American electric automaker Tesla has finally expanded the release of its highly awaited Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta version 12 to more employee electric vehicles.
In hindsight, Tesla initially launched the system update to a limited number of employees in late November this year.
Wave 1 rollout
On Wednesday, software update tracker Teslascope verified that the Musk-led automaker has already started rolling out the FSD beta v12.1 to more than 15,000 Tesla cars owned by its employees.
Notably, Tesla owners have long been anticipating the release of this new FSD version due to its promised improvements, such as the shift to neural networks for city driving.
“We can confirm that Full Self-Driving (Beta) V12.1 has now rolled out to Wave1, which including 15,000+ personally-owned @Tesla employee vehicles.”
Software update tracker Teslascope
Interestingly, the first wave can reportedly expand to 16,500-20,000 EVs in total. However, all the employees included in the first wave of the rollout are under strict non-disclosure agreements. According to Teslarati, the company may terminate or cut them from the FSD beta program once they violate the agreement.
Improvement
The prominent software update tracker posted a screenshot of the FSD beta v12.1’s release notes from Tesla employees on X. However, it indicated the insufficiency of the release notes as Tesla has yet to expand access beyond its employees to the public.
As you can see in the photo above, the v12 update shifts from 300K+ human-coded lines to an “end-to-end neural network” trained on millions of video data from Tesla cars for city driving.
Need for more testing
All these efforts are part of Tesla’s strategy to initially put the FSD Beta V12 to extra testing before a wider release. According to Tesla Autopilot employee Dhaval Shroff, Tesla cars will never be at a collision risk “even in unstructured environments” when they activate this updated system. Therefore, it is really crucial for the company to ensure that these claims will come to fruition without future problems.
“It is already on a lot of cars, but, given that is a completely new architecture, we are doing extra testing.
It works very well in California, but needs more training for heavy precipitation areas.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Excitingly, Tesla previously announced plans to eliminate the “Beta” name of the program after the release of the v12 update. However, “Beta” remains present in the FSD Beta update launches as of now.
