Tesla starts releasing to employees FSD v12 – a critical update to self-driving effort

Tesla has started releasing to employees its FSD v12 update, which is apparently critical to Tesla’s achieving its self-driving goal.

CEO Elon Musk has previously said that he believes Tesla will achieve “true” self-driving capability by the end of the year.

Now, the CEO has said that before, and it didn’t happen. But this time, he has linked the goal with Tesla’s FSD v12 update.

The main difference with the v12 update is expected to be vehicle controls being taken over by neural nets rather than being hardcoded by engineers.

It’s going to be neural nets all the way from computer vision to driving decisions.

Musk has previously said that FSD will “get out of beta” with the v12 update, but it didn’t say exactly what that is going to entail.

Right now, drivers need to monitor FSD at all times and be ready to take control. If they crash using Tesla’s FSD, they are responsible, not Tesla.

For Tesla to truly achieve “full self-driving,” as the company and Musk have been promising, it needs to take responsibility for the system and allow drivers not to pay attention.

Musk confirmed on X today that Tesla has started to push the FSD v12 update to employee testers.

Previously, it was only with the engineering testing team. This step is the last one before going to the customer fleet.

Therefore, it does look like Tesla is going to be able to push the update to customers by the end of the year.

However, that doesn’t mean that Tesla will have truly achieved “full self-driving,” as the company hasn’t said anything about taking responsibility for the system as of now.

Electrek’s Take

While I can see the potential for v12 to be a significant improvement for FSD, I don’t have much hope that Tesla will take responsibility.

I think it will likely be more of the same for at least the next few months.

Tesla will have to present data to regulators in order to be approved for Level 3, 4, or 5 autonomy. With Tesla being so opaque with its self-driving data to date, I don’t have much hope for Tesla to be approved anytime soon.

I think we are still looking at months or even years for Tesla to deliver on its promise.