Tesla starts rolling out new FSD beta update to address phantom braking concerns

Tesla has started rolling out new Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta 10.11 update to its Early Access Program, and is expected to eventually disseminate it to the public by the end of the week. The latest update comes with a lot of improvement and addresses concerns such as phantom breaking, among few other tweaks.

In the latest update, Tesla says that it has improved the precision of Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) detections by 44.9%, reducing spurious false positive pedestrians and bicycles. In simple words, the new update will decrease the incidence of VRU-related slowdowns or phantom braking. In addition, the update works on the predicted velocity error of motorcycles, wheelchairs, scooters, and pedestrians that are very close to the Tesla by some 63.6%.

The update will decreased the phantom braking incidents by about half for most users. Tesla has also updated a slew of other systems, for example, open car doors will be more accurately detected and turns will be smoother than before. Tesla has achieved this by utilizing a new optimization-based approach that decides which road lines are irrelevant based on a number of features.

Currently, this update is only being rolled out to Tesla customers in the Early Access Program who have a safety score of 99 or better. Once the system is well tested with these drivers, thousands more drivers will gain access to the software. That will in turn enrich the dataset that Tesla is gathering on how FSD performs in the real world. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that if this update “performs well," Tesla will “probably" lower the access to drivers who scored ’95’ on the driver safety score.