Tesla FSD 12.4 is moving closer to public release

Tesla is moving closer to releasing Full Self Driving (FSD) version 12.4 for public FSD users as the company intensified internal build verification with employees.

“Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) v12.4 is now rolling out Tesla employees in North America,” wrote Tesla enthusiast Sawyer Merritt on social media site X.

For the next few days or a week, Tesla employees will verify the v12.4 software to ensure it is ready for public release. Since it’s a version upgrade over 12.3 the company will perform the rollout gradually to FSD-eligible cars.

Nag Removed

The 12.4 version is considered a major self-driving system improvement by removing “wheel nag”. Nag reminds users to pay attention to traffic and be ready to take control when required. This is due to the fact that FSD is (currently) not an autonomous system and it may require a driver to handle the driving wheel in some scenarios.

The nag enables on-screen messages and chime sound whenever it detects inattentive behavior. Prior to FSD 12.4, Tesla detected this behavior with torque. It is a twisting force you apply while turning the driving wheel. The car enables an alert when it detects no such activity on the wheel for a short amount of time.

Nag relies on built-in sensors, which cannot see what’s going on inside the cabin. That’s where the system could pose unnecessary alerts.

New Driver Attention System

The electric vehicle (EV) company came up with a new solution called “Vision-based Attention Monitoring”. Vision is a camera-powered system designed by Tesla. This new system primarily relies on the cabin camera to decide driver attentiveness. Despite this new inclusion, the company will keep on using torque-based detection as a secondary attention detection system.

However, this new attention detection system requires the driver to meet certain conditions including sufficient camera illumination, and should not wear sunglasses.