Tesla has been cautiously launching its “Full Self-Driving Beta” system in recent months. Now, CEO Elon Musk says he will double the number of cars in the system with the next update to version 8.2, and that he will increase the number of cars with the firmware by 10x when version 8.3 arrives – which could be as little as 2 to 3 weeks.
The last time we heard, at Tesla’s quarterly conference call to shareholders in late January, Elon said that nearly 1,000 Tesla owners had FSD beta enabled in their cars. If that hasn’t changed much since then, the simple math is that 10 × more than 1,000 is 10,000.
Several members of our team want this!@ zshahan3 @mrkylefield @ atj721
Vijay Govindan– CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) March 6, 2021
Beta V8.3 has literally ~ 1000 improvements. It will take some time to do quality control internally before launch, probably in two or three weeks.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2021
A complicated thing about this stage of development of autonomous vehicles is that, contrary to what is intuitive, it can present more risks than the previous phases. When your car is “too good” to drive alone, but still not perfect, it is practically impossible to pay attention to the road on the rare occasions when it needs you to take control. In fact, NASA discovered years ago that even first-rate engineers couldn’t focus on monitoring something if there was nothing to do. With that in mind, Elon has repeatedly emphasized that Tesla owners who receive the FSD Beta update need to be extremely careful.
I think it would be nice if Tesla could implement some sort of gamification system to make the drivers interact with the system to a certain extent. I know – it frustrates the point to some extent, but Tesla is all about games and fun, so I’m sure your Jedi engineers could come up with some fun solutions. The point is, however, that the software is still not perfect and drivers need to find ways to stay focused on the road, despite the FSD taking up about 99% of the time. For now, Tesla is counting on drivers simply paying close attention to what’s going on.
I to have I thought using developer views on the touchscreen, as Tesla is doing, makes drivers pay more attention as well. They can better see what is going on, they can have a stronger feeling that they are part of the development team and are more involved in the process than if Tesla used the most refined visualizations in vehicles without FSD Beta – like mine.
The FSD Beta package can take people from their homes to their favorite stores, workplaces, tennis courts or Disney World – potentially even without a single driver intervention during the entire trip. It is not perfect yet, it is not ready for you to go to sleep or watch a movie while the car itself drives, but it is getting closer every week. As you can see in Elon’s tweet above, Tesla implemented about 1,000 improvements from version 8.2 to version 8.3 of the FSD Beta. I am certainly extremely interested to see what he can do in my area! Hopefully, we will enter the beta in this round of additions.
We have written extensively on FSD Beta here at CleanTechnica, so instead of doing it again to give this update more context, here are some of the most notable recent pieces on the subject:
Tesla AI, both hardware and software, is deeply underestimated
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2021
New podcast: how NVIDIA is bringing autonomy to car manufacturers