I keep telling you, 4 weeks is the new two weeks when it comes to Tesla. Owners of Tesla vehicles that have purchase the Full-Self Driving capability are watching the early access participants drive the FSD Beta build and they want it now.
Back in July, Musk indicated that a wide beta (which we took to mean the public beta), would arrive with version 10. Currently FSD Beta is at build 9.2 and this Friday (US Time) FSD Beta 9.3 was due, this will no longer occur, instead Musk confirmed Beta 10 will go out to existing Beta users (around 2,000 people) next week.
At the time, it Musk confirmed we were looking at roughly a month between full builds, placing version 10 release around mid-August.
In a new Tweet from Musk today, the updated timeline for a public release of FSD Beta appears to be scheduled for a month from now, making it late September.
This delay of a month is nothing new to those waiting for FSD, but Musk provides some insights into the cause of this delay. In his tweet, Musk says they will have a completely retrained Neural Net. Based on what we seen during AI Day, there should be dramatic improvement to path planning, lane selection, turning and more. We also seen a demo of a dramatically improved smart summon, finding its path through a parking lot.
Musk has also posted recently about the desire to apply the city-streets improvements, to highway driving, which could also see the improved FSD Beta visualisations be available at higher speeds.
The next step would be to apply the new approach to low-speed conditions like when using Smart Summon and my expectation is that once that becomes a priority, that we see the car deliver on the promise of dropping you off and going to find a park.
At AI Day, we heard Tesla discuss their US-first approach to the rollout, but they have sold this FSD package to customer across the world. We can expect this public beta will be US-only for now, but I hope the international focus is not lost. While there are different road rules, markings, signs and other challenges, that doesn’t change the fact that Tesla owners have equally paid for the feature.
In other Tesla news, a refreshed mobile app is now live for iOS, it does not yet appear to be out for Android users.
