Tesla has finally started the broad rollout of Full Self-Driving Beta v11, a significant update that is Autopilto with the Full Self-Driving Beta software stack.

Tesla FSD Beta v11 is both an exciting and scary step as it is supposed to merge Tesla’s FSD and Autopilot highway stacks.

FSD Beta enables Tesla vehicles to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car’s navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times.

Since the responsibility rests with the driver and not Tesla’s system, it is still considered a level 2 driver-assist system, despite its name. It has been sort of a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program, as some updates have seen regressions in terms of driving capabilities.

Tesla has frequently been releasing new software updates to the FSD Beta program and adding more owners to it.

Since the wider release of the beta last year, there are currently over 400,000 Tesla owners in the program in North America – virtually every Tesla owner who bought the FSD package on their vehicles.

However, the bulk of these owners had yet to receive significant FSD beta updates as Tesla was supposed to release v11 to the fleet in November 2022, but the update has been stuck in testing within Tesla’s closed fleet since then.

The update is an important step because it includes many new neural networks, as Elon Musk stated. But from a consumer perspective, it’s also important because it is expected to merge Tesla’s FSD Beta software stack primarily used on roads and city streets with Tesla’s Autopilot software stack, which is used as a level 2 driver assist system on highways.

It has been delayed several times, but it finally went to a closed beta release last month. Tesla is slowly releasing it to more beta testers, but it had yet to go to a broader release.

CEO Elon Musk kept saying that it is about a week away from a broader release since last month, and last week, he said it was coming this weekend.

This time was the right one. Tesla has now started to propagate FSD Beta 11.3.2 (2022.45.11) to more vehicles this weekend.

Tesla owners with FSD Beta across North America are reporting having received the update over the weekend. However, you don’t have to panic if you haven’t received it yet. It seems that while Tesla has started a wider rollout, the update is still being gradually deployed.

As usual, be careful testing the new software. You should always keep your hands on the steering wheel and be ready to take control at all times.

A Tesla owner is taking his hobby and love for electric vehicles to new levels by creating what could only be described as one of the coolest EV-related DIY projects to date. The idea for the project is simple: what happens when you cross a supercar with the Cybertruck? You end up with a two-seater CyberRoadster. 

Tesla owner David Andreyev, who goes by the username @Cyber_Hooligan_ on Twitter, has spent the last few months creating a Cybertruck-inspired version of the next-generation Roadster made from a salvaged Model 3 Performance. Starting with a Model 3 Performance is an inspired choice, considering that it is Tesla’s first vehicle that has a dedicated Track Mode. 

A look at Andreyev’s YouTube channel, which can be accessed here, shows the meticulous build that the Tesla owner has implemented on the project car. What’s particularly cool about the CyberRoadster is the fact that it’s being built with parts that are also from other Tesla vehicles, like its front bumper that came from a new Model S. Recent videos suggest that the project car’s rear bumper will be from a new Model S as well. 

The journey is long for Andreyev, so the completion of the CyberRoadster will likely take some more time. Despite this, seeing the Tesla owner’s DIY journey on such an epic build is more than satisfying. And considering that the CyberRoadster is evidently a labor of love from the Tesla owner, the final results would likely be extremely worth it. 

There’s a lot of crazy Tesla modifications that have been done as of late. But some, as it is with a lot of things on the internet these days, have become more silly gimmicks than serious automotive projects. Fortunately, car enthusiasts like Andreyev, who just happen to also love electric vehicles, are taking it upon themselves to create one-of-a-kind EVs that would surely capture the attention of anyone on the road. 

Check out the latest video in the CyberRoadster’s creation below. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.

Tesla fan creating ‘CyberRoadster’ using Model 3 Performance parts in epic DIY build

Tesla appears to have started slowly rolling out v11 of the Full Self-Driving Beta program this morning, just a few days after CEO Elon Musk stated the company would begin releasing it to more vehicles.

Tesla’s FSD Beta v11.3.1 started to roll out to employees late last year and a select few of the automaker’s long-standing testers a few weeks ago.

The controlled rollout allows Tesla to monitor its behaviors and tendencies in a highly safe way, as it can determine issues or bugs in a small sample size and fix them before a wider release begins.

On March 14, Musk stated that v11 would “start going live this weekend,” and we’ve heard it before. However, it appears the automaker is happy with the early reviews and is starting to release it to more vehicles.

V11 starts going wide this weekend

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 15, 2023

v11.3.2 is the newest version of the Beta and is being rolled out with Tesla Software Update 2022.45.11. According to statistics from TeslaScope, more vehicles are being updated with the new FSD Beta v11, and more drivers on the r/TeslaMotors subreddit are beginning to report that they have received the update.

