Tesla (TSLA) began the wide rollout of FSD v12.6.3 for HW3/AI3 vehicles a few days ago. This new update brought some hope for AI3-based legacy Tesla car owners to try new features.
During the Q4 and full year 2024 Tesla Earnings Call last month, the company’s CEO Elon Musk admitted that AI3 Teslas will need a retrofit computer to run Unsupervised FSD that’s shaping up with each new update to AI4 vehicles. However, there is no solid roadmap to this free retrofit upgrade for Tesla owners who purchased the FSD package with their cars.
In the meantime, Tesla hasn’t totally stopped pushing updates to its AI3 cars which form the majority of the fleet. The 12.6 branch of FSD is a scaled-down version of FSD v13 that offers limited features available on AI4 Tesla vehicles.
Interestingly, the firmware version number 2024.45.32.10 is the same for FSD v13.2.6 for AI4 Teslas + the Cybertruck and AI3 Tesla cars running on FSD v12.6.3. This indicates that the Tesla AI team is merging
According to some Tesla owners, recalibrating cameras (from a Tesla Service Center) after installing the FSD v12.6.3 OTA update improves Autopilot performance consierably. If you’ve such an experience, let us know in the comments below.
Related: FSD v12.6 Release Notes
FSD v12.6.3 Reviews
During the past week, AI3-based Tesla vehicle owners had a chance to test FSD v12.6.3 (2024.45.32.10). Most of these tests have returned positive results for legacy vehicles running a less powerful HW3/AI3 onboard Full Self-Driving (FSD) processor.
We can take a look at a variety of scenarios in which FSD v12.6.3 was tested and users shared their experience online in videos and comments.
Anticipating Traffic Lights
A Tesla owner’s AI3 car was running on FSD v12.6.3 when he experienced a new Autopilot behavior. As the car was stopped at a traffic light, it anticipated the signal to turn green and hurried in driving ahead.
The following video of this experience was posted on Reddit (NYSE: RDDT) for the Tesla Community to discuss. However, according to some Redditors, this might not be human-like anticipation but the car was in a hurry and moved while it should’ve waited.
It’s neural networks it’s just pattern recognition so it’s definitely anticipating based on common patterns that indicate light changes. Cars slowing down, numbers on the walk sign, average red light time and probably 10,000 other little things that we don’t know. You don’t exactly program a neural network you just give it data and say find patterns that I don’t understand to make this work.
A Tesla owner agreed that it’s anticipation as the vehicle learned this behavior using artificial intelligence (AI).
Another Tesla owner and FSD v12.6.3 user said it can be hurry instead of anticipation as he experienced the car’s behavior earlier during his Autopilot drives in Las Vegas.
I’m not sure what it’s doing. It does seem like it anticipates but it could just be impatience too. I don’t say that lightly. I was in Vegas this past Sunday-Wednesday and there were several red lights on Tuesday night that it started to go at when the light was still red. I had to force disengage each time because it was going to run it. These lights were extremely long and I almost had the feeling that the car was like “ok, done waiting, lets go”. Just like an impatient person would. I’m not sure what to make of it. Everything else about 12.6.3 has been awesome.
FSD v12.6.3 in New York Traffic and Rain
Tesla FSD beta tester Ananto/YouTube shared his FSD v12.6.3 experience through multiple cameras mounted on his AI3 Tesla Model Y.
Although in his previous tests, he got a positive response from the latest version, testing it on a rainy day was a different experience. @Ananto explained the experience in the description of his video:
Today, we tested Tesla FSD 12.6.3 in rainy conditions, and I noticed a few things. The car performs well on narrow roads, but its decision-making seemed to be lacking. This wasn’t present in 12.6.1 or even 12.6.2. While it was great in 12.6.3, today I noticed a few instances where FSD struggled.
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 and provide their valuable feedback and reviews (videos).){kind=link}
I just got updated to 12.6.3 on my 2018 M3. It is virtually unusable. Will slow to 10+ MPH below the speed limit, change into turn lanes before an intersection and generally feels worse than the version I had back in 2020. On a 7 mile drive this morning with very little traffic I had to disengage 5 times for various reasons. So frustrating. The last decent version I had was two updates ago. This one is simply unusable.