After the NHTSA recall announcement, Tesla has started pushing an over-the-air software update to remove FSD Beta’s ability to perform "rolling stops" at stop signs.
The update is coming as part of Full Self-Driving Beta's version 10.10, of which release notes were shared online. It's unclear how long it will take for the update to reach all 60,000 Tesla vehicles that are currently running FSD Beta.
The "rolling stop" functionality issue is addressed in the second paragraph of the FSD Beta 10.10 release notes that Whole Mars Catalog posted on Twitter.
Disabled rolling-stop functionality in all FSD Profiles. This behavior used to allow the vehicle to roll through all-way-stop intersections, but only when several conditions were met, including: vehicle speed less than 5.6 mph, no relevant objects/pedestrians/bicyclists detected, sufficient visibility and all entering roads at the intersection have speed limits below 30 mph.
While Tesla says it disables the functionality in all FSD Profiles, the way this is worded suggests that the feature wasn't as dangerous to begin with. It only happened when several conditions were met, including a vehicle speed of less than 5.6 mph (9 km/h), sufficient visibility, all roads entering the intersection having 30 mph (48 km/h) or lower speed limits, and no "relevant objects/pedestrians/bicyclists" detected.
In the NHTSA Safety Recall Report, Tesla noted that it wasn't aware of any incidents resulting from the "rolling stop" function.
"As of January 27, 2022, Tesla is not aware of any warranty claims, field reports, crashes, injuries or fatalities related to this condition."
The company also said that it would begin deploying firmware release 2021.44.30.15 over-the-air in early February 2022, and the release notes for FSD Beta 10.10 confirm that.
Besides disabling the "rolling stop" feature, FSD Beta 10.10 brings several other improvements, including two more for intersections, and you can check them out in the full release notes below.
- Smoother fork maneuvers and turn-lane selection using high fidelity trajectory primitives.
- Disabled rolling-stop functionality in all FSD Profiles. This behavior used to allow the vehicle to roll through all-way-stop intersections, but only when several conditions were met, including: vehicle speed less than 5.6 mph, no relevant objects/pedestrians/bicyclists detected, sufficient visibility and all entering roads at the intersection have speed limits below 30 mph.
- Improved generalized static object network by 4% using improved ground truth trajectories.
- Improved smoothness when stopping for crossing objects at intersections by modeling soft and hard constraints to better represent urgency of the slowdown.
- Enabled lane changing into an oncoming lane to maneuver around static obstacles, when safe to do so.
- Improved smoothness for merge handling by enforcing more consistency with previous cycle’s speed control decisions.
- Improved handling of flashing red light traffic controls by adding more caution for events where crossing vehicles may not stop.
- Improved right of way understanding at intersections with better modeling of intersection extents.
Source: Whole Mars Catalog (Twitter) via Teslarati