Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) quietly began releasing their Full Delf-Driving beta version 10.69.2 on Sunday. Later that evening, CEO Elon Musk announced the rollout on Twitter.
“FSD Beta 10.69.2 rolling out now. Please note that top priority is safety, so expect it to be overly cautious, especially around pedestrians.” — Elon Musk
Tesla fan and FSD user, Chuck Cook was one of the first few to receive the update and test the new system. Cook told Twitter that he’d already done two drives and that it was “as polished as it needed to be for the release”. Cook mentioned that he noticed some unnecessary pauses with vulnerable road targets. However, this would match with Musk’s post about the new software being “overly cautious”.
A few hours after his post about the rollout, Musk posted again saying, “Looks good to roll out to all Tesla owners with 10.12.2 (~100k cars)!”
According to the release note, the new software includes an added new "deep lane guidance" module to the Vector Lanes neural network. The new module fuses features extracted from the video streams with coarse map data. This design achieves a 44% lower error rate on lane topology compared to the previous model, enabling smoother control.
Tesla also improved how the vehicle reacts to unprotected left turns. By allowing optimizable initial jerk, to mimic the harsh pedal press by a human, when required to go in front of high-speed objects, these left turns now have a more appropriate and safer speed profile when approaching and exiting median crossover regions, in the presence of high-speed cross traffic.
Reduced false slowdowns near crosswalks was done with improved understanding of pedestrian and bicyclist intent based on their motion. They also improved velocity error for pedestrians and bicyclists by 17% by improving the onboard trajectory estimation used as input to the neural network.
The public is still waiting to hear about new Safety Score additions. But for now, about 100,000 users get to experience the new version for themselves.
By Michael Elkins | Michael.Elkins@streetinsider.com