Tesla Releases FSD Beta 10.5: What's New

By Nuno Cristovao

Tesla has now released the public version of FSD Beta 10.5. The public release comes in as version 2021.36.8.8.

Tesla releases FSD Beta 10.5
Tesla releases FSD Beta 10.5
Frenchie/YouTube

Tesla was aiming to have the beta initially available this weekend, but after releasing the beta to employees, Tesla wanted to make some changes before releasing it publicly.

Tesla employees were initially given release 2021.36.8.7, followed by 2021.36.8.8 the following day.

It's not clear what the issue was, or what Tesla fixed, but the release notes for both versions are the same and the FSD Beta version number didn't change between them as the beta remains at v10.5.

98 Safety Scores

With this release Tesla is also hoping to expand the beta to owners who have achieved a Safety Score of 98 or higher.

It appears that that is still the plan as we haven't heard otherwise as of yet, but it doesn't appear that the expansion has started yet.

It's likely that Tesla is completing the rollout to all existing beta testers and will wait a few days before expanding it to additional testers.

Release Notes

Tesla has once again posted technical release notes for the beta. It doesn't appear to have any new functionality, but instead improving various key aspects of what it already does such as better object detection and maneuvering.

The full technical release notes are below:

- 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 false slowdowns.

- Enabled "emergency collision avoidance maneuvering" in shadow mode

- Enabled behavior to lane change away from merges when safe to do so.

- Improved merge object detection recall by using multi-modal object prediction at intersections.

- Improved control for merges by increasing smoothness of arrival time constraints and considering possible merging objects beyond visibility.

- Improved lane changes by allowing larger deceleration limit in short-deadline situations.

- Improved lateral control for creeping forward to get more visibility.

- Improved modeling of road boundaries on high curvature roads for finer maneuvers.

- Improved logic to stay on-route and avoid unnecessary detours/rerouting.

The full release notes for this beta are accessible on our release notes page.

New Terms

The FSD Beta will also require you to reapprove the terms of use, which will require you to go into Controls > Autopilot before you can use FSD.

The terms appear to be the same as the previous beta, so it's not clear whether Tesla will be updating the terms or if this will be a new policy where you will have to accept the terms with each beta release.

It does serve as a reminder that this is still very much beta software and you need to be vigilant when using it.

First Look

The first videos of beta 10.5 are now becoming available. Here are some of the first videos below.

In this first video DirtyTesla tries the beta around some major construction.

Visualizations

We haven't noticed any new object visualizations yet, but the visualizations for road lines and road edges appear to be much improved.

Previously when the car wasn't sure exactly where a line or edge was, it could cause excessive blurring or jitteriness where the line would shift back and forth.

In this release the lines appear much more consistent and do not bounce back and forth as much as they did in previous releases.

The improved visualizations can be seen in this James Locke video where he takes the beta through his test loop 1. James has consistently tested previous betas through various loops so that we can see their progress over time.

If you'd like to see all the FSD visualizations that the beta can display and what they mean, you should take a look at our FSD Visualizations article.

Beta Released Version
Beta 9.0 July 10th, 2021 2021.4.18.12
Beta 9.1 July 31st, 2021 2021.4.18.13
Beta 9.2 August 15th, 2021 2021.12.25.15
Beta 10.0 September 11th, 2021 2021.24.15
Beta 10.0.1 September 18th, 2021 2021.24.16
Beta 10.1 September 25th, 2021 2021.24.17
Beta 10.2 October 11th, 2021 2021.32.25
Beta 10.3 October 24th, 2021 2021.36.5.2
Beta 10.3.1 October 25th, 2021 2021.36.5.3
Beta 10.4 November 6th, 2021 2021.36.8.5
Beta 10.5 November 22nd, 2021 2021.36.8.8

Tesla Reveals Robotaxi App and Names the Robotaxi the CyberCab

By Cláudio Afonso

Tesla has invested billions of dollars over the years toward vehicle autonomy. The mission continues as Elon Musk and Tesla now prepare to unveil their ride-hailing product, Robotaxi this August. Or, as Musk called it on Tuesday, Tesla CyberCab.

