Connect with us
tesla-fsd-beta-price-15k-10.69-wide-release tesla-fsd-beta-price-15k-10.69-wide-release

News

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

Credit: Whole Mars Catalog

Published

on

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. 

Advertisement
-->

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.

Advertisement
-->

– 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.

Advertisement
-->

– 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.

Advertisement
-->

– 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.

Advertisement
-->

– 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.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Tesla makes two big interior changes to several Model Y vehicles

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla has made two big interior changes to several Model Y vehicles in its lineup, and the changes come just as the new model year begins production.

Last year, Tesla launched the Model Y Standard, which separated the previous models into the “Premium” category. The Standard vehicles lack several features, including more premium interior materials, acoustic-lined glass, and storage.

@teslarati There are some BIG differences between the Tesla Model Y Standard and Tesla Model Y Premium #tesla #teslamodely ♬ Sia – Xeptemper

The Model Y “Premium” trims are now getting several new upgrades, which come after the company launched a seven-seat configuration of the vehicle last night in the North American market for an upcharge of $2,500.

The new Model Y seven-seat configuration did not come with just an additional row of seating; it also came with a slew of other goodies that now come standard and were previously only available on the Model Y Performance, which was launched late last year.

All Black Headliner

The new Tesla Model Y Premium trims will now come standard with a black headliner, something that many owners have been requesting for some time.

The previous grey headliner and trim within the vehicle is now gone; it will be all black on all of the Premium trims from here on out, a welcome change:

Credit: Tesla

Larger and Higher Resolution Center Touchscreen

The center touchscreen in the new Model Y Premium configuration is now larger and has a higher resolution than the previous version.

In last year’s Model Y configurations (apart from the Performance), the center touchscreen was 15.4″. Now, Tesla has decided to go with the 16″ version across all Premium trims, which is a nice step up. It was nice to see this in the Performance, but it is really great to see Tesla include this in the Model Y’s more Premium trim levels.

Tesla Model Y Seven Seater

Tesla launched the latest iteration of the seven-seater for the Model Y on Monday night. Traditionally, the Model Y seats five passengers in total, but there were calls for a more spacious version several years ago.

Tesla released it, but it was extremely tight in the back, basically reserving those back seats for only small people or children.

Credit: Tesla

The new configuration looks to be slightly more spacious in the third row, but not as much space as most would require or want. Instead,

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Lufthansa Group to equip Starlink on its 850-aircraft fleet

Under the collaboration, Lufthansa Group will install Starlink technology on both its existing fleet and all newly delivered aircraft, as noted by the group in a press release.

Published

on

Credit: Lufthansa

Lufthansa Group has announced a partnership with Starlink that will bring high-speed internet connectivity to every aircraft across all its carriers. 

This means that aircraft across the group’s brands, from Lufthansa, SWISS, and Austrian Airlines to Brussels Airlines, would be able to enjoy high-speed internet access using the industry-leading satellite internet solution.

Starlink in-flight internet

Under the collaboration, Lufthansa Group will install Starlink technology on both its existing fleet and all newly delivered aircraft, as noted by the group in a press release

Starlink’s low-Earth orbit satellites are expected to provide significantly higher bandwidth and lower latency than traditional in-flight Wi-Fi, which should enable streaming, online work, and other data-intensive applications for passengers during flights.

Starlink-powered internet is expected to be available on the first commercial flights as early as the second half of 2026. The rollout will continue through the decade, with the entire Lufthansa Group fleet scheduled to be fully equipped with Starlink by 2029. Once complete, no other European airline group will operate more Starlink-connected aircraft.

Advertisement
-->

Free high-speed access

As part of the initiative, Lufthansa Group will offer the new high-speed internet free of charge to all status customers and Travel ID users, regardless of cabin class. Chief Commercial Officer Dieter Vranckx shared his expectations for the program.

“In our anniversary year, in which we are celebrating Lufthansa’s 100th birthday, we have decided to introduce a new high-speed internet solution from Starlink for all our airlines. The Lufthansa Group is taking the next step and setting an essential milestone for the premium travel experience of our customers. 

“Connectivity on board plays an important role today, and with Starlink, we are not only investing in the best product on the market, but also in the satisfaction of our passengers,” Vranckx said. 

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Tesla locks in Elon Musk’s top problem solver as it enters its most ambitious era

The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.

Published

on

Credit: Duke University

Tesla has granted Senior Vice President of Automotive Tom Zhu more than 520,000 stock options, tying a significant portion of his compensation to the company’s long-term performance. 

The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.

Tesla secures top talent

According to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tom Zhu received 520,021 stock options with an exercise price of $435.80 per share. Since the award will not fully vest until March 5, 2031, Zhu must remain at Tesla for more than five years to realize the award’s full benefit.

Considering that Tesla shares are currently trading at around the $445 to $450 per share level, Zhu will really only see gains in his equity award if Tesla’s stock price sees a notable rise over the years, as noted in a Sina Finance report.

Still, even at today’s prices, Zhu’s stock award is already worth over $230 million. If Tesla reaches the market cap targets set forth in Elon Musk’s 2025 CEO Performance Award, Zhu would become a billionaire from this equity award alone.

Advertisement
-->

Tesla’s problem solver

Zhu joined Tesla in April 2014 and initially led the company’s Supercharger rollout in China. Later that year, he assumed the leadership of Tesla’s China business, where he played a central role in Tesla’s localization efforts, including expanding retail and service networks, and later, overseeing the development of Gigafactory Shanghai.

Zhu’s efforts helped transform China into one of Tesla’s most important markets and production hubs. In 2023, Tesla promoted Zhu to Senior Vice President of Automotive, placing him among the company’s core global executives and expanding his influence beyond China. He has since garnered a reputation as the company’s problem solver, being tapped by Elon Musk to help ramp Giga Texas’s vehicle production. 

With this in mind, Tesla’s recent filing seems to suggest that the company is locking in its top talent as it enters its newest, most ambitious era to date. As could be seen in the targets of Elon Musk’s 2025 pay package, Tesla is now aiming to be the world’s largest company by market cap, and it is aiming to achieve production levels that are unheard of. Zhu’s talents would definitely be of use in this stage of the company’s growth.

Continue Reading