Tesla is finally launching its Full Self-Driving Supervised (FSD) v14 update, the first major update to the driver assistance system in a year, and Elon Musk says it ‘feels sentient.’
However, he also referred to the previous update as sentient, so temper your expectations.
After releasing FSD v13 on HW4 cars late last year, Tesla hasn’t released a significant FSD update in 2025.
HW3 owners are still stuck on v12 with no hope of a significant update, and even those with the latest computer, HW4, have only seen incremental updates, which have even resulted in regressions in mileage between disengagements based on the best available data.
Tesla blamed the slowdown in FSD updates on its focus on its Robotaxi program in Austin, Texas.
CEO Elon Musk has been teasing a major new FSD update, v14, based on the progress made with the version of the software deployed in Robotaxi that Tesla aimed to roll out to customers in September.
Musk now says that Tesla FSD v14 is going to start rolling out to customers next week:
Version 14.0 goes into early wide release next week, then 14.1 about 2 weeks later, and finally 14.2. The car will feel almost like it is sentient being by 14.2.
The CEO had previously referred to FAS v14 as “sentient”. Now, he says that the upcoming v14.2 is going to be the one that will “feel almost like it is sentient.”
Musk has been known to use hyperbole to describe Tesla FSD updates. “Mind-blowing” used to be his go-to, but he appears to have switched to “sentient.”
The CEO previously said that v13, which currently achieves roughly 400 miles between critical interventions, “feels alive”, which is similar to being sentient.
Electrek’s Take
V14 is a big moment for Tesla. HW3 is over. Owners haven’t even heard a hint of a plan to make things right for them, nine months after Musk admitted that the hardware won’t support the promised unsupervised self-driving.
As for HW4, everything suggests that the new computer will follow the same path as HW3, since Tesla is approaching full capacity without the necessary redundancy.
We will learn more about this with the v14 update.
I expect at best a 2 to 3x improvement in miles between critical disengagement, which sounds great until you realize that that brings Tesla to a max 1,200 miles between critical disengagement and the automaker needs to be closer to 10,000 miles for a limited unsupervised ride-hailing service, and then 700,000 miles to be level 5 safer than humans as promised.
If I’m right, and it took Tesla almost a year between v13 and v14, Tesla will not get to 10,000 for another 3-4 years at this pace.
Now, the pace might slow down further or accelerate, but this is happening while competition has already rolled out their own unsupervised systems – meaning they are ahead of Tesla.
I simply can’t understand how anyone can see Tesla as leading in unsupervised autonomy. Tesla leads in driver assistance systems. That’s it. And even then, it comes with a giant liability of misrepresenting the capacity of those systems and how that contributes to crashes and misleading marketing.
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