This is the longest recorded video of Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) in action: 22-minute drive, 11x speed. With FSD Tesla distracts Google and Apple, creating the world's first real-time map.
Twitter user Whole Mars Catalog writes, "I understand why Elon Musk always sounded so confident about autonomy now. They've been holding their cards close to their chest. There's a lot of work left to do, but it's clear to me now that Tesla has a winning hand," sharing the longest video of FSD on Twitter.
The topic is actively discussed on Twitter and Reddit Tesla and here are some general observations from those discussions.
This is a distraction from what is next: a map that crushes anything Apple and Google have. This is Tesla’s real-time map of the world.
Maybe a dumb question or already answered but if mud or something blocks a camera enough, does FSD not turn on and warn you that it can’t see?
An even worse situation is if the sensor gets blocked _during_ an autonomous drive, not at the beginning. a self-driving system must include a way to keep outer sensors clean continuously, which is a huge headache.
But apparently, Tesla hasn’t done this. I don’t know, but someone says on Twitter “They've done no such thing. They released a video of a self-driving Tesla taking a long drive after autonomy day last year. They have been telling anyone who can be made to listen to how close they are to solving autonomy for years.”
With all this excitement in place, we need to realize that You're going to need to wait quite some time before this is available to the general public.
Regarding the wide release by the end of 2020, which is roughly 8 weeks, one person under Reddit discussion says “I really don't see how it can be in wide release in 8 weeks, they basically sent warnings to all the beta testers to not screw anything up. If it goes wide release you just need one unwise person to do something foolish and run over a pedestrian and it'd be a nightmare for Tesla.”
So far we know that very few beta testers were selected to get this update. Elon said he this won't roll out to the general fleet until it is safe enough. His original estimate was December, but it could be awhile - you can see in some of the other videos it has quite a few disconnections, which can be quite dangerous.
Another question for consideration is this. How many people paid for FSD? 100,000? 250,000? And of those, how many agreed to be beta testers? And do all those FSD betas in the US have it now?
If every beta tester who paid for FSD is included, seems like that would be more than 50,000 people on the road now. But I agree starting with a smaller number like 1,000 may be better.
From what I understand Very few people have "early access" and only a very small percentage of those who have the current FSD beta. And also, these people have signed NDA agreements, and probably these are people who will not hold Tesla responsible if something goes wrong with the FSD Beta.
Overall, Tesla has done amazing work here. I think with FSD, the optimal route may not be the shortest path. Instead, it may be the path the car has a high probability of handling.
It’s good to have a video of beta FSD in near-ideal driving conditions: well-marked roads, daytime, overcast weather (no sharp shadows and glare). It looks very promising, for a beta anyway.
While it’s a pretty simple road and simple driving conditions in the video, it’s still an achievement. Even if you can only do this on a narrow subset of simple roads the value creation is huge. It’s not all the way there yet but it’s hard to imagine it won’t be in 1-2 years.
For the rest of the world outside of the US, I hope roundabout support is coming soon! And some people say it’s really a needed functionality. I don’t know. I love driving. However, I realized that one-day FSD’s perfected version may be safer than human driving.
No wonder Elon is bullish about his RoboTaxi plan. Perfecting FSD which is pretty impressive already will be a very good recipe for RoboTaxi. Exciting for Tesla.
Armen Hareyan is the founder and the Editor in Chief of Torque News. He founded TorqueNews.com in 2010, which since then has been publishing expert news and analysis about the automotive industry. He can be reached at Torque News Twitter, Facebok, Linkedin and Youtube.
