Techweb reported on May 18 that Tesla's "fully automatic driving" (FSD beta) gives car owners the opportunity to test the latest progress made by the company in driver assistance driving system technology. At present, 100000 drivers have participated in the test, but Tesla is considering expanding the test number to 1 million, and this goal is expected to be achieved by the end of 2022.
Musk attended the all in sumit Technology Conference in Miami on Tuesday, local time. He participated in discussions on various topics, including plans to expand the scale of FSD testing. Musk said: "there are about 100000 car owners participating in the FSD beta test, so the scale is not small. But by the end of this year, we will expand the number of people participating in the test to about 1 million."
The FSD beta program benefits many car owners because they can experience the latest version of FSD first. At the same time, the program also benefits Tesla by accumulating driving data. Tesla cars are equipped with external cameras that can capture images required for "sentinel mode" or to activate safety functions such as autopilot.
Since Tesla canceled radar last year, the company has only used cameras to obtain data about the vehicle and its surroundings. These cameras transmit images to Tesla's autopilot team, which is then compiled by the computer to improve FSD performance by learning the behavior of other drivers. This is called neural network. Although it is not unique to Tesla, it is an important factor in the continuous improvement of FSD suite.
The expansion of the FSD beta test program will not only benefit more drivers, because more people will get air software updates in advance. At the same time, Tesla's FSD suite will also become more accurate and complex in this process. More vehicles mean more data. Expanding the test scale will increase the data accumulation tenfold and deepen the understanding of the data.
Musk still believes that the FSD suite will be improved by the end of this year. He said on the fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call in January that he would be "very surprised" if Tesla could not solve the FSD problem by the end of 2022.