Elon Musk says Tesla FSD v12.4 will drive a year between intervention, but there’s a caveat

Elon Musk is again hyping the delayed Tesla Supervised Full Self-Driving v12.4 update, now saying that it will drive for a year between interventions.

Although, there’s a pretty big caveat.

During the first week of May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the automaker was preparing to release its FSD v12.4 update the next week.

We are now in the first week of June and the update has yet to make it into the customer fleet.

Now, Musk says that Tesla has delivered the update to employees, and it will now come to “a limited number of external customers” this weekend:

FSD 12.4.1 releases today to Tesla employees. If that goes well, then it will be released to a limited number of external customers this weekend. There are a massive number of changes to this build. It should arguably be called v13, but we’re sticking to 12.

That would make it about a month late, but Musk is hyping it up as an update worth waiting for, which isn’t new.

Musk has hyped it up by saying that it will come without steering wheel nag and it will be able to drive “5 to 10x more miles per intervention“.

Now, the CEO says that it will drive “over a year” before getting one intervention:

Two other versions are in earlier stages of testing: 12.5 and 12.6, which could be called v14 and v15. We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention.

Although, there’s a pretty big caveat to that: it will happen “once known bugs are fixed”.

Electrek’s Take

You know what wouldn’t require intervention for over a year if all the known bugs were fixed: Tesla’s auto wipers.

And yet, we have been experiencing terrible auto wipers for years.

This would be exciting if Ii’d have more faith in Tesla fixing those bugs, but otherwise, it makes this comment a bit meaningless.

I’ve been impressed by v12.3, but it also still has a lot of issues. I had some pretty bad interventions with it just yesterday. Since v12, I’ve been saying that if Tesla, which is reportedly not compute power constrained anymore, can deliver consistent, meaningful improvements through software updates, I’ll start believing in the effort.

However, I am now tempering my expectations with already some problems in the rollout of v12.4.