Tesla pushes end-to-end neural networks for highway driving, but only for newer vehicles

Tesla has pushed a new (Supervised) Full Self-Driving update with the promised end-to-end neural networks for highway driving.

However, it’s only for newer vehicles.

“End-to-end” is what Tesla refers to as neural net-powered AI driving the vehicle from vision to controls rather than the controls being explicitly coded. It’s already the case in all widely released versions of (Supervised) Full Self-Driving (FSD) for city driving, but not for highway driving, which uses another software stack.

Tesla originally planned to deliver it for highway driving in October, but it was only delivered to a small number of vehicles.

In its latest AI roadmap, Tesla said that it would come the first week of November instead.

Now, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of self-driving and AI, said that the latest release with end-to-end highway driving (v12.5.6.3) has been widely pushed to HW4 vehicle owners:

With the latest release (v12.5.6.3), FSD is using end-to-end neural networks for driving across highways, city streets and parking lots, and has now shipped widely for AI4 vehicles. Highway driving should be smoother, more natural and even safer than the previous explicit control stack. Check out the different driving styles to set speed and lane change preferences. Enjoy and let Tesla AI know if you have any feedback.

However, there’s no word for the millions of HW3 vehicle owners.

In fact, the only thing promised to HW3 vehicles, which Tesla now called AI3, in its last roadmap is this:

Improved v12.5.x models for AI3 city driving

As we have often reported this year, Tesla has reached the limits of the HW3 computer and now needs to optimize the code with every release despite still being far from its promise of unsupervised self-driving.

Electrek’s Take

This is annoying cause I could really use end-to-end on my HW3 car. I am on v12.5.4.2 and it has been a regression from v12.5.4.1 for me, especially on highways.

Yesterday, it almost drove me off-road when taking my highway exit, which is always a bit shaky because it is a short exit and FSD often swings itself into it. It’s a bit awkward, and my girlfriend never likes it, so I disengage FSD before taking the exit when she was with me, but this time, she wasn’t, and I had the new update.

It again swung left before going right into the exit, but this time, it went way too far, and I was in the shoulder by the time I took control.

I took this exit hundreds of times with FSD and it’s the first time it did that.

I am starting to think we won’t see much more improvements to FSD with HW3 cars and there’s no retrofit computer in sight.