Tesla’s next Full Self-Driving update is late and it’s a critical one

Tesla’s next supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) update is becoming quite late, and it’s a critical one.

Here’s why.

During the first week of May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the automaker was preparing to release its FSD v12.4 update the next week.

We are now in the first week of June and the update has yet to make it into the customer fleet.

The update is a critical one for several reasons.

Musk has hyped it up a lot by saying that it will come without steering wheel nag and it will be able to drive “5 to 10x more miles per intervention“.

While this sounds unbelievable, especially after Musk has been wrong about self-driving so many times, some believe it there’s a possibility that it could happen because Tesla’s supervised FSD is now powered by neural nets end-to-end and Tesla has deployed a lot of compute power to train these neural nets recently.

But Tesla’s FSD Beta program, which has been going for about 3 years, has always been a two-step forward and one-step back kind of program.

It’s unclear why the update has been delayed. It has reportedly been in internal testing for more than 2 weeks.

One person on Reddit claimed to have had the v12.4 update and shared a screenshot to show the update was on their car, but we couldn’t confirm it:

The user claimed that the update had some major bugs that resulted in a constant need for intervention, which could explain the delay in bringing it to customers.

While v12.4 is delayed, Musk has already talked about v12.5, which was aimed for late June, but that’s probably not the case anymore.

Electrek’s Take

I’ve been waiting with anticipation for v12.4. I’ve been critical of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving effort. After having FSD Beta for two years and seeing very little improvements, I was impressed by v12.

As I previously stated, I felt that if Tesla can start consistently delivering improvements every new FSD update with its new end-to-end neural nets and training compute power, I can see the company finally entering the “march of 9s”.

The march of 9s is what people have referred to as getting the system to be 99.99999% reliable.

But with the first significant new update after since v12 being delayed, I think I’ll temper my expectations about Tesla FSD once again.