Tesla's Full Self Driving Beta (Videos): When will FSD become a reality?

In the last few days, events have been tumbling over each other. After the exciting videos of driverless rides in Waymo Ones in Phoenix, the announcement that GM Cruise has received a driverless driving license for San Francisco, the numerous videos of Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta hit the scene like a bomb.

A beta-version (pre-release) was uploaded to the Tesla's of a handful of selected beta testers - Tesla customers(!) - via OTA (over-the-air) and they are allowed to record and share videos with explicit permission from Tesla.

And what have we seen so far? We see short and long rides at night and day, in sun and rain, with a lot and a little traffic through various cities and regions in California and North Carolina. We see how the
Full Self-Driving navigates through streets, reacts to obstacles, navigates traffic circles and construction zones, masters unprotected left turns, stops at traffic lights, and with surprising sovereignty. To make it clear: the FSD is not an autopilot. The latter is a level 2 driver assistance system, while the FSD is already a level 4 autonomy functionality.

Tesla plans to upload this software to all customer vehicles in the coming months, naturally via OTA. In total, Tesla has delivered 1.2 million vehicles so far, whose computer and sensor hardware is already prepared for the FSD software. And since Tesla then downloads the driving data and feeds it into its machine learning system, a rapid improvement of the software can probably be expected, thanks to all vehicles with the FSD software. 

Here are some videos:

The conclusion: those who still think that self-driving cars will not be around for another 10 to 20 years will be in for a nasty surprise. We are in the middle of the tipping point., and there's all the possibilities that the next five years will bring the FSD to market. 

This article by Mario Herger shares more detailed insights with videos. Check it out!