Tesla has shared that Full Self-Driving (FSD) will soon be upgraded to expand from its vision-only approach, but not in the way you might think. The company says FSD v13 will also incorporate audio inputs to better respond to emergency vehicles.
Tesla’s FSD has been around for a little over four years now, and during that time the system has changed from taking inputs from radar and vision, to relying on vision only from the vehicle’s on-board cameras. With a vision-based approach one aspect of daily-driving that has yet to be tackled is the car being able to move over and out of the way for emergency vehicles.
This is despite Elon Musk telling us back in 2021, just after the decision was made to remove radar from the equation, that FSD would “soon capture turn signals, hazards, ambulance/police lights & even hand gestures.”
Action will follow recognition soon thereafter. Also, call will listen for sirens & alarms.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2021
While a number of those things have been accomplished, it looks like the ability to react and respond to emergency vehicles will finally be coming soon.
In its FSD development roadmap shared earlier today, Tesla said FSD v13 would include “audio inputs for better handling of emergency vehicles.”
Tesla didn’t elaborate on where the audio input would be coming from. As of now, Teslas do not have an external microphone, so the company will have to leverage the internal microphone located in the front overhead console near the rear-view mirror for this purpose. This will be in conjunction with the system also recognizing emergency lights through the on-board cameras.
Unfortunately this added new ability will only be coming to HW4/AI4 vehicles, at least for now, as Tesla also said that FSD v13 will only be coming to these vehicles, targeting a late November release date.
Interestingly, this feature may have already been deployed to some vehicles. Earlier this week a user on X shared a video of his Model 3 perfectly moving over for an oncoming fire truck, something which we have never seen before.
Well this was a FIRST.
— Pete Balls to the wall FSD (@kylaschwaberow) October 26, 2024
FSD sees Emergency vehicle approaching and pulls over to the side of the road.
Then resumes after it’s clear.
Just when I think I’ve seen it all. @WholeMarsBlog @tesla pic.twitter.com/1ZE7mPsXZj
