Chuck Cook has drone video of Tesla FSD 12.5 supervised making many perfect unprotected left turns. Tesla FSD is the Full Self Driving product which is a driver assist system the human driver must supervise the driving system. As of Tesla FSD F12.3.6, human drivers will not need to touch the steering wheel.
It is unprotected left turns (no lights) with heavy traffic. Tesla basically had this fairly perfected by 12.3.X but it is an indication that there is no hesitation or other issues on it. It is the only video we have of the testing. The other big things to see will be going in reverse and perfectly dealing with human hand signals, flashing lights and all emergency vehicles. Other robotaxi like Waymo and Cruise had issues with emergency vehicles and construction.
Chuck Cook is famous in the Tesla community for his thorough testing of previous versions of Tesla FSD.
This videos shows several Tesla test cars using FSD 12.5 to make the difficult turns.
Here is my priority list of what Tesla FSD 12.5 should hopefully have improved and added versus older versions.
An protected left turn is a common critical safety capability and is the ninth item on the checklist of features below. The checklist was not updated for four months. There have been several improvements for 12.3.6 being able to handle many capabilities better. There has been improvement in 12.3.6 on avoiding pot holes and with understanding hand signals. The common critical safety capabilities should go from 2 out of 6 green to 6 out of 6. They were at 7 out of 10 and should be 9 or 10 out of 10 or even blue where it works all the time perfectly.
It would be a huge advance for full self driving automation for the system to work perfectly most of the time but good the rest of the time. Obviously, it would be best to have it work perfectly every time but progress is first to get to perfect most of the time and good the rest of the time.
Tesla FSD 12.5 has not been released to the public but it will likely go to other Tesla employees on the weekend and could go to the first wave of the public next week.
I discuss with Herbert Ong how Tesla FSD 12.5 could change everything.
The chinese robotaxi companies and Waymo in the US have Lidar, sensor and hypermap dependent systems. This is why they are only using a few hundred to a thousand vehicles in small geofenced areas. The Chinese robotaxi companies want to rapidly scale to profitable service with tens of thousands to millions of vehicles by 2030. IF Tesla FSD 12.5 and later versions of Tesla full self driving solve driving then scaling to 100,000 vehicles next year and a million vehicles the year after can be done. This would be with human safety drivers and remote drivers until regulators are satisfied with the safety data.
However, the robotaxi partners would need to buy many Tesla vehicles to get market share and awareness in each city and they would need to work out all of the operational, charging and other issues of a full Uber-Didi ridehailing service.
Here are some of my other videos that explain how vastly improved automated driving changes the game with each tripling of miles per intervention
I explain the China automaker, robotaxi and ridehailing market.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.