Tesla has been cautiously rolling out its “Full Self-Driving Beta” system over the past several months. Now, CEO Elon Musk says it will double the number of cars in the system with the coming 8.2 version update, and that it will increase the number of cars sporting the firmware by 10× when version 8.3 comes along — which may be in just 2 to 3 weeks.
Last we heard, on Tesla’s quarterly conference call for shareholders at the end of January, Elon said that nearly 1,000 Tesla owners had the FSD beta activated on their cars. If that hasn’t changed much since then, the simple math is that 10× more than 1,000 is 10,000.
Several of our team members want it!@zshahan3 @mrkylefield @atj721
Vijay Govindan— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) March 6, 2021
Beta V8.3 has literally ~1000 improvements. Will take time to QA internally before release probably in two or three weeks.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2021
One tricky thing about this stage of autonomous vehicle development is that, counterintuitively, it can come with more risk than earlier phases. When your car is “too good” at driving itself, it’s practically impossible to pay attention to the road for the rare instances where it needs you to take over. In fact, NASA discovered years ago that even top-tier engineers could not stay focused on a task if there wasn’t anything to do. With this in mind, Elon has repeatedly emphasized that Tesla owners who get the FSD Beta update need to be extra, extra careful.
The FSD Beta suite can take people from their homes to their favorite stores, workplaces, the park, tennis courts, or Disney World — potentially even without any interventions on the part of the driver. It is not yet perfect, but it is getting closer and closer every week. As you can see in Elon’s tweet above, they implemented about 1,000 improvements going from version 8.2 to version 8.3. I’m extremely interested in seeing what it can handle in our area.
We’ve written about FSD Beta at length here on CleanTechnica, so rather than do that again, here are some of the most notable recent pieces:
Tesla AI, both hardware & software, is deeply underestimated
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2021
New Podcast: How NVIDIA Is Bringing Autonomy To Automakers
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Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/03/05/elon-musk-10x-more-tesla-cars-to-get-full-self-driving-beta-soonish/