Elon Musk says the latest beta self-driving software of Tesla is 'not so great'

August 25, 2021: On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called the latest release of the company’s experimental driver-assistance software, FSD Beta 9.2, “actually not great” on Twitter.

“FSD Beta 9.2 is not great IMO, but Autopilot/A.I. team is rallying to improve faster. We’re trying to have a single stack for both highway & city streets. It requires massive N.N. retraining,” Musk wrote.

The company sells a Full Self-Driving capability package for $10,000 or $199 each month in the U.S. This premium driver assistance system does not make Tesla electric vehicles safe for use without an attentive driver behind the wheel.

The full self-driving (FSD) Beta is available only to some drivers who had purchased FSD and Tesla employees previously. The beta version features newly revised functionality added to the premium driver assistance features of the car.

Usually, the drivers agree to keep their experiences private. However, some public FSD Beta users can post videos to social media showing off and critiquing the latest features that they have tried on U.S. roads.

Regulators may decide to disallow vehicle testing with drivers who are not trained professionals on the public roads. But for now, no regulation interferes with the ability of Tesla to turn their customers and everyone they share the road with into guinea pigs.

On Monday, Musk’s critical tweet came just days after he touted Tesla’s prowess with autonomous systems and components for them at an event known as Tesla AI Day.

At that event, Tesla showed off a custom chip for training artificial-intelligence networks in data centers last week. The chips are meant to train models to automatically identify various obstacles that appear on the road in video feeds recorded by cameras inside Tesla vehicles.

Among other things, FSD is sold with the promise of enabling a Tesla vehicle to automatically change lanes, navigate on the highway, move into a parking spot, or emerge from one and drive across a small distance to the driver’s side at a slow pace without anyone behind the wheel.

Tesla says that FSD will also include the ability to steer on city streets automatically, a long-delayed feature later this year. FSD Beta has included the auto-steer on city streets feature, albeit it is imperfect and incomplete.

Musk’s critical tweet also followed the launch of a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system by federal vehicle safety authorities in the U.S. last week.

Autopilot is the basic version of the driver assistance system of Tesla, and today it comes as a standard part of their cars.