Tesla CEO Elon Musk Test Drives FSD v12 in Livestream

To say that Tesla owners with the Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta are excited about the software’s continual improvement would be an understatement, especially if it leaves beta soon as CEO Elon Musk has suggested. After Musk said earlier this year that FSD’s version 12 would exit beta, the CEO recently shared a live stream while using the forthcoming build to show off the system’s capabilities.

Above: The touchscreen and steering wheel in a Tesla Model 3 (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).

In recent weeks, Musk shared a 45-minute live stream of him using FSD v12 in a Model S on X (formerly Twitter), as joined by Tesla Autopilot software head Ashok Elluswamy (via InsideEVs). While the video quality certainly left something to be desired for many onlookers, the drive through Palo Alto, California took place during rush hour and showed that the software is a pretty huge improvement from the company’s current FSD beta v11.4.6

As Musk has said in the past, Tesla’s FSD v12 essentially functions like a person’s mind, utilizing a set of neural nets and its cameras the help it see and analyze traffic. While it’s far from perfect still, the system is constantly training using driver data from those who are testing FSD, learning from the millions of Tesla vehicles already on the road.

“You definitely need a lot of training data to make it work,” Musk said during the video. “You need millions of dollars or training hardware. And you need to run the neural net training hardware. It’s not easy. The mind-blowing thing is that there’s no line of code.”

Tesla’s vehicles include eight cameras, offering 36 fps frame rates. Although the actual hardware in the car can work at up to 50 fps, Musk has said in the past that the cameras are a limiting factor. FSD v12 is considered quite different from v11, with Musk having said that the new version won’t be a beta. As can be seen in the video, v12 appears to handle people on bicycles and pedestrians on foot better, along with staying in its lane and making more precise active decisions than v11 — among other differences, still.

“There is no line of code that says there is a roundabout, which is what we have in the explicit control stack in version 11,” Elluswamy explains in the video. “There are over 300,000 lines of C++ in version 11, and there’s basically none of that in version 12.”

You can also see some of FSD v12’s imperfections in the video, including a moment where the software nearly sends the Model S through a red light, and another when the vehicle doesn’t fully stop at a painted stop sign. The video shows that the software still requires some more training before being released to the public, though it still has some pretty impressive moments. Musk also said earlier this year that it’s possible that FSD v12 will be released later this year.

You can see the full video of Musk and Elluswamy using Tesla's FSD v12 on X here.

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