Tesla FSD v12

Tesla's 2024 driver-assist release that replaced its city-street driving stack with a single end-to-end neural network.

FSD (Full Self-Driving) is Tesla's driver-assistance software; its official name includes “Supervised,” meaning a driver must still monitor it. V12 changed the underlying architecture. Elon Musk livestreamed a test drive in August 2023, it rolled out to users in early 2024, and v12.3 expanded the rollout with a free one-month trial for US owners in March. According to Tesla, the city-driving stack was replaced with a single end-to-end neural network trained on millions of video clips, replacing more than 300,000 lines of hand-written C++ rules: camera footage goes in, driving controls come out, with no hand-designed rules in between. In November 2024, v12.5.6.3 extended end-to-end driving to highways too, but only for cars with HW4 hardware. V12 turned “end-to-end” into an industry buzzword, and both the self-driving and embodied-AI communities often cite it as evidence that a data-driven approach can work; Tesla has not published model details.

ExampleDuring Musk's roughly 45-minute livestreamed test drive of V12 in August 2023, he took over the wheel only once, when the car misread a signal at a busy intersection and was about to run a red light. He said there was no code specifically written to handle traffic lights — this kind of behavior was learned entirely from fleet video.

Also called

FSD Beta v12, Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v12, End-to-End Neural Network Driving

Related

End-to-End · Autonomous Driving · Imitation Learning · Tesla · Data Flywheel · UniAD

Sources

Tesla Software Release 2024.3 release notes (FSD Supervised v12)
Tesla pushes end-to-end neural networks for highway driving, but only for newer vehicles (Electrek, 2024-11)
Elon Musk demonstrates Tesla FSD 12 in a live stream (Tesla Oracle, 2023-08)

As of

2024-11