Tesla FSD 10.5 - Numerous Improvements

Tesla FSD 10.5 is now live and being released to purchasers of Tesla's full self-driving package. Let's take a look at the patch notes and improvements.

FSD 10.5 Patch Notes:

- Improved VRU (pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcycles) crossing velocity error by 20% from improved quality in our auto-labeling.
- Improved static world predictions (road lines, edges, and lane connectivity) by up to 13% using a new static world auto-labeler and adding 165 auto-labeled videos.
- Improved cone and sign detections by upreving the generalized static object network with 15K more video clips and adjusting oversampling and overweighting strategies (+4.5% precision, +10.4% recall).
- Improved cut-in detection network by 5.5% to help reduce false slowdowns.
- Enabled "emergency collision avoidance maneuvering" in shadow mode.
- Enabled behavior to lane change away form merges when safe to do so.
- Improved merge object detection recall by using multi-modal object prediction at intersections.
- Improved control for merges by increasing smoothness of arrival time constraints and considering possible merging objects beyond visibility.
- Improved lane changes by allowing larger deceleration limit in short-deadline situations.
- Improved lateral control for creeping forward to get more visibility.
- Improved modeling of road boundaries on high curvature roads for finer maneuvers.
- Improved logic to stay on-route and avoid unnecessary detours/rerouting.

There are 12 items here. On a side note, Tesla did not put a dash on their patch notes for the ninth item here (but I did). There are twelve items, and the ninth one doesn't have a - like the others. Does that mean something is going to happen on 12/9? There are rumors of a stock split or the announcement of production at Giga Berlin and Giga Texas. We'll have to wait and see!

When I see the patch notes, I notice a focus on auto labeling and using more videos. Tesla is the king when it comes to data with over 2 million vehicles on the road. I don't see anyone reaching autonomous robotaxis that are widespread before Tesla.

Improvement in FSD 10.5

These are the improvements I see in FSD 10.5:

Very much improved unprotected left hand turns from Chuck Cook. Several months ago, Tesla FSD was struggling with these. There are 5 things Tesla FSD needs to be able to do before robotaxis can launch and unprotected left hand turns is one of them. Check out these two videos as a before and after and notice the huge improvement:

9 months ago: 3/18/2021

Now, 11/17/2021 (FSD 10.4 - not even 10.5 yet!)

You can see that the car is much better at executing these unprotected left hand turns!

There was a drive from Dr. Know-it-all Knows it all, who also had a drive with 0 disengagements. A disengagement is when the driver has to take over and manually drive the car because FSD was going to do something it shouldn't. The car got off to a slow start, but was able to navigate through some traffic and get going.

Dirty Tesla is another YouTube user who is famous for his videos on FSD. He had a really good drive with 10.5 and you can see that here. My favorite part is 6 minutes and 49 seconds when the vehicle has to navigate a REALLY tight section of rode with cones in the middle of it. There's still room for improvement, but the car did well and the software is more refined.

I'll end with this video from Whole Mars Catalog, who has many videos posted of FSD. He had over an hour of driving with zero disengagements.

As we can see, FSD 10.5 is progressing well. I think we are still a year or more out from having our first robotaxis, but it's amazing to see the incremental progress over time. That is the only way this can work is for Tesla to slowly release it to users, gather more and more data, and train its neural net more and more.

Lastly, the lines in the FSD visualization screen have a lot less flickering - they are pretty solid and stable.

What are you impressions of FSD 10.5? Is it an improvement over 10.4? How close are we to robotaxis?

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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.

Image Credit - Screenshot From YouTube Video