The wait for the highly anticipated single stack Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta might come to an end this week, but if it does it will only be for a limited number of testers. That’s according to the latest timeline according to CEO Elon Musk, who has been personally testing the software over the last few weeks.
The important FSD Beta update, referred to as version 11 (V11), is supposed to merge the city streets and highway Autopilot code into a single stack, representing a significant step forward in Tesla’s ambition of achieving Full Self-Driving. Taking such a big step has apparently been more difficult than Elon Musk anticipated, who has been promising a release of this version of FSD Beta since before Halloween last year.
After numerous delays Musk has said several times that it should be coming “next week”, or in the infamous “two weeks” timeframe, but none have so far come to fruition.
Over the weekend Musk provided the latest update on a release timeline, again indicating that V11.3 should be deployed to some testers this week. The key word in that sentence is some testers, as Musk clarified it will at first be a “limited” release.
So when should the rest of the beta testers expect to receive it? At least another few weeks after that, according to Musk, who said it would require at least two step released and would “probably” come with V11.3.2.
v11.3 (single stack) goes to limited beta this week. Probably 11.3.2 before wide release in North America.
Then we adapt for EU roads & submit to regulators. 90% of what we’ve done so far for NA applies WW.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2023
Musk clarified last week why the single stack FSD update has taken so long to make it to a public release. As mentioned it was supposed to arrive several months ago, and the release notes from an internal tester were even leaked. But according to Musk making it good enough for public consumption “has been tougher than expected,” explaining in a tweet earlier this month that it contains a “significant rearchitecture of [neural nets], plus many more [neural nets] replacing C++.”
This level of caution should not be surprising though. According to the latest update from Tesla in their Q4 2022 shareholder deck the number of FSD Beta testers in Canada and the US now stands at about 400,000.
