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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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Cybertruck

Tesla analyst claims another vehicle, not Model S and X, should be discontinued

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla analyst Gary Black of The Future Fund claims that the company is making a big mistake getting rid of the Model S and Model X. Instead, he believes another vehicle within the company’s lineup should be discontinued: the Cybertruck.

Black divested The Future Fund from all Tesla holdings last year, but he still covers the stock as an analyst as it falls in the technology and autonomy sectors, which he covers.

In a new comment on Thursday, Black said the Cybertruck should be the vehicle Tesla gets rid of due to the negatives it has drawn to the company.

The Cybertruck is also selling in an underwhelming fashion considering the production capacity Tesla has set aside for it. It’s worth noting it is still the best-selling electric pickup on the market, and it has outlasted other EV truck projects as other manufacturers are receding their efforts.

Black said:

IMHO it’s a mistake to keep Tesla Cybertruck which has negative brand equity and sold 10,000 units last year, and discontinue S/X which have strong repeat brand loyalty and together sold 30K units and are highly profitable. Why not discontinue CT and covert S/X to be fully autonomous?”

On Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla planned to transition Model S and Model X production lines at the Fremont Factory to handle manufacturing efforts of the Optimus Gen 3 robot.

Musk said that it was time to wind down the S and X programs “with an honorable discharge,” also noting that the two cars are not major contributors to Tesla’s mission any longer, as its automotive division is more focused on autonomy, which will be handled by Model 3, Model Y, and Cybercab.

Tesla begins Cybertruck deliveries in a new region for the first time

The news has drawn conflicting perspectives, with many Tesla fans upset about the decision, especially as it ends the production of the largest car in the company’s lineup. Tesla’s focus is on smaller ride-sharing vehicles, especially as the vast majority of rides consist of two or fewer passengers.

The S and X do not fit in these plans.

Nevertheless, the Cybertruck fits in Tesla’s future plans. Musk said the pickup will be needed for the transportation of local goods. Musk also said Cybertruck would be transitioned to an autonomous line.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX reportedly discussing merger with xAI ahead of blockbuster IPO

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Credit: SpaceX/X

In a groundbreaking new report from Reuters, SpaceX is reportedly discussing merger possibilities with xAI ahead of the space exploration company’s plans to IPO later this year, in what would be a blockbuster move.

The outlet said it would combine rockets and Starlink satellites, as well as the X social media platform and AI project Grok under one roof. The report cites “a person briefed on the matter and two recent company filings seen by Reuters.”

Musk, nor SpaceX or xAI, have commented on the report, so, as of now, it is unconfirmed.

With that being said, the proposed merger would bring shares of xAI in exchange for shares of SpaceX. Both companies were registered in Nevada to expedite the transaction, according to the report.

Tesla announces massive investment into xAI

On January 21, both entities were registered in Nevada. The report continues:

“One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX ​and Bret Johnsen, the company’s chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company’s only officer, the filings show.”

The source also stated that some xAI executives could be given the option to receive cash in lieu of SpaceX stock. No agreement has been reached, nothing has been signed, and the timing and structure, as well as other important details, have not been finalized.

SpaceX is valued at $800 billion and is the most valuable privately held company, while xAI is valued at $230 billion as of November. SpaceX could be going public later this year, as Musk has said as recently as December that the company would offer its stock publicly.

SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms

The plans could help move along plans for large-scale data centers in space, something Musk has discussed on several occasions over the past few months.

At the World Economic Forum last week, Musk said:

“It’s a no-brainer for building solar-powered AI data centers in space, because as I mentioned, it’s also very cold in space. The net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space and that will be true within two to three years, three at the latest.”

He also said on X that “the most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space.”

If the report is true and the two companies end up coming together, it would not be the first time Musk’s companies have ended up coming together. He used Tesla stock to purchase SolarCity back in 2016. Last year, X became part of xAI in a share swap.

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Elon Musk

Tesla hits major milestone with Full Self-Driving subscriptions

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Credit: Ashok Elluswamy/X

Tesla has announced it has hit a major milestone with Full Self-Driving subscriptions, shortly after it said it would exclusively offer the suite without the option to purchase it outright.

Tesla announced on Wednesday during its Q4 Earnings Call for 2025 that it had officially eclipsed the one million subscription mark for its Full Self-Driving suite. This represented a 38 percent increase year-over-year.

This is up from the roughly 800,000 active subscriptions it reported last year. The company has seen significant increases in FSD adoption over the past few years, as in 2021, it reported just 400,000. In 2022, it was up to 500,000 and, one year later, it had eclipsed 600,000.

In mid-January, CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would transition away from giving the option to purchase the Full Self-Driving suite outright, opting for the subscription program exclusively.

Musk said on X:

“Tesla will stop selling FSD after Feb 14. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter.”

The move intends to streamline the Full Self-Driving purchase option, and gives Tesla more control over its revenue, and closes off the ability to buy it outright for a bargain when Musk has said its value could be close to $100,000 when it reaches full autonomy.

It also caters to Musk’s newest compensation package. One tranche requires Tesla to achieve 10 million active FSD subscriptions, and now that it has reached one million, it is already seeing some growth.

The strategy that Tesla will use to achieve this lofty goal is still under wraps. The most ideal solution would be to offer a less expensive version of the suite, which is not likely considering the company is increasing its capabilities, and it is becoming more robust.

Tesla is shifting FSD to a subscription-only model, confirms Elon Musk

Currently, Tesla’s FSD subscription price is $99 per month, but Musk said this price will increase, which seems counterintuitive to its goal of increasing the take rate. With that being said, it will be interesting to see what Tesla does to navigate growth while offering a robust FSD suite.

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