Tesla made a huge leap forward in FSD capabilities with their recent FSD Beta 9.0 release. You can tell that Tesla feels FSD is achievable and that they're racing toward the finish line. They're now releasing FSD Betas as fast as they can to iron out edge cases and reach a higher level of autonomy.
Elon Musk has hinted at the fact that Tesla will be releasing an updated FSD Beta about every two weeks. Tesla released the major FSD Beta 9.0 update at midnight on July 10th. Three weeks later they released version 9.1. Most of us expected version 9.2 yesterday, but when it wasn't available, it led some folks to be disappointed. Well, worry no more. Early this morning Tesla released version 9.2 of the FSD Beta with release 2021.12.25.15.
The official release notes in the car haven't changed since the FSD 9.1 Beta, although 9.2 is built on a newer build of the Tesla OS, so it also includes new language support and Sky Force Reloaded.
However, Elon has shared technical release notes for version 9.2 which go into much more detail of what has changed in this latest beta.
Clear-to-go boost through turns on minor-to-major roads (plan to expand to all roads in V9.3).
Improved peek behavior where we are smarter about when to go around the lead vehicle by reasoning about the causes for lead vehicles being slow.
v1 of the Multi-model predictions for where other vehicles expected to drive. This is only partially consumed for now.
New Lanes network with 50k more clips (almost double) from the new auto-labeling pipeline.
New VRU velocity model with 12% improvement to velocity and better VRU clear-to-go performance. This is the first model trained with “Quantization-Aware-Training," an improved technique to mitigate intr8 quantization.
Enabled Inter-SoC synchronous compute scheduling between vision and vector space processes. Planner in the loop is happening in v10.
Shadow mode for new crossing/merging targets network will help you improve VRU control.
As you read through the release notes above, you can see Tesla appears to have made some big changes in a short amount of time in order to address certain situations recent betas have had trouble with. One of these situations is when transitioning onto a major road from a complete stop.
It's reassuring to see that Tesla is iterating on these FSD Betas so quickly. They look to be making amazing progress and we hope that the FSD Beta will be opened to all this year.
Tesla’s FSD V13.2.2 continues its rollout to the HW4 fleet, now complete with holiday goodness that makes it available to all HW4 vehicles. While FSD V13 is capable of some incredible feats, such as three-point turns, there are some additional capabilities Tesla hasn’t talked about yet.
Emergency Vehicle Handling
First up, better handling for emergency vehicles. While Tesla works on gathering audio data to make emergency vehicle detection even better, Tesla improved how it handles emergency vehicles with FSD V13.
FSD previously had issues handling emergency vehicles - sometimes pulling over and stopping on V12, other times requiring driver intervention to do the job. This led to lots of user interventions when an emergency vehicle was detected. Ensuring you’re out of the way of an ambulance can save precious seconds - which is enough to save lives.
V13 now does a much better job of pulling overly safely to the side for emergency vehicles. Check out the video below of FSD pulling the vehicle over to the side of the road.
Another issue that FSD had trouble handling previously was school buses. Previously, FSD would ignore the stop sign and flashing lights and attempt to drive around the bus.
School buses often required driver intervention, but it seems Tesla has dedicated time to training FSD V13 to handle them properly now. Check out this post of FSD now successfully stopping and waiting for a school bus.
FSD v13 stopped for a school bus! Waited till the stop sign folded in and then proceeded forward! pic.twitter.com/ReU4enxnNB
Reduced speed zones, including school zones, have had mediocre handling by FSD in previous versions. Now, some initial speed zone handling has arrived in V13.2. However, while it does handle some speed zones with blinking signs, it doesn’t necessarily handle all speed zones. For now, while Supervising, drivers will need to make sure their vehicles don’t exceed the speed limit, especially in school zones. In the meantime, look at this speed video of the vehicle handling a speed zone with FSD V13.
Slightly better video of FSD V13 responding appropriately to flashing yellow lights indicating it’s temporarily a 20mph zone. It didn’t exceed 25 despite being set to a much higher max speed
As part of V13, Tesla included some interesting features addressing hardware - namely camera cleaning, The initial changelog was slightly vague: “Improved Camera Cleaning” and nothing else.
It turns out this actually refers to the camera heating elements around the vehicle, including those around the B-Pillar. According to FSD engineer Yun-Ta Tsai, this is far more complex than just heating the camera up.
The system integration team does a lot of energy and thermal optimization across the entire vehicle, to optimize autonomy.
This is just one example. The heating is actually more complex than just heating it up.
Yes, real world AI cares about these things, a lot!
The Cybertruck features an automatic tonneau that lets you lock in valuables. It rolls back and forth along a track and is somewhat water-resistant. Tesla never said that the tonneau would be waterproof, but many owners have encountered a lot of water flowing into their tonneau covers.
The place where the glass roof meets the plastic strip - the aero flap- seems to be the location where most of the water gets in, and this has been noted by many as a constant source of leaks - while the rest of the bed stays mostly dry.
Tesla has attempted to fix this by adding additional slats to the tonneau, which ensures that there are slats left over underneath the aero cover, thereby providing some additional water resistance. However, it looks like they’re doing more now to prevent these leaks.
New Rubber Seals
Tesla intends to issue a service code - the term they use for service bulletins to fix common problems - for this particular issue. This service code will include the removal of the old aero flap and the installation of a new aero flap that has additional rubber seals - similar to the ones used on windows. Thanks to theMONK11 on Reddit for catching this and providing the photo.
The service code hasn’t gone live yet, so it looks like Tesla is only testing this new part for owners who have complained about excessive water intrusion. We’ll likely see this new flap, with the additional rubber seals, become a standard part on newly built trucks to resolve this issue.
For everyone else, you’ll need to put in a service ticket with Tesla, but we would recommend waiting a few weeks before doing so. That will give them time to finalize the process and have the new part sent around to service centers across North America. Given that this isn’t a critical issue to the functionality of the vehicle, Tesla likely will not issue a recall for this - so it’ll be up to owners to create a service ticket and have the new applique installed.
![Tesla FSD V13 Makes Big Improvements Around Emergency Vehicles, School Buses and Speed Zones [VIDEO]](https://www.notateslaapp.com/img/containers/article_images/fsd-beta/emergency-vehicle-school-bus.webp/6f1dd57e47f6aec0e257cdc6b0d13d4c/emergency-vehicle-school-bus.jpg)
![Tesla Is Adding 'Weather Radar' to Intel Vehicles [VIDEO]](https://www.notateslaapp.com/img/containers/article_images/tesla-screen/official-weather-overlay.jpeg/5eadeddd505b2b3b09508817e0e6d62f/official-weather-overlay.jpg)
![Andrej Karpathy considers returning to Tesla to work on Optimus [video]](https://www.notateslaapp.com/images/news/2022/karpathy-podcast_300w.jpg)
_300w.png)
