@boiler81 this idea sounds plausible, but it's impractical. It would go against the morale-building free update policy. But mainly because splitting the software releases into multiple branches to break out salable "useful feature" subsets would create more bugs, and deprive some owners of safety-enhancing improvements, which are essential for everyone's well-being. They have been working to get everyone updated to one common maximally safe point, until they begin rolling out HW3-only code (which undoubtedly exists already in alpha). I'm not even sure that will be a separate branch. No way to know from the outside.
So-called "FSD" is an incremental process, not an SKU. If we look at what already exists, objectively, and get off the "it will never happen" train, what we have as of V10 2019.12.2 is 1) pretty good highway self-driving with target navigation, 2) parking lot "street FSD" with partial intersection handling and short range target navigation, and 3) AP level wider range "street FSD", without target nav and without intersection/signage handling.
These missing feature combinations are probably being tested as alpha code as we sit here. I suspect that they are further along than we imagine, and as we've seen in demos, just not perfected. They might suddenly become generally released as beta within the next few months, so they can provide feedback to the NN and get refined. Or, they might only be released for HW3 equipped cars. We'll see.
But it's like Advanced Summon that was "never coming" until it came. For all the complaining, like about cutting through some empty parking spaces, which may be by design, it actually
functions better than expected. Kind of interesting that we haven't heard of any catastrophic parking lot accidents.
Although I personally see SciFi level robotaxi-capable FSD, with a lot of edge case handling, as being gradually reached and permitted over the next few years, I think that basic street level self-driving with navigation to target and intersection/signage handling, is not that far off. Time will tell.
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