Drivers who have experienced the early editions of this rollout have reported that there have been several improvements to highway driving, and inner-city street navigation has also been refined and feels more accurate than ever before, which is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

The full release notes for the FSD Beta are available below via TeslaScope:

• Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was setup to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision making.
• Improved recall for close-by cut-in cases by 15%, particularly for large trucks and high-yaw rate scenarios, through an additional 30k auto-labeled clips mined from the fleet. Additionally, expanded and tuned dedicated speed control for cut-in objects.
• Improved the position of ego in wide lanes, by biasing in the direction of the upcoming turn to allow other cars to maneuver around ego.
• Improved handling during scenarios with high curvature or large trucks by offsetting in lane to maintain safe distances to other vehicles on the road and increase comfort.
• Improved behavior for path blockage lane changes in dense traffic. Ego will now maintain more headway in blocked lanes to hedge for possible gaps in dense traffic.
• Improved lane changes in dense traffic scenarios by allowing higher acceleration during the alignment phase. This results in more natural gap selection to overtake adjacent lane vehicles very close to ego.
• Made turns smoother by improving the detection consistency between lanes, lines and road edge predictions. This was accomplished by integrating the latest version of the lane-guidance module into the road edge and lines network.
• Improved accuracy for detecting other vehicles’ moving semantics. Improved precision by 23% for cases where other vehicles transition to driving and reduced error by 12% for cases where Autopilot incorrectly detects its lead vehicle as parked. These were achieved by increasing video context in the network, adding more data of these scenarios, and increasing the loss penalty for control- relevant vehicles.
• Extended maximum trajectory optimization horizon, resulting in smoother control for high curvature roads and far away vehicles when driving at highway speeds.
• Improved driving behavior next to row of parked cars in narrow lanes, preferring to offset and staying within lane instead of unnecessarily lane changing away or slowing down.
• Improved back-to-back lane change maneuvers through better fusion between vision-based localization and coarse map lane counts.
• Added text blurbs in the user interface to communicate upcoming maneuvers that FSD Beta plans to make. Also improved the visualization of upcoming slowdowns along the vehicle’s path. Chevrons render at varying opacity and speed to indicate the slowdown intensity, and a solid line appears at locations where the car will come to a stop.
• Improved the recall and precision of object detection, notably reducing the position error of semi-trucks by 10%, increasing the recall and precision of crossing vehicles over 100m away by 3% and 7%, respectively, and increasing the recall of motorbikes by 5%. This was accomplished by implementing additional quality checks in our two million video clip autolabeled dataset.
• Reduced false offsetting around objects in wide lanes and near intersections by improving object kinematics modeling in low speed scenarios.

I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.

Tesla slowly rolls out FSD Beta v11 for wide release

Posted on
March 19, 2023
by
Charles Morris

The main barrier to widespread EV adoption, from a car buyer’s standpoint, is a very simple one: they cost more to buy than legacy vehicles. On a total cost of ownership basis, owning an EV is actually cheaper than owning a gas-burner, as numerous studies have demonstrated (Would you believe it can be cheaper to own a Tesla Model 3 than a Toyota Camry?), but many buyers don’t look beyond the price on the sticker at the dealership, and purchase prices for EVs still tend to be substantially higher than those of “comparable” fossil rides. However, as Christopher Mims writes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the gap is narrowing.

Above: A Tesla Model 3 (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).

Due to a variety of factors, the costs of producing EVs could drop drastically over the next few years, and given the competitive nature of the auto industry, automakers are likely to pass on much of the savings to buyers by lowering prices.

The main reason for the steadily shrinking cost of an EV can be found in its batteries. The battery pack is the single most expensive component in an EV, and this is the reason they’ve always cost more than legacy vehicles. But battery costs have been on a steady downward trajectory ever since the advent of modern EVs, thanks to improvements in the technology, along with economies of scale resulting from higher production volumes.

“Battery costs are the biggest contributor to the overall change in the cost of EVs, and their premium compared to [internal combustion engine] vehicles,” Paul Augustine, Director of Sustainability at Lyft, told the WSJ. “We’ve seen that cost drop 90% from 2010 to 2020.”

This trend went into reverse in 2022, as the aftermath of the COVID pandemic caused raw-material prices to soar. According to BloombergNEF, the price of an EV battery pack rose 6.9% compared to 2021— the first increase since Bloomberg began following the market in 2010.

Some feared that the party was over, and that battery prices would level off or even continue to increase. This didn’t happen, for several reasons. First, the Invisible Hand of the free market went to work, and higher prices gave producers an incentive to ramp up production. Second, automakers began using different battery chemistries that don’t require as much of the most expensive raw materials.

To date, most EVs have used batteries based on chemistries that use nickel and cobalt, which are not only expensive, but also come from regions with poor environmental and human-rights records. However, for some time, Chinese automakers have been using a different battery chemistry—lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), which uses no nickel or cobalt. Tesla began offering LFP-based battery packs in 2021, and now VW, Ford and other automakers are expanding their use of LFP chemistries.

