Tesla starts Supervised Full Self-Driving v12.5 wide release

Tesla has started the wide-release rollout of Supervised Full Self-Driving v12.5, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Musk again recently said that he believes Tesla could finally deliver on its promise of an unsupervised self-driving system by the end of the year, or he will “be surprised” if it doesn’t happen next year.

The CEO doesn’t have much credibility with these predictions as he said the same thing every year for the last 5 years.

Therefore, we have to rely more on what Tesla is actually delivering, Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD), and how close it is getting to an unsupervised system.

Musk has hyped up Tesla’s two latest upcoming software update, 12.4 and 12.5. For 12.4, the CEO said that it will come without steering wheel nag and it will be able to drive “5 to 10x more miles per intervention“.

However, Tesla encountered issues an internal and limited external testing and ended up never releasing the update to the wider fleet.

Instead, Tesla is going directly to a 12.5 wide release:

When talking about FSD 12.5 and 12.6 last month, Musk claimed that “it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention.”

The CEO also indicated that Tesla is going to re-merge the highway and street stacks with v12.5, but this is reportedly not happening with this specific 12.5.1 version.

as we recently reported, the update is currently only rolling out to HW4 vehicles as Tesla needs to optimize it for HW3. This points to Tesla getting closer to reaching the limits of HW3.

Musk commented on the issue again:

It takes considerable software effort to optimize the code enough to run on HW3. It also needs to be validated separately.

He believes it will be another 10 days before 12.5 can make it to HW3 vehicles.

Electrek’s Take

I’m excited to test it, but I’m highly skeptical of the year between intervention claim.

I’d be pleasantly surprised if I don’t get an intervention within my first hour of driving, let alone a year.

But my biggest concern at this point is that I know we are likely at least a dozen updates away from the promised unsupervised system. If Tesla is already having issues running the code on HW3, that is going to be only more difficult for every further update.

I am starting to have serious doubts that an unsupervised system will ever make it to HW3 at this pace.