Tesla starts releasing big Full Self-Driving Beta update

Tesla has started releasing a big new Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software update with a lot of improvements.

The automaker might widen access to the beta if this update “performs well,” according to CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta

Since October 2020, Tesla has been slowly rolling out what it is calling “Full Self-Driving Beta” (FSD Beta), which is an early version of its self-driving software that is currently being tested by a fleet of Tesla owners selected by the company and through its “safety test score.“

The software enables the vehicle to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car’s navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times.

Since the responsibility lies with the driver and not Tesla’s system, it is still considered a level two driver-assist system despite its name. It has been sort of a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program, as some updates have seen regressions in terms of the driving capabilities.

Tesla has been frequently releasing new software updates to the FSD Beta program and adding more owners to it.

The last significant update was FSD Beta 10.10 in early February.

As of Q4 2021, the automaker said that it almost had 60,000 owners in the FSD Beta program.

Tesla FSD Beta 10.11

Now Tesla has started pushing a new FSD Beta 10.11 update to its Early Access Program, and it is a significant one based on the release notes.

Here are the release notes:

• Upgraded modeling of lane geometry from dense rasters (“bag of points”) to an autoregressive decoder that directly predicts and connects “vector space” lanes point by point using a transformer neural network. This enables us to predict crossing lanes, allows computationally cheaper and less error prone post-processing, and paves the way for predicting many other signals and their relationships jointly and end-to-end. Use more accurate predictions of where vehicles are turning or merging to reduce unnecessary slowdowns for vehicles that will not cross our path.
• Improved right-of-way understanding if the map is inaccurate or the car cannot follow the navigation. In particular, modeling intersection extents is now entirely based on network predictions and no longer uses map-based heuristics.
• Improved the precision of VRU detections by 44.9%, dramatically reducing spurious false positive pedestrians and bicycles (especially around tar seams, skid marks, and rain drops). This was accomplished by increasing the data size of the next-gen autolabeler, training network parameters that were previously frozen, and modifying the network loss functions. We find that this decreases the incidence of VRU-related false slowdowns.
• Reduced the predicted velocity error of very close-by motorcycles, scooters, wheelchairs, and pedestrians by 63.6%. To do this, we introduced a new dataset of simulated adversarial high speed VRU interactions. This update improves autopilot control around fast-moving and cutting-in VRUs.
• Improved creeping profile with higher jerk when creeping starts and ends.
• Improved control for nearby obstacles by predicting continuous distance to static geometry with the general static obstacle network.
• Reduced vehicle “parked” attribute error rate by 17%, achieved by increasing the dataset size by 14%. Also improved brake light accuracy.
• Improved clear-to-go scenario velocity error by 5% and highway scenario velocity error by 10%, achieved by tuning loss function targeted at improving performance in difficult scenarios.
• Improved detection and control for open car doors.
• Improved smoothness through turns by using an optimization-based approach to decide which road lines are irrelevant for control given lateral and longitudinal acceleration and jerk limits as well as vehicle kinematics.
• Improved stability of the FSD Ul visualizations by optimizing the ethernet data transfer pipeline by 15%.

CEO Elon Musk says that if this update “performs well,” Tesla will “probably” lower the access to drivers who scored ’95’ on the driver safety score. This should give a lot more FSD buyers access to the beta.

As for Canada, Tesla owners who bought FSD have had access to the driver safety score for more than a week now. The automaker is expected to soon start releasing the beta to those with top scores.