Ryan Castilloux, Managing Director at Adamas Intelligence, told the WSJ that iron-based batteries now account for almost a third of all EV batteries produced worldwide, and he expects that share to grow. Nickel-based chemistries, which offer better energy density, will continue to be preferred for some vehicle segments, but LFP, which is cheaper and more durable, is likely to become the technology of choice for lower-priced mass-market EVs.

Batteries aren’t the only components that are expected to see price drops. Every day brings news of breakthroughs having to do with motors, inverters, electronics, and even such mundane parts as brakes and tires—and increasing range and lowering costs are top priorities.

Technological advances will deliver cost savings, but economies of scale will play an even more important role—and the scale of everything to do with EVs is expected to blast off over the next few years. Automakers and battery producers have massive investment in EV production lines, battery plants and new sources of raw materials in the pipeline—consulting firm AlixPartners told the WSJ that automakers will invest a collective half a trillion dollars in EV development and production through 2026.

All of the above should be enough to deliver substantial price reductions for EVs over the next few years. And there’s much more going on. The revamped tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act will deliver substantial savings to some EV buyers, but there’s a much less well-known section of the IRA that could have many times the impact of the tax credits.

Section 45X authorizes 10 years’ worth of funding for battery production credits that could reimburse a manufacturer for a big chunk of the cost of building a battery. One EV battery production expert told Car and Driver that Section 45X could cut one-third to one-half off the total cost of a US-made battery pack. And here’s the kicker: Because the subsidy is based on a fixed dollar amount, if the actual cost of producing a battery pack continues to drop, the cost to the manufacturer after the subsidy could theoretically fall to zero.

Of course, there are a lot of unknowns when dealing with a new technology, so prices can’t be predicted with any precision. It does seem certain, however, that EVs will continue to get cheaper, and as the WSJ’s Christopher Mims puts it, car buyers could soon be in a very strange position: If they insist on sticking with last-generation technology, they’ll have to pay a premium.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

Posted in

Battery-Electric Vehicles,

Electric Vehicles,

EV Batteries,

Tesla

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McLaren Applied has revealed how it aims to conquer the EV industry in the coming years.

McLaren has consistently been on the bleeding edge of technology for its entire history as a company. From its time in Formula 1 to its work within automotive engineering, it has been a leader in automotive technology. Now, the company’s ex-technology wing has shared its plan to conquer the EV industry in an interview with Forbes.

McLaren Applied was the section of McLaren’s business that took the innovations from the track and its consumer hypercars and attempted to leverage them in other businesses. This resulted in the brand being involved in the engineering of everything from bicycles to medical equipment. But following the acquisition of the business by Greybull Capital, its mission has become more precise; data communications and engineering within mainstream vehicles.

As revealed in the report from Forbes, McLaren Applied’s automotive engineering work now focuses on supplying parts to other automakers, notably inverters for electric vehicles. And here is where the now independent business hopes to conquer the current EV leader, Tesla.

As described by McLaren Applied’s Stephen Lambert, Head of Electrification, the company views electrification as occurring in multiple waves. The first wave was Elon Musk’s introduction of the Tesla Roadster, and we now find ourselves within the second wave of electrification, mass proliferation. Automakers worldwide are attempting to bring as many offerings to the new market as possible as an ever-increasing number of consumers choose to electrify their mobility.

But where McLaren is focused is on what they call the third and fourth wave of electrification. The third wave will be one focused on EV efficiency. Which automaker can go the furthest with the smallest battery and thus achieve the best profit margins? And here is where  McLaren introduces its product, its IPG5 EV inverter.

“The inverter really is the heart of that driver experience,” says Lambert in a comment to Forbes. The inverter is directly responsible for taking energy from the battery and directing it to the motors of an EV, allowing for precise (or imprecise) motor control as a driver. Lambert explains that this is why so many seem to prefer the driving experience of the Porsche Taycan over alternative Tesla products.

McLaren’s inverter is quite extraordinary. Not only does the company claim it is the most power-dense inverter on the market, but thanks to its proprietary design, its compatibility with 800-volt architecture, and its use of silicon carbide, it is capable of achieving unparalleled levels of performance and efficiency.

This feeds into what McLaren believes will be the fourth wave of electrification, the driving experience of electric vehicles.

As the market of electric vehicles continues to grow, consumers will look for more ways to choose between the vehicles. Through part choices like the inverter, McLaren believes that the driving experience of different EVs will become dramatically different. And as the British engineering firm continues to aid its luxury automaker partners, it believes it can continue to deliver “Tesla-beating” products.

McLaren Applied has worked with Porsche, Formula E, and Extreme E in introducing and testing its products in recent years, but it hopes to work with other motorsports partners and automakers in the coming years. But if it hopes to dethrone the likes of Tesla, it has quite a hill to climb.

What do you think of the article? Do you have any comments, questions, or concerns? Shoot me an email at william@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @WilliamWritin. If you have news tips, email us at tips@teslarati.com!

McLaren Applied reveals path to besting Tesla in the EV industry