During Elon Musk’s live stream of FSD V12 today, we saw a new feature for the first time. The car reached its destination and pulled over to the curb and stopped. This is not possible in the current V11 beta builds.
Typically FSD Beta drives all start and end with the driver starting the journey, then enabling FSD. This showed for the first time a point-to-point opportunity that could drive without humans at either end.
Musk commentated on much of the 45-minute lives stream, where he talked through the architectural change in this release.
Prior to today, we’d heard Musk talk about V12 being end-to-end and that means video in and control out. Today, we got to see that in action.
Before the stream, I thought a lot about what I wanted to see from V12 and my expectation was to see the car behave at least as well as V11, given the major architectural change (dropping from around 300,000 lines of code to around 3,000 and letting the car drive almost entirely on an AI model from video training data.
The vast majority of the drive was easily at the same level of V11, with smooth turns, lane selection, changes etc. There was one intervention where Elon disengaged, which was actually a blessing in that it allowed an opportunity for Elon to discuss the solution to that disengagement and disengagement like it.
The answer to issues in the model is no longer to have humans label images and video to correct issues, instead, the AI model would be retrained and shown a lot more data on the problem area (i.e. traffic lights). With a new model (and build of the software), the car could then understand how human drivers respond and proceed through that scenario.
What isn’t known is how many of these types of issues remain and perhaps with V12 we need to start a new to-do list.
At the end of the video, Musk returned to Tesla HQ and talked about Actual Smart Summon, which has been on the roadmap for some time. Musk suggested that A.S.S. is now possible given the new approach to control and navigation in V12.
While it may not result in the most efficient journey, Musk highlighted that driving the vehicle actually doesn’t even require navigation/map data and certainly not a connection to the internet. Navigating through a parking lot (and hopefully finding a free park) is a great example of where map data doesn’t exist and having a car that can roam until it finds one, or understand where the entrance/exit to a shopping center is and go drop you off/pick you up would be possible.
If you missed the live stream, it’s available below.
