Elon Musk has announced the next update of the Full Self-Driving Supervised (FSD) function for Tesla electric vehicles, which will supposedly bring significant improvements. He wrote about it on Twitter.
“Tesla is training a new FSD model with about a 10-fold increase in the number of parameters and a significant improvement in video compression loss. If the testing is successful, a public release is likely to take place at the end of next month.”
This is the second time this year that Musk has stirred up interest in updating the autopilot system. However, real changes in FSD performance on user cars are not very noticeable — especially since the beginning of the year, when Tesla focused on deploying its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.
After launch of the FSD v13 version on vehicles with fourth-generation (HW4) equipment at the end of last year, the enthusiast community has not seen any significant progress. In fact — some data points to a deterioration. While during the first five FSD v13 updates the average mileage between critical driver interventions was about 510 miles (821 km), with the last four updates this figure has dropped to 431 miles (694 km). However, this change can also be explained by the fact that the latest data was collected on more miles driven, which gave more accurate results.
Tesla shareholders hope that the delay in the development of FSD will be offset by the experience the company gained during Robotaxi testing. Back in June, Musk hinted at a new update — back then, it was about quadrupling the parameters. Now he has “improved” the promise to a 10-fold increase and postponed the deadline to the end of September.
However, one should be careful with expectations. Last time, Musk promised that FSD v12.5 on HW4 would show a 5-fold increase in parameters — but in practice, it brought only a 22% increase in the mileage between critical interventions. And even this advantage disappeared with subsequent updates: the average dropped to 184 miles (296 km), which is significantly worse than the previous v12.3 version.
Promises of revolutionary upgrades Full Self-Driving sound loud and have been for a long time, but Tesla users should focus on real performance indicators rather than loud numbers. Even if technology and the number of parameters are increasing, this does not guarantee an improvement in the safe behavior of the autopilot on the road.
Source: electrek
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