As Tesla’s Full Self Driving (supervised) software evolves and the world watches the progress of each update through YouTube videos, inevitable we want the software to find its way to the rest of the world.
Tesla has sold the software upgrade into than 14 counties, but as yet, hasn’t made its way out of the US and Canada.
Naturally a US-based country would develop and perfect it at home first, but that hasn’t made it any easier for customers abroad.
Australia is one of a handful of countries that drive on the left side of the road (RHD vehicles), as such, Tesla needs to build a RHD model to accommodate for our driving differences.
I understand that there was a time in the past that a RHD model did exist, but active development was paused while they iterated on LHD.
The progress through version FSD 12 and certainly 12.5.x has been seriously impressive, with the drives now smooth and human-like and that’s only set to get better.
The Tesla AI account posted this afternoon, sharing a new timeline for the rollout of FSD-related features and most significantly for international markets, official confirmation it’s heading overseas.
Actually Smart Summon
This week, Tesla has shipped Actually Smart Summon to customer cars. Cybertruck Autopark is coming in the next week.
Eye-tracking with sunglasses
As good as hands-free FSD is, the feedback from users is that not being able to wear sunglasses has limited the usefulness. Thankfully that will be resolved as they implement eye tracking with sunglasses, something that feels like it shouldn’t work, but seems they have a path for success. You could understand that sunglasses would block the interior camera’s view of your eyes, and I thought Tesla would then rely on head/body positions for determining attentiveness.
End-to-End network on highway
The next item is End-to-End network on highway. This takes the improvements made to the city-streets stack and applies the to the highway was well, so while we’ve had two software stacks merge before, they again got seperated and this will resolve that. I don’t see a lot of complaints about FSD performance on highways, but i think we should expect a performance improvement.
Cybertruck FSD
The owners of Cybertruck have spent a lot of money on their Foundation series trucks, which includes FSD, but as yet, they don’t have it, even basic Autopilot has been lacking. There’ll be a lot of happy customers once this ships later this month.
Unpark, Park and Reverse in FSD
Unpark is a new term that we haven’t seen or heard from Tesla, so this is an interesting one to include an upcoming feature list, without any details. Given that Smart Summon can already call your car when it’s parked, unpark sounds like it’s more than that.
If I had to guess, Tesla Unpark may be similar feature to what we’ve seen from some Chinese-based automakers that allow you to drive through a parking garage, then effectively reverse that to exit the carpark. Of course Tesla would use their vision system to detect and adapt to the changing environment, but this could be a feature that allows those in underground carparks, where cellular service and GPS are unavailable, to retrieve their cars.
The Park reference is also interesting. We have Autopark, but this again is different terminology, and the Autopark we have today is initiated from within the vehicle. I expect, given the pairing with Unpark, Park in this context refers to being able to get out of the car, select a parking bay on the app and have the car go park itself.
This would be one step removed from Banish, which would simply ask the car to go scan for and park in an available parking bay, rather than be told exactly where to park. Banish has a number of complexities, like reading complex parking signs that indicate how long, which days of the week the park is available and at times, if it is reserved or paid.
Reverse in FSD will allow a more resilient autonomy. If the car routes down a street, only to find it’s blocked off by roadworks, the car could reverse and perform a 3-point turn to get out of the dead end. If it ever attempted a turn and couldn’t achieve the turning radius, it could also reverse, as a human would, then drive forward.
International expansion
A rare insight into future timelines, the post goes on to say that in Quarter 1 of 2025, Tesla will seek to roll out FSD to Europe and China, but does caveat this with ‘pending regulatory approval’.
When it comes to regulation, Tesla will bring the data, and lots of it, to prove that their software is safer than humans and therefore should be allowed to operate. The key here, at least with current builds, that we’re talking about AI+humans combining for an overall improvement, however in the future, Tesla’s objective is definitely to ship FSD Unsupervised, effectively a SAE Level 4 autonomous system.
We’ll hope to learn more at Tesla’s 10th October even next month which will be dedicated to the product unveiling of Tesla’s upcoming Robotaxi without wheels and pedals.
RHD expansion
Now for the good part.. FSD is coming to RHD markets.
Musk replied to the Tesla AI post, saying ‘Hopefully, RHD markets in late Q1, early Q2 pending regulatory approval.’
It’s hard to say Q1 in 2025 is soon, given that we’ve been waiting since FSD (beta) went live for early testers in late 2020, but somehow it feels within reach. Between today and the end of March, there’s 208 days… let the countdown begin!
Personally, I purchase the FSD package on May 2nd, 2020 and would love to be part of a group of early testers in Australia to help provide feedback to developers to improve the software for others. Naturally, I’d love to share that progress with the world through X, providing constructive criticism where necessary.