Tesla has rolled out the latest installment of its Full Self-Driving software to the early access Tesla employees and owners — FSD Beta 10.5 (firmware version: 2021.36.8.8).
Just like the previous update V10.4, Tesla has again presented a list of improved features, new capabilities enabled, and the scaling of Autopilot imagery and video labeling to the next level.
Looking at the release notes (below), it’s obvious that Tesla is exponentially improving the safety of vulnerable road users (VRU). With each new update, Tesla is explicitly mentioning how much (in %) the algorithm and data processing has improved for the safety of pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and such susceptible road users in the surroundings of a Tesla vehicle equipped with FSD Beta.
One new interesting development is that the “emergency collision avoidance maneuvering” is now enabled in “shadow mode”. This means that the entire Tesla fleet now will be monitoring collision events and what would have happened if the vehicle had used the Autopilot emergency collision avoidance feature. This will improve the AI dataset and labeling of crash avoidance maneuvering data inside the Tesla Neural Net.
FSD Beta 10.5 Release Notes (2021.36.8.8)
- Improved VRU (pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcycles) crossing velocity error by 20% from improved quality in our auto-labeling.
- Improved static world predictions (road lines, edges, and lane connectivity) by up to 13% using a new static world auto-labeler and adding 165K auto-labeled videos.
- Improved cone and sign detections by upreving the generalized static object network with 15K more video clips and adjusting oversampling and overweighting strategies (+4.5% precision, +10.4% recall).
- Improved cut-in detection network by 5.5% to help reduce falso slowdowns.
- Enabled “emergency collision avoidance maneuvering” in shadow mode.
- Enabled bahevior to lane change away from merges when safe to do so.
- Improved merge object detection recall by using multi-modal object prediction at intersection.
- Improved control for merges by increasing smoothness of arrival time constraints and considering possible merging objects beyond visibility.
- Improved land changes by allowing larger deceleration limit in short-deadline situations.
- Improved lateral control for creeping forward to get more visibility.
- Improved modeling of road bounderies on high curvature roads for finer maneuvers.
- Improved logic to stay on-route and avoid unnecessary detours/rerouting.
Drop scene of the CNN FSD Beta video
CNN released a testing video of the FSD Beta last week. They had recorded this video on a Tesla Model 3 owned by a Tesla YouTuber Tallman Tech. CNN got in touch with the owner most probably after looking at his FSD Beta testing videos and wanted to have the car for their own reporting.
A big chunk of this video contained fear, uncertainity, and doubt (FUD) about Tesla FSD Beta. The journalist who drove the beta tester’s cars went to the length of showing the car was about to crash into an oncoming UPS truck in a narrow Brooklyn, NY street.
Fotunately, the Model 3 owner also recorded the entire testing session on his phone as well. Let’s first check out what CNN protrayed in their version of this test.
But Jason, the host of the Tallman Tech channel debunked this FUD video by posting several pieces of the video recording he made during this test drive by the CNN.
CNN removed several parts of the test footage and made a 4:09 minutes video selecting most parts where the inexperienced driver was using a system that he was not very comfortable with. Driving a Tesla car on Full Self-Driving for the first time and that in busy streets is not a good way to start.
Tesla itself carefully selects only those Tesla owners that it evaluates as safe using the Safety Score calculated by driving his/her driving behavior. Let’s listen to the Tesla Model 3 owner’s views on the above CNN video and the footage he recrded with his phone during the test drive.
However, Tesla did not revoke Jason’s FSD Beta access and he just got the 10.5 update.
FSD Beta 10.5 test videos
The latest version of FSD Beta is better than the previous one but all software need constant improvement over its lifetime. And this is just in the beta phase as of now, so still a long way to go.
FSD Beta 10.5 did make some mistakes during tests but the overall experience by beta testers was that it has actually improved a bit over 10.4 as Tesla has claimed. Let’s watch how it did on city streets.
Stay tuned for constant Tesla updates, follow us on:
Google News | Flipboard | X (Twitter) | RSS (Feedly).