Tesla releases new video of self-driving software

Entertainment

Tesla has released a new video demonstration of its latest self-driving software following Elon Musk’s underwhelming livestream.

A few months ago, Elon Musk did a livestream of a drive on Tesla’s latest “Full Self-Driving” software in the Bay Area.

The idea was to showcase Tesla’s new neural net-based vehicle controls, but the stream was far from a success with poor filming and equally poor video quality, and the Full Self-Driving system itself had a few issues.

Now, Tesla has released a more professional-looking video demonstration of its latest FSD Beta capability:

In the latest video, Tesla weirdly doesn’t confirm the exact build of FSD Beta being tested here, but it says it is “version 11.4.7 or later.”

Therefore, it doesn’t sound like this demo features the latest neural network-based vehicle controls.

It’s important to note that Tesla acknowledged that it removed the alerts to apply pressure on the steering wheel for the demo – something that owners can’t do and not how FSD Beta is meant to be used.

Electrek’s Take

The five-minute drive shows a no-intervention drive in an environment where FSD Beta generally shines: residential streets and following traffic. It’s certainly not the most impressive FSD Beta drive I’ve seen.

What we want to see from Tesla is a path to taking responsibility for the system so it can truly become a useful level-3 or level-4 self-driving system. For that, we would like to see actual data on driver intervention, system failures, and accidents, but Tesla has expertly managed to not release that information. While FSD Beta is impressive in many ways, it’s hard to take their goal of a robotaxi service seriously without that.