Here are the release notes, but they’re not much help in determining what lite leaves out over the full version. My understanding is that the biggest limitation is that HW3 only has 8GB of RAM, which is insufficient to run the V14 model. There are other differences, like lower resolution cameras and slower processors on HW3, but it’s the lack of RAM that is the real killer.
Right now the V14 Lite appears to be in very limited public testing, which in the past means 4-12 weeks away from a wider release.
My biggest fear with moving to V14 is the inability to set the max speed limit, which I need to do very frequently to avoid going 15 over in school zones, and such.
This is probably the biggest complaint about v14 for those of us blessed with HW4 vehicles. It was really awkward at first but I have found it to be significantly less problematic in later versions. Given that, the ability to set speed isn’t as critical. Of course who knows how that translates to LITE and you may still hate it anyway. It’s also now much better in school zones and it correctly deals with school busses as well as ambulances and cop cars with sirens.
Here’s a short article about self-driving cars in Australia I thought might interest people.
It talks about infrastructure upgrades that would help adoption. I could see a two tier system developing with some roads upgraded to be suitable for self-driving, but older or less-used roads still needing a human driver to pay attention.
The CBS News program 60 Minutes ran a segment yesterday on self-driving cars in London that soon may be competing with black cabs driven by people who have to pass a famously difficult qualifying test. (There are already GPS-based services like Uber competing with the black cabs, which the story mentions, has resulted in thousands few black cab drivers.) The story shows self-driving cars from Waymo and Wayve, which was new to me. Wayve’s claim is that it can drive on unknown roads based on experience and rules from driving on known roads.
Of course the famously difficult test isn’t about driving. It’s about navigating a vast and unplanned city. Computerized navigation is a 99.9% solved problem. Computerized driving isn’t.
The Knowledge Test is frankly obsolete ancestor worship in the days of GPS nav apps. For human drivers or machine drivers.
Here is an interesting story. A guy in Georgia was using FSD and talking to his son on the phone. While talking he had a heart attack and was barely conscious. His son had the Tesla app connected to the car and was able to reroute the car to the closest emergency room and the driver lived.
This neat trick only would work if you had the Tesla app, access to the specific vehicle (you can have access to multiple vehicles on a single app) and FSD was active at the time.
Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi’s speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend’s birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through the car’s speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn’t stir…
Isn’t being completely wasted a pretty common reason to call a taxi to take you home? I’ve seen people who can barely remember their own address, so hammered they cannot walk the couple of blocks from the bar back to their apartment, so messed up from lean I was surprised they were even able to pull themselves into the cab, etc.
Of course the car should also have a feature to play loud noises, perhaps sirens, through the car’s audio system on command from HQ. Yes, folks can be drunk enough to sleep (be drugged unto unconsciousness actually) through nearly any stimulus. But they can probably solve about half their fall-asleep problems with a potent enough alarm clock mode.
Of course sometimes a rider becomes unresponsive for more serious reasons. Heart attack, stroke, etc. In that event I can certainly see some enterprising family members and lawyers deciding it was negligence if the operators assumed the customer was just sleeping and didn’t immediately divert the car and unresponsive passenger to the nearest hospital emergency department.
How to thread that cautious enough but not too cautious needle is an interesting question.
Not yet. In my experience from a few years ago when I was still getting FSD updates was there’d usually be a few limited releases of major update before it would roll out to everyone in the beta program. Sometimes that would be weeks, but occasionally months.
On a related note, I recently read that Tesla is getting their speed limit information from Open Streetmap and MapBox, and that submitting updates to those places might eventually correct FSD’s behavior. Long ago I created an OpenStreetmap account to submit some corrections, so I’m going to have to figure out how to submit updates.
There are errors on some very well traveled streets near me, and it is annoying even on 12. With 14 it might mean having to disengage FSD to avoid a ticket. In one case the speed limit drops from 55 to 40 and then 35, and the car is still saying the speed limit is 55 in the 35 zone, even though the display actually shows the speed limit sign on the side of the road with the correct speed limit. One part of the computer recognizes it, and another part ignores it.
Yes, I think they went too far with the training data. As I’ve complained before FSD does other “human in an ICE car” things, like slowing down as it goes up a hill, and then speeding up as it goes over the top. Absolutely no reason an EV with a computer controlling the speed should behave like that.
The speed limit stuff is just so weird. Like many cars, the screen displays a little speed limit sign. That sign is not necessarily what FSD thinks the speed limit is. Just now, the speed limit sign was showing 25, but FSD was going 44, so the speed limit sign was highlighted to show I was speeding. I think the road is 40.
The “max speed” was 50, but on my version of FSD I can still set the max speed to automatically be an increment over (or under) the speed limit. I have it at 10% over, so if FSD really thought the speed limit was 25, it should have been limited to 28.
So the car is displaying 25 as the speed limit, but by all other indications behaving as if it is 45. Then because of the “driving like a human” thing, the actual speed of FSD is determined by things like how wide the road is.
