Although it was a little later than planned, Tesla began deploying the latest Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta v9.2 (2021.12.25.15) software update late Saturday night/Sunday morning. Originally scheduled for a Friday at midnight California time release, the deployment actually ended up being earlier than CEO Elon Musk thought it would be.
Musk responded to FSD beta tester @nickhoward early Sunday morning, after the new version was released, saying some last minute issues caused the delay.
Some unexpected last minute issues. Should go out in next day or two.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2021
For the first time Musk also included detailed notes on what was new in the latest v9.2 release, pleasing many beta testers who had been asking for such a list for quite some time.
- Clear-to-go boost through turns on minor-to-major roads (plan to expand to all roads in V9.3)
- Improved peek behavior where we are smarter about when to go around the lead vehicle by reasoning about the causes for lead vehicles being slow
- v1 of the Multi-model predictions for where other vehicles expected to drive. This is only partially consumed for now
- New Lanes network with 50k more clips (almost double) from the new auto-labeling pipeline
- New VRU velocity model with 12% improvement to velocity and better VRU clear-to-go performance. This is the first model trained with “Quantization-Aware-Training,” an improved technique to mitigate int8 quantization
- Enabled Inter-SoC synchronous compute scheduling between vision and vector space processes. Planner in the loop is happening in v10
- Shadow mode for new crossing/merging targets network will help you improve VRU control
But perhaps most important for Tesla owners, he also gave an updated timeline on when the company will deploy a wide release to all owners.
FSD Beta Wide Release
In a separate tweet Musk was asked what comes after the current v9.2, to which responded, “9.3, probably 9.4 & then maybe 10. Significant architecture changes in 10.”
With a recent commitment to a weekly release cadence, that means v10 is at least three weeks away, so long as the versions go from 9.4 straight to 10.
Musk has previously tied the wide release, or more famously known as “the button”, to v10 of the self-driving software. He has now walked that back slightly, saying it could come in 10.1.
Beta 10 or maybe 10.1. Going to pure vision set us back initially. Vision plus (coarse) radar had us trapped in a local maximum, like a level cap.
Pure vision requires fairly advanced real-world AI, but that’s how our whole road system is designed to work: NN’s with vision.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2021
This new date is much later than Musk had originally hoped for. Earlier this year he was hoping to release “the button” to a large number of Tesla owners sometime in March, then delaying it until at least April, then again pushing it to “hopefully” May.
The good news is v9.2 has been getting positive reviews from the beta testers so far. You can check out some early first impression videos below.
