Elon Musk says Tesla FSD Beta 9.2 software program is ‘not nice’

Tesla boss Elon Musk visiting the construction site of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Gruenheide near Berlin, Germany, 13 August 2021.

Patrick Pleul | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk called the latest version of the company’s experimental driver assistance software, FSD Beta 9.2, “actually not great” on Monday on Twitter.

Specifically, Musk wrote:

“FSD Beta 9.2 isn’t actually great imo, but the autopilot / AI team is trying to improve asap. We’re trying to have a single stack for highways and city streets, but it requires massive NN retraining.”

The company sells a Full Self-Driving Skills Package (or FSD) in the US for $ 10,000 or $ 199 per month. This premium driver assistance system does not make Tesla electric vehicles safe without an attentive driver behind the wheel.

FSD Beta is only available to some drivers who have previously purchased FSD and Tesla employees. The beta version offers new or newly revised functions that will be added to the premium driver assistance functions of the vehicle.

Drivers usually agree to keep their experiences private, although some public FSD beta users are allowed to post videos on social media showing and criticizing the latest features they tried out on US roads.

Regulators could one day decide to ban vehicle tests with drivers who are not trained professionals on public roads. But right now, no regulation is hindering Tesla’s ability to turn its customers and everyone they share the road with into guinea pigs.

Musk’s critical tweet on Monday came just days after extolling Tesla’s capabilities with autonomous systems and components for them at an event called Tesla AI Day.

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At this event, last Thursday week, Tesla showed a custom chip for training artificial intelligence networks in data centers. The chips are designed to train models to automatically identify a variety of obstacles that appear on the road in video feeds recorded by cameras in Tesla vehicles.

Today, FSD is sold with the promise, among other things, of enabling a Tesla vehicle to automatically change lanes, navigate the motorway, park in a parking space or drive out of a parking space and drive a short distance to the driver’s side at slow speed without that someone is behind the wheel.

Tesla says that later this year, FSD will also include the ability to automatically steer onto city streets, a long-delayed feature. FSD Beta has integrated the Auto-Steer on City Streets function, albeit imperfectly and incompletely.

Musk’s critical tweet also follows the initiation of a formal investigation into Tesla’s autopilot system by U.S. federal vehicle safety agencies last week.

Autopilot is the basic version of Tesla’s driver assistance system and is now part of the standard equipment in your cars.

Tesla vehicles with autopilot or only enabled traffic-aware cruise control features collided with first-aid vehicles at least 11 times in the U.S., the NHTSA found, with at least 17 people injured and 1 killed. This prompted the formal investigation into whether the autopilot contained safety flaws that the NHTSA may need to change from Tesla.

In addition, in an interview with Bloomberg late last week, newly appointed NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said, “Whether Tesla or someone else, it’s up to these manufacturers to be honest about what their technology does and doesn’t.”

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