Gary Zhou 
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently confirmed on Twitter that the Full Self-Driving Beta’s single stack version should roll out with FSD Beta 11. This should allow the advanced driver-assist system to perform even more impressively in real-world scenarios, likely exceeding the already notable capabilities of the current FSD Beta 10.2.
Musk’s update came as a response to a Tesla owner on Twitter who noted that the driving visualizations for V10.2 were quite incredible. The Tesla owner asked the CEO if the highly-anticipated single stack FSD Beta was expected to be released on the upcoming V11 update. Musk answered in the affirmative.
Considering Musk’s statement, it appears that the upcoming 10.x updates of FSD Beta would not be featuring a single stack. This does not mean that improvements in the advanced driver assist system would be marginal in the near future, however, as Tesla’s steady optimizations have been quite evident with each FSD Beta release.
FSD Beta 10.2, for example, appears to be superior than FSD Beta 10.1 and 10.0. Videos of Tesla owners navigating roads with the system show that V10.2 operates quite similarly to a human driver now, especially in the way it behaves in intersections and when it navigates through narrow, car-lined streets. FSD Beta 10.2 is still not perfect, of course, but it is a substantial improvement to previous versions of the advanced driver-assist system.
A perfect demonstration of these driving behaviors could be seen in AI DRIVR’s recent trip through Berkeley, California. While FSD Beta fluctuated between being far too aggressive and not aggressive enough in some sections, there is no denying that FSD Beta 10.2’s capabilities are indeed becoming quite incredible.
Tesla’s shift to a single FSD stack has been mentioned by Elon Musk for quite some time now. Earlier this year, Musk admitted that the version of FSD Beta then is actually not that great yet, and part of it was because it still utilizes a separate stack for city streets and highway driving. The CEO noted that transitioning into a single FSD stack requires an immense amount of neural network training, but Musk also highlighted that once the transition was done, FSD should be “sublime.”
While much about the hype surrounding the Full Self Driving Beta is undoubtedly due to Elon Musk’s optimism about the advanced driver assist system’s potential there is no denying that FSD and Autopilot are both improving at a rapid rate. In a statement to TechCrunch, Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics, which primarily deals with trucking, remarked that it’s theoretically possible to develop a single stack solution for autonomous driving, but such an endeavor would be very challenging.
“One of the unique aspects of our tech is that it’s highly customized for a specific goal. We don’t have this constant requirement that we maintain really high truck highway performance while at the same time really high dense urban passenger car performance, all within the same stack and system. Theoretically, it’s certainly possible to create a generic solution for all driving in all conditions under all form factors, but it’s certainly a much harder problem,” Burnette said.
