Almost a year after Tesla began testing its controversial “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta software with a select group of customers, company CEO Elon Musk said he was aiming for a larger release. wide by the end of September. The news comes as an older version of the software leaked online.
Musk said on Twitter that the company would begin rolling out version 10 of FSD to customers of its Early Access program at midnight on September 10. Then the software “will need a few more weeks for tuning. [and] bug fixes, ”which Musk said would take four weeks. At this point, a “public beta button” will be made available to more Tesla customers, which should take the form of a download button for people who have purchased the FSD package.
Of course, all of this should be taken with a giant grain of salt. Musk has promised a larger version of the beta software for customers who have purchased the FSD package (which currently costs $ 10,000) for some time now. It’s possible that Tesla will miss that deadline, and Musk is tweeting a new date to get customers excited.
Just to give you an idea of how long that was going on: In 2018, Musk said the “long-awaited” version of FSD would start rolling out in August of that year, which didn’t happen. He did it again in 2019, proclaiming that “in a year” there would be “over a million cars with full autonomous driving, software, everything.” This did not happen either. The company actually started shipping FSD version 9 in July, but only to members of its Early Access program.
So to say that Tesla fans have been anticipating this update for a while would be an understatement. Some customers are fed up with the wait and sued the company for false advertising.
Tesla says the software controls vehicle steering, lane centering, braking and acceleration on highways and city streets. But it is still considered an advanced level 2 driver assistance system because it requires driver supervision at all times. Studies have shown that this supervisory role can make it more difficult for drivers to stay alert on the road, which can be dangerous. The driver is also legally responsible for the vehicle, which some say undermines Tesla’s marketing of its product as “fully autonomous driving.”
There is no doubt that Tesla is more willing than its competitors to test beta versions of its Autopilot driver assistance feature on its customers for the purpose of collecting data and fixing system bugs. And Tesla customers generally agree with that, regularly flooding mentions of Musk begging for admission into the company’s early access program for beta testers. This has contributed to Tesla’s public reputation as a leader in autonomous driving, although its vehicles consistently fall short of what most experts agree to define as a self-driving car.
Meanwhile, an older version of Tesla’s FSD software has leaked and is now spreading among the hacker community, according to Electrek. Citing anonymous sources, the website reported that binary firmware files for the software were being released to Tesla’s root access community. According to SSH.com:
Having root access usually means being able to log into a root account on the server, or being able to run commands as root on the server, for example using a privilege escalation tool such as sudo.
Some Tesla owners have used root access to review the company’s software versions and access some new features. With root access, you can actually run the software on your vehicle. According to Electrek, the hacker community generally tries to silence things so as not to alarm Tesla.
However, a Tesla owner in Ukraine recently posted a video using FSD beta version 8.2 in Kiev, where Tesla did not post it. Tesla only developed the FSD for the US market and did not adapt it for use in other countries, which have different traffic signs and rules of conduct. As reported by hacker @greentheonly, this is an example of how Tesla’s FSD works in a place without “decent cards”.
It’s also a useful reminder of what happens when you neglect to use high definition maps to underpin your autonomous driving software. Unlike autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo and Cruise, Tesla does not use HD maps and does not prevent its software from being used in certain areas, also known as geofencing.
Musk said he’s trying to create autonomous vehicle technology that relies on vision-based sensors such as cameras and neural network-trained software. He poked fun at the audiovisual industry’s reliance on sensors such as lidar, which uses lasers to identify nearby objects and which other companies say provide the necessary redundancy in the event of a crash. breakdown.
The U.S. government has renewed its interest in Tesla, recently announcing it was investigating incidents involving Tesla cars using autopilot crashing into parked emergency vehicles.
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