Early Days

Five years ago, during Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in April 2019, Elon Musk said he felt “very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla in the following year [2020]”. At the time, Musk added a bolder claim, predicting that Tesla wouldn’t even make cars with steering wheels or pedals by 2022. While timeliness may not be Musk’s strong suit, he has a track record for getting things done that others were unwilling to try or thought were impossible. Musk later admitted he can be overly optimistic and said “sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.” 

Now, 5 years later, we have the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August 8th. After the release of FSD v12, it’s clear that we’re much closer to autonomy than we were in 2019, although FSD v12 is still a far cry from full autonomy.

While Tesla still has the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August, Tesla announced yesterday that it’d be prioritizing a simpler “next-gen” model that could be released by early 2025.

Latest Updates

On the conference call, Musk added that Tesla now has over 300 million miles driven with FSD v12 since it was launched just last month. He added that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.

Tesla said it has been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. The company is confident that it can establish a scalable and profitable autonomous driving business by employing a vision-only architecture.

think of it [Tesla] as combination of Airbnb and Uber meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates

Tesla = Uber + AirBnb

Later on, Elon Musk unveiled that the new service will operate and result in a mix between Uber and Airbnb where the Tesla driver decides if and when he wants his Tesla to be used and by whom. Tesla stated:

“We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.”

Tesla’s CEO clarified that the owners will be able to add or remove their car from the fleet “whenever they want” adding that it will be up to them to decide if they want to only let the car be used “by friends and family or only by five-star users or by anyone at any time”. The flexible program will, just like Airbnb, allow the owners to take the car out of the market when they want.

The upcoming ride-hailing service will enable users to easily request a Tesla vehicle, control the car's temperature, monitor its real-time location, and adjust the audio system. The only question is when.

Musk Teases New Model for Early 2025 That Will Use a Mix of Next-Gen and Current Platforms

By Cláudio Afonso

“We have updated our future vehicle line-up to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of our previously communicated start of production in the second half of 2025”. This was one of the key sentences that were part of Tesla’s deck shared on Tuesday directly before its financial results.

Since Reuters’ report a few weeks ago saying Tesla had “scrapped” the highly expected cheaper model— which Elon quickly denied on X —retail and institutional shareholders started asking for more details on Tesla’s product roadmap for 2024 and beyond.

In the earnings conference call, Elon Musk reiterated that Tesla expects to launch the next model in “early 2025, if not late this year”.

“We've updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of previously mentioned start of production in the second half of 2025. So, we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year. “

Over concerns of temporary production halts to update the factories for these new models, Musk said that Tesla will produce new models with certain aspects from their next-generation platform and current models. This will reduce the number of changes needed on production lines and allow Tesla not only to ramp up production faster but also to get the vehicles to market quicker.

Model Y Redesign

Tesla appears to hit that their next-gen vehicle will be less “next-gen” than they were initially aiming for, but to get a new vehicle out the door by late 2024, the process would already have to be in motion. Tesla may likely be referring to the redesigned Model Y, which is expected to reuse many parts from the new Model 3. Earlier this year, Tesla said that the redesigned Model Y will not be released this year, so it makes sense that they’re looking to speed up that production.

Tesla CEO concluded by saying that these measures will allow Tesla to reach a capacity of over 3 million units. Tesla produced 1.84 million vehicles in 2023. However, this year they’re ramping up Cybertruck production and introduced the new Model 3 into new markets.

And we think this should allow us to get to over 3 million vehicles of capacity when realized to the full extent.

Tesla reported on Tuesday its earnings results followed by a conference call where it teased its upcoming Robotaxi and its next-generation platform saying its “purpose-built Robotaxi product will continue to pursue a revolutionary ‘unboxed’ manufacturing strategy”.

Earlier in the day, Tesla announced the new Performance variant of its sedan Model 3 with deliveries in the United States starting already next month. The new version starts at $45,490 (after applying the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit) and goes from 0 to 60mph in 2.9 seconds.

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Although we share official Tesla release notes, we are not affiliated with Tesla Motors. We are Tesla fans and supporters.

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