Tesla to release ‘Full Self-Driving Beta’ to some customers next week

Tesla is going to release its ‘Full Self-Driving Beta’ to some customers who are “expert and careful drivers” next week, says CEO Elon Musk.

Over the last few months, Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla working on “a significant foundational rewrite in the Tesla Autopilot.”

He has been teasing the new core change to Autopilot, which should be able to interpret its environment in 4D instead of 2D after the update, and should result in a rapid improvement in performance and new features being released quicker.

Musk said back in August:

“The FSD improvement will come as a quantum leap, because it’s a fundamental architectural rewrite, not an incremental tweak. I drive the bleeding edge alpha build in my car personally. Almost at zero interventions between home & work. Limited public release in 6 to 10 weeks.”

A month later, he delayed the launch, but he said that a “private beta” would be coming in “2 to 4 weeks.”

Now the CEO took to Twitter to announce that the limited “private beta” release would happen next week and instead of referring to it as the launch of the Autopilot rewrite, he started referring to it as “limited FSD beta”:

“Limited FSD beta releasing on Tuesday next week, as promised. This will, at first, be limited to a small number of people who are expert & careful drivers.”

‘FSD’ generally means ‘full self-driving’ when it comes to Tesla.

The CEO didn’t elaborate further on the upcoming software update, which is not expected to be released to the broader fleet until December.

Electrek’s Take

Curious to see what the ‘Limited FSD beta’ will look like.

Based on Elon talking about his commute being ‘almost at zero interventions’, I would expect that Tesla will build on its current ‘Traffic light and stop sign control’ feature to add turns in intersections and integrate it fully into Navigate on Autopilot.

With that, a Tesla driver could technically could monitor an entire journey without intervention.

However, this update will still require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel and be ready to take control at all times.

This update will be really important because Tesla will use it to start refining its full self-driving system and build a case to eventually remove the driver monitoring requirement.

Though I don’t see that happening for another year at least.