Self driving cars are still decades away

2024.26.1’s release notes just dropped. Not sent out to the masses but YouTube Music is apparently no longer included. FML

They seemed to have paused the rollout of FSD 12.4.2. Only 20% of the TeslaFi fleet have it and updates are at a trickle. The latest UI version looks to be starting a roll out (with 12.3.6).

FSD 12.5 which has no nag even with sunglasses is apparently rolling out to employees and it’s on the 2024.20 branch. (2024.20.10).

Feels like it’s been forever since I got 12.3.6. But it’s been <3 months. Granted, outside events have made that feel like 3 years.

There is crazy hype over this. Besides the no nag it has “unified model for highway & city streets” which I don’t understand what it means. Also it’s the first FSD that Cybertrucks get.

Most people will skip 12.4.x entirely.

FSD on the highway isn’t using the end-to-end model. The end-to-end model basically takes zillions of clips of the camera inputs and the steering/throttle position, and trains with that input, leaving the neural net to do its thing internally. The previous model (from v11, and still used for highway) is still trained from clips, but has a human-created internal representation, which amounts to “there’s a car here, and a telephone pole there, and road markings here, etc.”. And then it also has a bunch of spaghetti code to decide what to do in all those situations.

The advantage of end-to-end is that it doesn’t build in a bunch of preconceptions, and is also easier to train because you don’t need a human to label all the different elements.

Highway driving is still a weak point in <=12.4–while it does ok in easy situations, if there’s anything weird like degraded markings or unusual construction, it tends to fall apart. A unified model should fix this. Also (I hope), just lane changes. Always snappy on city streets, as if it already knew if the lane was clear and then goes immediately if it is. While on highways it takes a few seconds even to start moving, even if the destination is totally clear.

It also probably means more resources available for each mode of operation. The single model will have to be bigger than either the highway or city driving models individually, it should be much smaller than both of them combined (since so many elements are the same, like whatever piece recognizes cars, lanes, etc.).

Thanks for all of that. Great explanation.

I had the FSD get a little wonky on city streets yesterday. It was a just paved road and the lines hadn’t been painted yet, just those little tabs. It didn’t know what to do so I took over. I don’t ordinarily use it on streets anymore, just freeways. I was just in the mood yesterday.

If you don’t yet have 2024.20.9, check your car. They are doing a massive push right now but for some reason it’s not giving phone notifications. This is supposedly in preparation for 2024.20.10 which has FSD 12.5. There appears to be a lot of confidence in this version as opposed to the 12.4.x fiasco.

Interesting. I’ll take a look. Need to poke my head down there anyway to see how much juice my teslausb has left.

Word is that FSD 12.5 will not have the single stack. That will come in a later point release. The nag will go away though.

Yup. From an official Tesla account:

So it’s what 12.4 was supposed to be

My intuition is that they actually had substantially improved training data, but the NN just didn’t have the capacity to make use of it. 12.5 supposedly has 5x the number of weights as 12.3-12.4, so it can likely “absorb” substantially more training without regressing some other aspect. That’s pure speculation, though.

I do wonder, though. I have HW3. 5x the weights is substantial but they must be getting close to the hardware capacity. I wonder if they’ll have to upgrade me at some point. Maybe not the cameras, just the computer.

Origin, GM’s funky-looking Robotaxi, is no more. They write down a more than half a billion dollar loss and move on.

Elmo said on X that the initial release of 12.5 will be on Model Ys with HW4.

Apparently they plan to use the next generation Chevrolet Bolt instead:

2026 Chevy Bolt Will Be ‘Most Affordable’ EV On The Market, GM Says

https://insideevs.com/news/721430/next-gen-chevy-bolt-cheap/

This makes a lot of sense and could definitely be a game changer. That other car wouldn’t have had a steering wheel or pedals. This will be a regular full EV at under $30k with some sort of supervised self driving

BTW, thanks for the note. Started downloading when I woke up the car. Now have 2024.20.9 installed.

Also found that something has changed with my mesh wifi lately and my garage now gets horrible wifi speeds. Took forever to download the update at 500 kB/s. Bleh.