Tesla pushes new Full Self-Driving Beta update, don’t hold your breath for download button

Tesla has started pushing a new software update for its Full Self-Driving Beta program.

CEO Elon Musk released the improvements in the update and gave us an idea of when the wider release is going to happen.

It was just over a month ago that Tesla released its long-awaited Full Self-Driving Beta v9 with its new Tesla Vision computer vision system.

The update is only for its early access program, which consists of employees and a select group of Tesla owners chosen by the automaker.

Musk had been linking the wider release of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta to this update, but he later said that it would be “about a month later”.

Now more than a month later, Tesla is starting to push a new v9.2 update to Full Self-Driving Beta, but it is still only for the early access program

The CEO shared the release notes:

• Clear-to-go boost through turns on minor-to-major roads (plan to expand to all roads V9.3)
• Improved peek behavior where we are smarter about when to go around the lead vehicle by reasining about the causes for lead vehicle being slow
• v1 of the Multi-modal predictions for where other vehicles expected to drive. This is only partially consumed for now.
• New Lanes network with 50 more clips (almost double) from the new auto-labeling pipeline
• New VRU velocity model with 12% improvement to velocity and better VRU clear-to-go performance. This is the first model trained with “Quantization-Aware-Training”, an improved technique to mitigate int8 quantization.
• Enabled Inter-SoC synchronous compute scheduling between vision and vector space processes. Planner in the loop is happening in V10.
• Shadow mode fo new crossing/merging targets network which will help improve VRU control

The update appears to be focused on the system’s driving behaviors – making the autonomous driving system smarter.

Chuck Cook, a Tesla owner in the early access program, has released a video of a first look at the update:

As for the timeline of the wider release, which has also been referred to as the “download button”, Musk commented that Tesla will still need to release at least one or two more updates to the early access program before v10, which is now the wider release update.

The CEO didn’t suggest an actual timeline, but we are probably still at least a month or two away based on the current update rate.

And once the update reaches a wider release, it doesn’t actually mean that Tesla’s vehicles become “self-driving”. The drivers will still be responsible for their vehicles at all time and need to be ready to take control.

Tesla will use the data from the wider fleet to improve the system and try to collect enough data showing that the system is safer than human drivers.