Almost three years have passed since Tesla launched the first beta version of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, but it was with the launch of the twelfth version that the magnate and CEO of the company decided to act again as a commercial showing in a home video the news of the system.
Musk begins the video with a ride in the Tesla Autopilot FSD V12 from Tesla’s engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, California, aboard his Model S with a yoke steering wheel. He activates Autopilot mode and lets the vehicle drive itself to a destination he chooses on the screen. Some of the ‘challenges’ faced by the new FSD V12 are a construction zone full of cones, a red light and a left turn, one of the Achilles heels for the autonomous driving system.
In the 45 minutes of driving, Musk only has to intervene once, (approximately 19 minutes and 54 seconds) at a busy intersection where Tesla’s Autopilot tries to resume driving at a red light. On the surface, the Model S handles itself just fine for most of the road. This is achieved thanks to the Tesla Vision system, made up of cameras and a neural network that learns thanks to Artificial Intelligence and that make up the eyes and brain of the autonomous car.
One of the main novelties of this new version is that it does not have lines of code to execute (version 11 has more than 300,000), but rather is based on learning and driving data from other users. According to Musk, if FSD 12 doesn’t make a good decision in a given scenario, Tesla feeds the neural network more driving data. As the billionaire explains, as “less than 1% of people stop completely at a traffic light”, they have to teach the machine to do it, since they hardly have examples that can feed the AI network.
Version 12 of Tesla’s FSD is already being tested “all over the world,” the tycoon explained in his video. An extra (that of semi-autonomous driving) that in Spain costs 7,500 euros, and whose main obstacle is regulation.