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Tesla FSD Beta V11 release gets the “next week” treatment from Musk
Elon Musk has posted a quick update on the potential rollout of FSD Beta V11, the highly-anticipated update to the electric vehicle maker’s advanced driver-assist suite. As confirmed by the CEO, FSD Beta V11 is quite remarkable as it uses a single software stack for both highway and inner-city driving.
Musk’s recent comments were shared on Twitter. Amidst the ongoing controversy behind his decision to suspend a number of notable journalists on the social media platform over alleged violations of Twitter’s doxxing policy, Musk was asked about the highly-anticipated FSD Beta update.
When asked by the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley group if FSD Beta V11 is still expected to be rolled out before Christmas, Musk noted that the update should release “next week.” While such a timeframe may seem exciting, Musk’s “next week” estimate has become an inside joke of sorts among those who closely follow Tesla. Musk, after all, has missed estimates for V11’s release in the past.
Next week
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022
Musk noted last month that the initial rollout of FSD Beta V11 started on 11/11/2022 at 11:11 p.m. PST. Musk later stated that Tesla was looking to release FSD Beta V11 before Thanksgiving. The holiday came and went, and no V11 wide rollout happened. The delay seemed a bit understandable, however, since Tesla did conduct a wide release of FSD Beta to its fleet — it was just V10.69.3.1, not V11.
Due to FSD Beta V11’s initial release being over a month ago, the update’s full release notes have already been shared online. If the release notes are any indication, it would definitely seem that the highly-anticipated update would be well worth the wait. Following are FSD Beta V11’s release notes, as shared by Tesla enthusiasts online.
-Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was setup to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision making.
– Improved Occupancy Network’s recall for close by obstacles and precision in severe weather conditions with 4x increase in transformer spatial resolution, 20% increase in image featurizer capacity, improved side camera calibration, and 260k more video training clips (real-world and simulation).
– Improved merging behavior by leveraging lane geometry and lane bounds, association with coarse map information and better gap selection algorithms, allowing for a smoother and safer experience.
– Added highway behavior to offset away from blocked lanes and generic obstacles like road debris while also adding a smooth hand- off between in-lane offsetting and lane changing.
– Improved speed-based lane change decisions to better avoid slowing down traffic in fast lanes, and interfere less with navigation.
– Reduced sensitivity for speed-based lane changes in CHILL mode.
– Improved lane changes to allow higher jerk maneuvers if required to stay on-route or to move away from lane blockages.
– Improved smoothness at highway lane splits by being less strict about centering between lane lines and allowing lower jerk maneuvers, where safe to do so.
– Reduced latency of trajectory optimization by 20% on average, without sacrificing behavior, by leveraging numerical tricks for more efficient computations.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
