Elon Musk says Tesla is training a new full self-driving model amid its Autopilot woes
The Tesla CEO's comments come just days after jurors found the company partially liable in a 2019 fatal car crash
Nora Tam/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced early Wednesday that his company is training a self-driving model with new enhancements, just days after being found liable in an autopilot crash and being sued by Tesla shareholders.
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“Tesla is training a new FSD model with ~10X params and a big improvement to video compression loss. Probably ready for public release end of next month if testing goes well,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media site, X.
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FSD, or Full Self-Driving, is Tesla’s semi-auto driving tech that allows the car to drive itself, but needs driver supervision when used. Tesla’s website says the current model can do “route navigation, steering, lane changes, parking and more.”
Tesla’s stock has risen 2% on Wednesday following Musk’s post.
Musk provided no other context. His announcement comes days after Tesla was ordered to pay more than $300 million for a fatal autopilot crash in Florida in 2019. On Friday, federal jurors found the company partially liable for its role in the crash, ruling that Tesla’s driver-assistance system failed to prevent a deadly collision that killed one and severely injured another.
At the heart of the lawsuit was the claim that Tesla deceptively marketed Autopilot as more capable than it actually was, encouraging drivers to put too much trust in what is, legally, still a driver-assist feature, not a self-driving system.
And on Monday, shareholders filed to sue Musk and Tesla for the company's claims about the efficacy of its autonomous-driving robotaxis.
The suit claims that Tesla overstated the effectiveness of its autonomous driving tech, leading to a “significant risk” that the cars were dangerous and would violate traffic laws — which would subject the company to “heightened regulatory scrutiny.” The suit also alleges that Tesla’s financial prospects were overstated and that, as a result of all these allegations, Tesla’s public comments “were materially false and misleading at all relevant times,” according to a release.
At the end of June, Tesla launched its autonomous-driving robotaxis in Austin, Texas. They were recorded making mistakes like driving on the wrong side of the road and stopping in the middle of a crosswalk, which made U.S. safety regulators begin looking into the company for its traffic violations.
— Shannon Carroll contributed to this article.