On July 24, Elon Musk revealed that Tesla Robotaxi will be unveiled on October 10 and released to users by year-end or next year.
Two days ago, Tesla's FSD v12.5 began a rollout to employees and to some external users for testing.
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Tesla has historically been reluctant to release new FSD versions to non-employee testers, but this time around, some external users already gained access to v12.5 within 24h of its release to employees at Tesla.
Some test rides using the FSD v12.5 have already been released on Youtube, with Whole Mars Catalog calling it "smooth as hell", and Dirty Tesla suggesting it is the "most natural update yet".
Elon Musk mentioned in X that the FSD v12.5 will "finally combine the city and highway software stacks". Since the release of version 12, FSD has been handled by "end-to-end neural nets", which learn the entire task of autonomous driving from raw sensor inputs (i.e. camera footage, steering, acceleration actions).
Traditionally, FSD used a modular system that was reliant on different components (i.e. object/lane detection, route planning, etc) to handle perception and predefined algorithms to make driving decisions.
With the release of v12.5, He Xiaopeng, Founder and Chairman of XPeng Motors, shared that while an end-to-end approach is best to reach L2 or L3 driving, it may lack what it takes to reach L4, which is full autonomy. Instead, he believes that only an end-to-end paired with a large model could eventually solve L4 autonomy.
He Xiaopeng plans to launch its own version of robotaxi for the Chinese market in 2026.
On June 25, He Xiaopeng experienced FSD v12.3.6 in California and expressed that he was very impressed with its progress. He also added that 2025 will likely be a "self-driving Chat GPT" moment as everyone is learning from each other, iterating quickly.
Elon confidently predicts that Tesla can achieve unsupervised autonomous driving within this year or by next year.
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He also added that after the release of the FSD v12.6, Tesla will launch FSD in China, Europe, and other regions.
Musk says that Tesla will soon submit a Tesla-regulated FSD license request to Chinese and European regulators and expects a response before the end of 2024.
FSD at present differentiates from most self-driving solutions in China as Tesla remained adamant about not using an expensive LiDAR unit paired with high-precision maps, for cost and efficiency reasons.
Elon is certainly optimistic about the potential of FSD as he suggested that once it is commercially available, all Tesla vehicles on the road will become a "giant autonomous fleet" and will take Tesla's valuation to about USD 5 trillion. Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, will further increase that valuation multiple times, says Elon.