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If you weren’t impressed with what you saw of Tesla’s latest full self-drive beta, version 9.2, you’re not alone. CEO Elon Musk agrees.
“FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great imo,” he said in a Tweeter last night, “but the Autopilot / AI team is mobilizing to improve as quickly as possible.”
FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great, but the Autopilot / AI team is mobilizing to improve as quickly as possible.
We try to have a single battery for highways and city streets, but it requires massive recycling of NN.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 23 Aug 2021
While Tesla’s full self-drive feature can perform impressively at times, videos from beta testers show it falls short at critical times. In one video, a car approaching a small construction site suddenly heads towards a hole marked with orange cones. Previous beta versions have seen Teslas make successful turns through city streets before heading towards parked cars or scratching themselves while plowing through overgrown bushes extending to the right-of-way .
Development hell
The development of Tesla’s full self-driving feature has had a long and eventful history. In June 2016, Musk said he believed fully autonomous vehicles were only a few years away. “I would really consider autonomous driving a solved problem,” he said. “I think we’re basically less than two years away from full autonomy.”
Months later, Tesla began shipping cars with new autopilot hardware, which the company said at the time would be able to drive fully autonomously. (That statement ended up not being entirely true – some owners have to pay for a new computer to access fully autonomous driving.) In 2016, Tesla also began selling customers future access to the feature for 5,000. $, a price that the company would raise. in increments up to $ 10,000.
Yet after years of development and failed predictions, full autonomous driving still isn’t ready for prime time. Earlier this year, Tesla changed its approach by writing software that relied on a combination of radar and cameras and removed the radar from its Model 3 and Y cars. This change took the automaker’s approach further away. further from its peers, who have used radars, cameras and lidar in their attempts to move beyond Level 2 autonomous driving.
The removal of radar, along with the addition of autonomous driving on city streets, forced Tesla’s engineers to redo much of the software, further delaying its wide release.
“We’re trying to have a single battery for freeways and city streets, but that requires massive recycling of NN,” Musk said in the tweet.
Latest timeline
It’s unclear whether Musk believes Tesla will still be able to meet his end-of-year goal of achieving Level 5 range, designating a car that can be driven at any time without human intervention. Musk’s goal sparked questions from the California DMV, which asked CJ Moore, Tesla’s director of autopilot software, if that timeline was achievable.
“DMV asked CJ to technically address Elon’s message on L5 capability by year-end,” reads a note from DMV summarizing a meeting with Moore. “Elon’s tweet does not match technical reality by CJ.”
“Tesla is currently at level 2. The driver interaction ratio should be on the order of 1 or 2 million kilometers per driver interaction to move to higher levels of automation,” the memo said. Tesla said Elon was extrapolating the improvement rates when talking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the improvement rate would reach the L5 level by the end of the calendar year. ”
While Musk seems optimistic about the Full Self-Driving 9.3 beta – it’s “much improved,” he says – it can be a deadlock in terms of development. Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that version 10 is likely to include significant architecture changes.
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