The wait appears to be coming to a close, as Tesla is preparing to release to a limited number of owners the first beta of its Full Self-Driving software next week.
In a post to Twitter, CEO Elon Musk said the first release of the autopilot rewrite would only go to a small number of Tesla owners “who are expert & careful drivers.”
Limited FSD beta releasing on Tuesday next week, as promised. This will, at first, be limited to a small number of people who are expert & careful drivers.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
Tesla has been working on a rewrite of its Autopilot software since some time last year. We first heard about it during the Third Row Tesla podcast in January, where Musk said “there’s quite a significant foundational rewrite in the Tesla Autopilot system that’s almost complete.”
Musk revealed during the Q2 2020 earnings call he was personally testing the latest alpha build of the new software in his own Tesla. At that time he called it a “quantum leap” from the current version, and “profoundly better than people realize…it’s like amazing.”
The anticipated release date for next week lines up with the previous timelines Musk has given, saying back in July the re-write was 2-4 months away. We expect a wider public release likely in December, or early next year.
The interesting part about Musk’s latest tweet is his comment that it will only be going to owners “who are expert and careful drivers.” Does this mean Tesla knows the driving habits of those owners who have turned on the option to share data with the automaker?
If so, they’d likely only have a very small limited number of owners to send the update to.
