Tesla FSD Beta is out!
Checkmate Big Auto. Especially those with a supposed autonomous solution.

On Tuesday, October 20th, 2020, Tesla released a limited access beta version of their long-awaited full self-driving software. This allows for Level 4 Autonomous driving for the lucky Teslas of early access owners that received the OTA (Over The Air) update. The hardware has been in newly-produced Teslas and/or readily available for existing eligible Teslas for a few months now. However, this is the first true taste of what full self-driving capabilities await us in the coming years.

Navigate On Autopilot is nothing new. Awareness of traffic lights in the UI of Tesla’s iPad-sized screens is almost old news at this point as well. However, being able to truly see what the cars see and how it catalogs different objects by color is quite extraordinary. Not only garbage bins, other moving vehicles, traffic lights, bicycles, and pedestrians… but also curbs, medians, and different types of traffic lines and painted symbols. It can even make left & right turns at intersections while looking for traffic and successfully navigate roundabouts! This is true computer vision. Not at its finest as this is still beta software, but Mr. Musk was not kidding at how epic the FSD software truly is even during its alpha stage.

Not sure how long it will be before other reasons get FSD beta access. There’s a lot of corner cases to rule out. It can navigate on the right side of the road with minimal issues, even without lane markings. However, there is the European market to consider. The software has left to drive publically on the left side of the road. Regardless, the millions of specific driving scenarios will be ironed out in the neural net as more Teslas ramp up the driving miles needed to thoroughly test the neural logic.

This is the ultimate autonomous win for Tesla. They’ve brought the future of science-fiction to reality and thrown Big Auto and Big Oil’s reality into the history books. Queue the inevitable mic drop.
['James Crawford']
['Full Self Drive', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Disruption', 'Beta Testing', 'Tesla']