Tesla FSD 12.5 Shows Massive Improvement, Testers Say

August 19, 20244 months ago Zachary Shahan 0 Comments

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Years ago, I got hyped up by early Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) testers giving the impression that FSD was nearly robotaxi capable. I got FSD, which I had bought years prior, activated about a year later and discovered it was actually horrible and much worse than the previous Autopilot features I had gotten accustomed to using. I saw a similar thing play out with FSD updates several times after that. So, I try to not get optimistic about FSD updates until I experience them for myself.

That said, version 12.3 of Tesla FSD was a huge step forward and it was finally behaving how I expected it would when I first got it. It’s been a months since I got version 12.3 and have been waiting for the next versions, which Elon Musk said would be much better. Some others have gotten up to version 12.5 now, though, and I’ve seeing some people rave about it. A tweet I saw last night is what got me to cover this update before I actually get and experience it myself. Here’s the tweet:

Elon arguably fulfilled all his promises.

1. v12.5.1.3 is ~14x better overall and ~4x safer than v12.3.6

2. This month, FSD 12.5.X already got ~1.4x better overall and ~2x safer pic.twitter.com/ip93swwg1K

— Raines (@raines1220) August 19, 2024

A great, neutral and level-headed Tesla fan responded with a logical question: “What is the source of this data?” The answer: “The community tracker. Unlike others, I got my data from the ‘tester view’ and compared how the experience changes within the same groups of testers (so it doesn’t matter whether they prefer to disengage more or less).”

More details are also provided by another account tracking the data:

This is my reply to the original post regarding hand selected testers. U can get after the same by filtering for testers with over 500-1k miles on the tester view tab https://t.co/SO3uZ0buME

— Elias Martinez (@eliasmrtnz1) August 19, 2024

So, that’s the deal. The data is not the most expansive and robust (Tesla has that), but it’s clearly implying real progress. However, the data is too limited for now to make strong conclusions from it. Here’s one more note from that poster 7 hours ago: “the only problem with this, is that the sample size becomes very small. Only a few testers (~12) had hw4 and were reporting data prior to 12.5. 12.5.x still hasn’t gone wide, so we need to look at this again once we get more testers on this version.”

Regarding Tesla’s data, Musk tweeted in mid-May that there would be an approximately 5–10× improvement in miles per intervention with version 12.4 compared to version 12.3, and version 12.5 would be out in late June.

About a month ago, I also saw a long anecdote from one user who is very happy with the update:

First 10 mile drive on FSD V12.5.

I want to contain myself, because I have used prior versions that have delivered very good experiences and then suddenly seemed to get worse, but here goes…

That was by a long shot the most incredible FSD experience I've ever had, and the…

— Mike P (@mikepat711) July 24, 2024

We’ve got one more post from another early tester, replying to that initial post above with the graph:

My wife who vouched that she would "never ever activate FSD" is now using FSD 12.5.3 for more than 90% of all her drives.

No amount of graphs or data can capture the success of FSD when it successfully passes a "non-tech spouse approval test".

Buy TSLA!! pic.twitter.com/ghcFXcFhhs

— Vekay (@rajuvamsi007) August 19, 2024

Many of us are quite familiar with the “wife test” and can relate to and understand what this means. Of course, it’s one case and one person’s claims. But it’s another sign that 12.5 is indeed much better.

Lastly, the following is a note from a Tesla FSD user and Tesla Insurance subscriber who says that FSD has helped him to get cheaper and cheaper insurance from Tesla:

@Tesla insurance is paying for most or all of the monthly cost of FSD in my case.

I started at $163/mo for a MX plaid driving score of 90. FSD Supervised 12.5.x has elevated my driving score to 100 over just a few months and lowered my premiums by about $70… 🤯 pic.twitter.com/TozLKhDSq1

— Jeff Lutz 🔋 (@thejefflutz) August 19, 2024

That’s appealing — no doubt about it. Looking at that, I sure would love to try Tesla Insurance for my 2019 Tesla Model 3 SR+ with FSD here in Florida.