Tesla has highlighted multiple recent Full Self-Driving (FSD) experiences from customers with the v12 software, as shared in a mega-thread on X this week.
On Tuesday, the main Tesla X account shared an article featuring multiple FSD videos from customers across the platform, showing a number of edge cases and how the vehicles handled them. The drivers in the videos are using either FSD Supervised v12.3.4 or v12.3.6, and Tesla notes the specific situations tackled by the semi-automated driving system in each video.
The so-called article, which is essentially just the series of seven videos, details different edge-case traffic situations, showing off some of the positive encounters customers have recently had with the neural net-based system. We’ve embedded each video below, or you can check out the article directly on X here.
Navigating a construction zone & taking into account signs from workers indicating when to proceed
FSD 12.3.6 vs road works.
This was quite impressive!
Going up this hill, there were road works causing my lane to be closed. Workers were there with signs indicating when we could move.
Without hesitation, FSD put the indicator on and went around onto the other side, cleared the… pic.twitter.com/uazXrd8diN— Darryn Appleton (@DrTeslaFSD) May 16, 2024
Making a turn in a busy area with a large number of pedestrians crossing the street
How many pedestrians can FSD track simultaneously?
All of them.LA is nothing like Manhattan but we have this little area of town that gets super busy with tourists and a great test for FSD at low speed negotiation around pedestrians and traffic. The key for success is to always… pic.twitter.com/ASWWA0T3Ru
— Edge Case (@edgecase411) May 6, 2024
Driving like a human would—with good spatial awareness & reaction time
Thank you @Tesla and @elonmusk for #FSD v12.3.4 — avoiding hazards, oncoming traffic, merging in/out of lanes. Insanely good. Human. pic.twitter.com/PS8gnkxeSp
— CyberMan (@thalerz) April 15, 2024
Road etiquette matters
Navigating through heavy traffic in my Tesla Model X with FSD (Supervised) v12.3.4 today, my car showed impeccable manners, stopping to let a fellow driver pass. A true example of how technology can enhance road etiquette! pic.twitter.com/0iQFbg5iQc
— TeslaFamOnBoard – Jose Negron⚡️??? (@TeslaFamOnBoard) April 15, 2024
Braking for another vehicle despite having right of way
FSD deals with driver failing to yield due to light malfunction?@Tesla @cityoflubbock @LubbockPolice
Guys can we get Lubbock Traffic control on X! Would make reporting much easier!
9 Major Accidents Avoided! Save lives & drive a Tesla! pic.twitter.com/74EKlMg2Ze— Allen Iron (@myprojectpluto) May 23, 2024
Adjusting to real-life situations that require temporary overriding of traffic rules
Nothing to see here.
Just a robot car making a left at a light and calmly driving over a double yellow line avoiding a garbage truck.
No other car you can buy is capable of anything close to this.
FSD 12.3.4 pic.twitter.com/AKWHQmQ3Qu— Pete Balls to the wall FSD ?? (@kylaschwaberow) April 13, 2024
Giving adequate space to pedestrians
FSD V12 prioritizes pedestrian safety more than most human drivers pic.twitter.com/MH45CAo544
— AI DRIVR (@AIDRIVR) May 19, 2024
While it’s not entirely clear where Tesla’s social media and advertising divisions stand following multiple rounds of layoffs in the past several weeks, the company has taken no break from sharing select ads across socials.
Throughout late last year and early this year, Tesla’s focus on using social media platforms, especially X, as a means of advertising was becoming more apparent than ever. Meanwhile, many shareholders had been calling for the company to increase its advertising presence in general, especially for the sake of helping to educate the public on misconceptions about electric vehicles (EVs).
Many of the company’s executives had also been interacting directly with fans and shareholders on the social media platform in recent months, though at least a few of said executives have since departed. Tesla has also been highly focused on FSD ahead of the unveiling of a future robotaxi platform in August, recently offering free one-month trials of the software for the first time ever, and rolling out mandatory demos of the system with purchase of a vehicle.
The company is also seemingly preparing to launch FSD in China and potentially other markets in the coming months, being granted tentative approval in April. Recent wording spotted in a Tesla customer vehicle in China also suggests that FSD could be coming to the country sooner rather than later.
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
