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Tesla FSD Beta 10.69.2.2 extending to 160k owners in US and Canada: Elon Musk

Credit: Whole Mars Catalog

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It appears that after several iterations and adjustments, FSD Beta 10.69 is ready to roll out to the greater FSD Beta program. Elon Musk mentioned the update on Twitter, with the CEO stating that v10.69.2.2. should extend to 160,000 owners in the United States and Canada. 

Similar to his other announcements about the FSD Beta program, Musk’s comments were posted on Twitter. “FSD Beta 10.69.2.1 looks good, extending to 160k owners in US & Canada,” Musk wrote before correcting himself and clarifying that he was talking about FSD Beta 10.69.2.2, not v10.69.2.1. 

While Elon Musk has a known tendency to be extremely optimistic about FSD Beta-related statements, his comments about v10.69.2.2 do reflect observations from some of the program’s longtime members. Veteran FSD Beta tester @WholeMarsBlog, who does not shy away from criticizing the system if it does not work well, noted that his takeovers with v10.69.2.2 have been marginal. Fellow FSD Beta tester @GailAlfarATX reported similar observations. 

Tesla definitely seems to be pushing to release FSD to its fleet. Recent comments from Tesla’s Senior Director of Investor Relations Martin Viecha during an invite-only Goldman Sachs tech conference have hinted that the electric vehicle maker is on track to release “supervised” FSD around the end of the year. That’s around the same time as Elon Musk’s estimate for FSD’s wide release. 

It should be noted, of course, that even if Tesla manages to release “supervised” FSD to consumers by the end of the year, the version of the advanced driver-assist system would still require drivers to pay attention to the road and follow proper driving practices. With a feature-complete “supervised” FSD, however, Teslas would be able to navigate on their own regardless of whether they are in the highway or in inner-city streets. And that, ultimately, is a feature that will be extremely hard to beat. 

Following are the release notes of FSD Beta v10.69.2.2, as retrieved by NotaTeslaApp

– Added a new “deep lane guidance” module to the Vector Lanes neural network which fuses features extracted from the video streams with coarse map data, i.e. lane counts and lane connectivities. This architecture achieves a 44% lower error rate on lane topology compared to the previous model, enabling smoother control before lanes and their connectivities becomes visually apparent. This provides a way to make every Autopilot drive as good as someone driving their own commute, yet in a sufficiently general way that adapts for road changes.

– Improved overall driving smoothness, without sacrificing latency, through better modeling of system and actuation latency in trajectory planning. Trajectory planner now independently accounts for latency from steering commands to actual steering actuation, as well as acceleration and brake commands to actuation. This results in a trajectory that is a more accurate model of how the vehicle would drive. This allows better downstream controller tracking and smoothness while also allowing a more accurate response during harsh maneuvers.

– Improved unprotected left turns with more appropriate speed profile when approaching and exiting median crossover regions, in the presence of high speed cross traffic (“Chuck Cook style” unprotected left turns). This was done by allowing optimisable initial jerk, to mimic the harsh pedal press by a human, when required to go in front of high speed objects. Also improved lateral profile approaching such safety regions to allow for better pose that aligns well for exiting the region. Finally, improved interaction with objects that are entering or waiting inside the median crossover region with better modeling of their future intent.

– Added control for arbitrary low-speed moving volumes from Occupancy Network. This also enables finer control for more precise object shapes that cannot be easily represented by a cuboid primitive. This required predicting velocity at every 3D voxel. We may now control for slow-moving UFOs.

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– Upgraded Occupancy Network to use video instead of images from single time step. This temporal context allows the network to be robust to temporary occlusions and enables prediction of occupancy flow. Also, improved ground truth with semantics-driven outlier rejection, hard example mining, and increasing the dataset size by 2.4x.

– Upgraded to a new two-stage architecture to produce object kinematics (e.g. velocity, acceleration, yaw rate) where network compute is allocated O(objects) instead of O(space). This improved velocity estimates for far away crossing vehicles by 20%, while using one tenth of the compute.

– Increased smoothness for protected right turns by improving the association of traffic lights with slip lanes vs yield signs with slip lanes. This reduces false slowdowns when there are no relevant objects present and also improves yielding position when they are present.

– Reduced false slowdowns near crosswalks. This was done with improved understanding of pedestrian and bicyclist intent based on their motion.

