A ray of light has finally emerged for the anticipators of Tesla FSD version 12.5 as the company starts the software’s internal and limited external rollout.
A Tesla employee shared a screenshot of his Tesla software screen yesterday showing that FSD v12.5 (2024.20.10) has been installed on his vehicle. However, this account has been silent since and has apparently been locked or deleted from Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
However, after about 10 hours of the employee rollout began, a selected number of external users were identified as getting the FSD 12.5 release. Once again, this strata of Tesla Full Self-Driving users belongs to either the social media influences, consistent FSD (Beta/Supervised) YouTubers, and/or Tesla (TSLA) individual retail investors (also known as Original Group or OG FSD testers).
Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously confirmed that FSD 12.5 will bring Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to Cybertruck. But as of this writing, there are no confirmed reports of a Cybertruck receiving this limited-release update.
The rollout of FSD v12.5 to external non-employee testers was unexpectedly sooner. Previously, Tesla was reluctant to release new FSD (Supervised) versions externally before extensive testing. However, in this iteration, the automaker seems to be much more confident and released FSD 12.5 to some external testers within 24 hours of its release to employee testers.
The Director of Tesla Autopilot (AI) software Ashok Elluswamey expressed this confidence in an X (Twitter) post this past weekend. “If you liked FSD v12.4, you’re gonna love 12.5!” Ashok wrote.
According to the Tesla software tracking website TeslaFi.com, as of this writing, only 2 Teslas out of 20,103 data-contributing vehicles have received the FSD v12.5 (firmware version 2024.20.10) OTA software update.
It could take from a week to a couple of months and multiple point releases in between before FSD v12.5 is available to a wider user base of Tesla owners (wide release). However, Tesla seems to have gotten on a fast track with FSD releases in the last few months, so the expected time might be short as we just saw in this initial rollout of FSD 12.5.
FSD v12.5 (2024.20.10) First Impressions
“By far the smoothest version of FSD ever,” wrote FSD (Supervised) beta tester and YouTuber AI DRIVR who is one of the luckiest few getting FSD 12.5 earlier than almost everyone else. His FSD test drives and commentary are followed by around 118K subscribers on YouTube and a significant following on Musk’s X, he wrote:
– By far the smoothest version of FSD ever. the way it approaches stopped traffic, takes off, slows down for turns, etc etc has never felt better. turns feel drastically improved too, especially around other traffic (like multiple turn lanes). feels like there’s zero indecisiveness on the steering wheel and feels CONFIDENT.
– “Creeping” behavior improved, every unprotected turn it has been through so far it creeps and continues without coming to a secondary stop or even slowing back down. does them in “one motion” if that makes sense. will obviously need more testing on unprotected turns in general to form a real opinion though.
– No more speed control issues where it speeds up and then slows back down (so far, at least). it still does speed a little fast in my neighborhood (33mph in a 25) but stays at a consistent speed now.
– I tried to wear sunglasses and it disabled driver monitoring, meaning it still has steering wheel nags with sunglasses on.
– Highway definitely still feels like the old stack to me and not end-to-end. might not have made it into this release. no release notes and it still displays messages on the screen like “changing lanes into faster lane” and has manual speed control (no auto max speed). also doesn’t feel as smooth as city driving with its acceleration and braking.
– My first ~35-mile drive to the supercharger was completely intervention-free, charging up to do more testing in Concord, CA now because 12.4 struggled a lot here.
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