Tesla pushes new Full Self-Driving Beta update, Elon Musk says could slash interventions by a third

Tesla has started pushing a new software update under its Full Self-Driving Beta program and CEO Elon Musk says it could already cut driver interventions by a third.

It has been less than two weeks since Tesla has started pushing the first version of its “Full Self-Driving” feature in beta to some users.

As we previously reported, Tesla has already been collecting a large amount of data from its test fleet and now it is using it to improve on the system.

Yesterday, Tesla started pushing a new 2020.40.8.12 software update to owners with the ealry access FSD beta and they have been reporting a smoother experience with the driving capability of the AI.

CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to say that the update could reduce driver interventions by as much as 33%:

“We measure this primarily in intervention probability. This update addressed several issues, resulting in perhaps ~1/3 fewer interventions. Many of the improvements consist of fixing silly bugs vs grand eureka moments. True for most beta releases in my experience.”

As we previously reported, even though Tesla calls the system “Full Self-Driving”, it actually requires that a driver keeps their hands on their steering wheel and be ready to take control.

Tesla can learn from those interventions to help its neural nets improve in future updates.

Musk says that the automaker plans to push new updates every 5 to 10 days leading to the wider release of the Full Self-Driving beta in the US later this year.

The CEO warns that errors will never reach zero, but Tesla’s hope is that they will become low enough to be safer than humans and therefore, they will be able to remove the driver oversight restriction:

“Faults will never be zero, but at some point the probability of a fault will be far lower than that of the average human.”

Musk has previously said Tesla could reach this goal by the end of 2020, but it now looks like this is unlikely to happen with the FSD Beta only slated for a wider release in December and that version is still expected to rely heavily on driver attention.

The new software update released last night also comes with update user interface with new visualizations: