Autonomous driving at Tesla has never seemed so far away | MacGeneration

Fully autonomous driving is not for tomorrow at Tesla despite the fine promises of Elon Musk (who ended up admitting that he was talking nonsense). Since last year, Tesla has allowed a small handful of drivers to test betas of the Full Self Driving (FSD) ¹ system, version 9.2 of which is supposed to improve autonomous driving in the city. This test software is still far from satisfying users… Elon Musk first.

In a tweet, the bubbling boss even explains that this version is “not great” but that the teams in charge of Autopilot and artificial intelligence were doing their best to improve the technology. Version 9.3, still in beta, offers much better performance, he says.

Elon Musk also indicated that the Autopilot software for highway driving and for city driving will merge, which will require significant groundwork for the neural networks at work under the hoods of Teslas. The leader also indicated that version 10 of FSD would be based on deep structural changes.

Developing level 5 autonomous driving (without any human intervention) when you are still at level 2 is already very complicated. But the manufacturer has embarked on a significant technical overhaul by purely and simply removing the radars from its vehicles, a sensor widely used everywhere else. The manufacturer now relies solely on on-board cameras, which further adds to the difficulty. And pushes even further the horizon of piloting without a driver.

Tesla fires up his neurons for his long-term vision

1. In July, the automaker activated the FSD system subscription to the general public in the United States, offering them all sorts of unmanned navigation functions, but it is still a long way from full FSD (read: Tesla activates subscription for autonomous driving in the United States). ↩︎