10 × more Tesla cars to get full self-driving beta soon

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Tesla has been cautiously rolling out its “Autonomous Driving Full Beta” system over the past few months. Now CEO Elon Musk says he will double the number of cars in the system with the next update to version 8.2, and increase the number of cars with the firmware by 10x when version 8.3 arrives – which could be in just 2-3 weeks.

The last time we heard, during Tesla’s quarterly conference call for shareholders at the end of January, Elon said that nearly 1,000 Tesla owners have FSD beta enabled on their cars. If that hasn’t changed much since then, the simple calculation is that 10 × over 1000 equals 10,000.

A tricky thing about this stage of autonomous vehicle development is that, counterintuitively, it can carry more risk than the previous stages. When your car is “too good” to drive itself but not yet perfect, it’s next to impossible to pay attention to the road in the rare event that it needs you to take over. In fact, NASA discovered years ago that even top engineers couldn’t stay focused on monitoring something if there was nothing to be done. With that in mind, Elon has repeatedly emphasized that Tesla owners who get the FSD Beta update need to be very careful.

I think it would be cool if Tesla could implement some kind of gamification system to make drivers interact with the system to some extent. I know – it defeats the purpose to a certain extent, but Tesla is all about play and fun, so I’m sure its Jedi engineers could come up with some fun solutions. The point is, however, that the software is still not perfect, and drivers need to find ways to stay focused on the road despite FSD being supported around 99% of the time. For now, Tesla relies on drivers just paying close attention to what’s going on.

I have believed that the use of developer visualizations on the touchscreen, like Tesla does, also prompt drivers to pay more attention. They can see what’s going on better, have a stronger sense that they’re part of the development team, and are more drawn to the process than if Tesla used the more sophisticated visualizations in vehicles without FSD Beta – like the mine.

The FSD Beta suite can take people from home to their favorite stores, workplaces, tennis courts or Disney World – potentially even without a single driver intervention during the entire trip. He’s not yet perfect, not yet ready for you to fall asleep or watch a movie while the motorists himself, but he’s getting closer and closer every week. As you can see in Elon’s tweet above, Tesla has implemented around 1000 enhancements ranging from version 8.2 to version 8.3 of FSD Beta. I am certainly extremely interested to see what he can handle in my area! Hopefully we will get into the beta of this series of additions.

We have written at length about FSD Beta here at CleanTechnica, so rather than redoing it to give this update more context, here are some of the more notable recent articles on the subject:


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