– Improved geometry error of ego-relevant lanes by 34% and crossing lanes by 21% with a full Vector Lanes neural network update. Information bottlenecks in the network architecture were eliminated by increasing the size of the per-camera feature extractors, video modules, internals of the autoregressive decoder, and by adding a hard attention mechanism which greatly improved the fine position of lanes.

– Made speed profile more comfortable when creeping for visibility, to allow for smoother stops when protecting for potentially occluded objects.

– Improved recall of animals by 34% by doubling the size of the auto-labeled training set.

– Enabled creeping for visibility at any intersection where objects might cross ego’s path, regardless of presence of traffic controls.

– Improved accuracy of stopping position in critical scenarios with crossing objects, by allowing dynamic resolution in trajectory optimization to focus more on areas where finer control is essential.

– Increased recall of forking lanes by 36% by having topological tokens participate in the attention operations of the autoregressive decoder and by increasing the loss applied to fork tokens during training.

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– Improved velocity error for pedestrians and bicyclists by 17%, especially when ego is making a turn, by improving the onboard trajectory estimation used as input to the neural network.

– Improved recall of object detection, eliminating 26% of missing detections for far away crossing vehicles by tuning the loss function used during training and improving label quality.

– Improved object future path prediction in scenarios with high yaw rate by incorporating yaw rate and lateral motion into the likelihood estimation. This helps with objects turning into or away from ego’s lane, especially in intersections or cut-in scenarios.

– Improved speed when entering highway by better handling of upcoming map speed changes, which increases the confidence of merging onto the highway.

– Reduced latency when starting from a stop by accounting for lead vehicle jerk.

– Enabled faster identification of red light runners by evaluating their current kinematic state against their expected braking profile.

Press the “Video Record” button on the top bar UI to share your feedback. When pressed, your vehicle’s external cameras will share a short VIN-associated Autopilot Snapshot with the Tesla engineering team to help make improvements to FSD. You will not be able to view the clip.

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Tesla Europe builds momentum with expanding FSD demos and regional launches

Needless to say, it appears that Tesla is putting in some serious effort into boosting sales in Europe this year. 

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Credit: Tesla Europe & Middle East/X

Tesla has been notably active across Europe in recent weeks, expanding its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) ride-along program, entering a new market, and showcasing its newest vehicles across multiple regions. 

Needless to say, it appears that Tesla is putting in some serious effort into boosting sales in Europe this year. 

Tesla Europe recently announced the expansion of its FSD (Supervised) ride-along experiences, inviting the public to experience the system on local roads. Initially available in Italy, France, and Germany when it launched, the program has now expanded to Hungary, Finland, and Spain.

The ride-along program allows participants to ride in the passenger seat and observe how FSD Supervised handles real-world traffic scenarios, including dense urban driving and other challenging conditions. Tesla has positioned the initiative as a way to familiarize European drivers and regulators with the system’s capabilities in everyday use. The program has received positive reviews so far, with many being impressed by FSD’s real-world capabilities. 

Tesla also recently launched operations in Slovakia with a pop-up store and multi-day public event in Bratislava, as noted in an EV Wire report. The launch, held from January 16 to 18 at the Eurovea Mall Promenade, featured test drives, vehicle displays, including the Cybertruck, as well as family-focused attractions such as a mini-Tesla racetrack. 

Local observers noted that Tesla Optimus was also shown at the event, while the Tesla Owners Slovakia club welcomed the brand with a coordinated light show near the Slovak National Theater. Tesla Europe later shared its appreciation for Slovakia in a post on its official social media account on X, stating, “Thanks, Slovakia, for the amazing last 3 days & for giving us such a warm welcome!”

Tesla’s Slovakia entry follows a familiar pattern used by the company in other European markets. Tesla opened a pop-up store in Bratislava as an initial step, with plans for a permanent showroom and a potential service center at a renovated site previously occupied by a Jeep and Dodge dealership. Tesla has used a similar approach in markets such as Czechia and Lithuania, where permanent facilities followed within a few months of pop-up launches.

Slovakia already has six Supercharging sites totaling 46 Superchargers, including two locations in Bratislava, providing early infrastructure support for Tesla owners. Tesla staff program manager Supratik Saha described the Slovakia launch as a strategic expansion in the heart of the EU, citing the country’s strong automotive manufacturing base and appetite for advanced technology.

