After months of waiting, Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta v11 is going to a wide release this weekend, if you believe Elon Musk.
Tesla FSD Beta v11 is both an exciting and scary step as it is supposed to merge Tesla’s FSD and Autopilot highway stacks.
FSD Beta enables Tesla vehicles to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car’s navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times.
Since the responsibility rests with the driver and not Tesla’s system, it is still considered a level 2 driver-assist system, despite its name. It has been sort of a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program, as some updates have seen regressions in terms of driving capabilities.
Tesla has frequently been releasing new software updates to the FSD Beta program and adding more owners to it.
Since the wider release of the beta last year, there are currently over 400,000 Tesla owners in the program in North America – virtually every Tesla owner who bought the FSD package on their vehicles.
However, the bulk of these owners have yet to receive significant FSD beta updates as Tesla was supposed to release v11 to the fleet in November 2022, but the update has been stuck in testing within Tesla’s closed fleet since then.
The update is an important step because it includes many new neural networks, as Elon Musk stated. But from a consumer perspective, it’s also important because it is expected to merge Tesla’s FSD Beta software stack primarily used on roads and city streets with Tesla’s Autopilot software stack, which is used as a level 2 driver assist system on highways.
It has been delayed several times, but it finally went to a closed beta release last month. Tesla is slowly releasing it to more beta testers, but it has yet to go to a broader release.
Today, Musk said that it will finally go to a wide release this weekend:
Again, take this with a grain of salt since the CEO teased the release of the new v11 update several times over the last year.
But Tesla did release a new version of v11 to some beta testers last week, and it looks like it went fairly well. This could be a good indicator that a wider release is finally coming.
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