Beyond the EU, the company also marked another milestone with the first Cybertruck deliveries in the United Arab Emirates, signaling continued geographic expansion for Tesla’s newest vehicle. Just like Tesla Slovakia, the Cybertruck also received a warm welcome from the UAE’s EV community. 

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Tesla Sweden maintains Trelleborg port deal despite union blockade

As noted in a report from Dagens Arbete (DA), Tesla was able to maintain its storage agreement with the Port of Trelleborg.

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Andrzej Otrębski, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Tesla Sweden is still storing vehicles at the Port of Trelleborg despite the ongoing blockades against the company from the country’s labor unions. 

Tesla still at Port of Trelleborg

As noted in a report from Dagens Arbete (DA), Tesla was able to maintain its storage agreement with the Port of Trelleborg. This allows the company to keep vehicles at the port while imports into Sweden continue. This was despite the Transport Workers’ Union’s blockade, which was aimed at halting the loading and unloading of Tesla vehicles in the area.

Local union leader Jörgen Wärja, chairman of Transport and an employee representative on the port company’s board, confirmed that the agreement was still active. “The agreement has not been terminated. You want to have the money instead of having empty warehouses. I understand the reason, but I do not support it,” Wärja said

The local union leader also noted that he visited Tesla’s storage area earlier this week. “There were a lot of cars. I was surprised that there were so many, actually,” he said.

Tesla had been able to bring vehicles into Sweden via passenger ferries at Trelleborg, a method that unions said allowed the company to bypass the blockade, DA noted. According to estimates from IF Metall, the workaround enabled Tesla to deliver thousands of cars to Sweden each year.

Port defends decision

The Port of Trelleborg did not issue a comment on its current agreement with Tesla, but said it had complied with union sympathy measures. Documents reviewed by Swedish media showed that the contract with Tesla was being extended in six-month intervals.

Port CEO Malin Collin noted that the port would not discuss individual customer arrangements. “We do not go into details regarding any customer agreements. We have continuous dialogue with potential tenants, and this is not unique to any location,” Collin wrote in an email.

The CEO added that the port was following legal requirements related to the labor dispute. “We have taken note of the Transport Workers’ Union’s decision on sympathy measures and are of course following applicable legislation and the requirements placed on us as employers,” Collin said.

Jörgen Wärja, for his part, stated that the issue was not whether Tesla’s imports into Sweden could be fully stopped, but whether the port should provide logistical support to the electric vehicle maker during an active conflict. “The port shouldn’t have anything to do with Tesla at all, we believe,” he said. “It’s purely moral. Whether you honor a conflict or not. If you say you support Transport’s sympathetic actions against Tesla, it becomes a double standard.”

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk shares insights on SpaceX and Tesla’s potential scale

In a pair of recent posts on X, Musk argued that both companies operate in domains where growth is not linear, but exponential.

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Credit: xAI

Elon Musk outlined why he believes Tesla and SpaceX ultimately dwarf their competitors, pointing to autonomy, robotics, and space-based energy as forces that fundamentally reshape economic scale. 

In a pair of recent posts on X, Musk argued that both companies operate in domains where growth is not linear, but exponential.

Space-based energy

In a response to a user on X who observed that SpaceX has a larger valuation than all six US defense companies combined, Musk explained that space-based industries will eventually surpass the total economic value of Earth. He noted that space allows humanity to harness roughly 100,000 times more energy than Earth currently uses, while still consuming less than a millionth of the Sun’s total energy output.

That level of available energy should enable the emergence and development of industries that are simply not possible within Earth’s physical and environmental constraints. Continuous solar exposure in space, as per Musk’s comment, removes limitations imposed by atmosphere, weather, and land availability.

Autonomy and robots

In a follow-up post, Elon Musk explaned that “due to autonomy, Tesla is worth more than the rest of the auto industry.” Musk added that this assessment does not yet account for Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot. As per the CEO, once Optimus reaches scaled production, it could increase Earth’s gross domestic product by an order of magnitude, ultimately paving the way for sustainable abundance.

Even before the advent of Optimus, however, Tesla’s autonomous driving system already gives vehicles the option to become revenue-generating assets through services like the Tesla Robotaxi network. Tesla’s autonomous efforts seem to be on the verge of paying off, as services like the Robotaxi network have already been launched in its initial stages in Austin and the Bay Area. 

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