Tesla's AI Day, a yearly event for the tech-obsessed eager to see new ways the company is pushing the envelope, is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 30 in Palo Alto. It's expected to be live-streamed on the Tesla website and YouTube channel around 5 p.m. PT and promises lots of Big Musk Energy. AI Day is basically Tesla's version of an Apple event, but rather than product launches, the event will have a forward-looking focus. It's less about new Teslas, and more about emerging technologies the company is exploring. As Musk noted on Twitter, "this event is meant for recruiting AI & robotics engineers, so will be highly technical."

Tesla's Full Self Driving Beta was able to easily navigate a crooked'drunk' lane over the weekend in a demonstration of the company's ongoing quest to have its autonomous driving software widely adapted. A street in Hollister, California was mistakenly painted incorrectly by a contractor after the city had redesigned the road to add bike lanes and traffic circles - the lines were meant to be curved and ended up in a strange, zigzag pattern - according to a report from KKTV. The automaker on Monday unveiled massive new casting machines that will simplify the manufacturing process at its factories so that it can ramp up production and stay ahead of its competitors in the expanding electric vehicle space. After the'drunk' lanes were shared online, it was only a matter of time before a Tesla owner with FSD Beta uploaded a video onto Reddit showing the driver-assisted system deftly navigating the crookedly lined street. The software system, which is just about to roll out version 10.13, kept a consistent speed and stayed within its own lane, even when the lanes weren't typical.

Tesla's Full Self Driving Beta has traveled 35 million miles - collecting a gigantic amount of data that will further improve its capabilities - with most of those miles having been driven in the past seven months. 'We have now deployed our FSD Beta with City Streets driving capability to over 100,000 owners - they're very happy with the capability of the system and we'll continue to improve it every week,' CEO Elon Musk said during Tesla's earnings call this week. 'We've now driven over 35 million miles with FSD Beta.' Tesla plans to continue expanding FSD Beta to more owners in the coming months. 'That's more autonomous miles than any company we're aware of, I think probably more than -- it might be more than any -- all other companies combined. So -- and that mileage is growing exponentially.' Alphabet's Waymo, in contrast, revealed in August 2021 that its autonomous vehicles had driven 20 million miles since 2009 - a 12 year time frame.

Autonomous driving regulators in the US have finally made it official: fully self-driving transportation in the country will no longer have to equip human driving controls in order to meet traditional road safety standards. The momentous rule change means that for the first time, automated vehicle makers will no longer have to include manual driving controls such as brake pedals and steering wheels for vehicles designated fully self-driving, representing a mammoth shift in safety expectations and regulatory oversight of the autonomous driving market. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the previous standard that all road vehicles had been held to, had actually been created in an era where fully autonomous driving had not even been conceived of -- essentially, the rules presumed that a vehicle "will always have a driver's seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position." These regulations have obviously become passe in an era where fully autonomous driving is now a distinct possibility, but even though the rules have been revised, lingering questions concerning road safety still remain. Last month, General Motors' self-driving subsidiary Cruise petitioned the NHTSA to approve and fully deploy its fully-autonomous Origin into full commercial operations -- a problem at the time since Origin did not come with human-centered features, like a steering wheel or a sun visor.

Tesla has officially started rolling out its Full Self-Driving Beta in Canada – marking the first official international expansion of the driver-assist system that Tesla taunts as an early version of a true self-driving system. Since October 2020, Tesla has been slowly rolling out what it is calling "Full Self-Driving Beta" (FSD Beta), which is an early version of its self-driving software that is currently being tested by a fleet of Tesla owners selected by the company and through its "safety test score." The software enables the vehicle to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car's navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times. Since the responsibility lies with the driver and not Tesla's system, it is still considered a level two driver-assist system despite its name. It has been sort of a "two steps forward, one step back" type of program, as some updates have seen regressions in terms of the driving capabilities.

Tesla will soon begin a new round of recruitment in Europe and new employees will contribute to the testing of Autopilot, according to the description of open vacancies. As FSD Beta has become more advanced, it can be deployed to countries other than the US if it meets regulatory requirements. In early June 2021, Tesla announced the expansion of its ADAS test team around the world. According to the job listing, candidates from Canada, Spain, France, and Italy were able to apply and become Tesla employees to accelerate vehicle-level testing of all current and future Autopilot features on the path to full self-driving (FSD). The company later posted two more similar vacancies in China and Japan.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk often touts the arrival of completely autonomous vehicles as imminent, but exactly how close that future is for the electric automaker remains murky. Meanwhile, the company is launching new features in a US regulatory environment that has often taken a laissez-faire approach to emerging technologies, while using terms like Full Self Driving (FSD) that critics view as misleading. Videos posted online by Tesla owners show an erratic performance in "FSD Beta," the latest update on Tesla's driver-assistance system. Cars can be seen turning awkwardly, knocking down safety cones and lurching unexpectedly. Earlier this month, Tesla initiated a recall of some 54,000 vehicles equipped with FSD Beta to disable a feature that had allowed the cars to go through a stop sign without fully halting in certain situations. The episode highlights a downside to Musk's envelope-pushing approach, which has also been credited with making electric vehicles a mainstream option in the United States and other markets.

With Tesla's latest FSD ("Full Self-Driving") release, it's asking drivers to consent to allowing it to collect video taken by a car's exterior and interior cameras in case of an accident or "serious safety risk." That will mark the first time Tesla will attach footage to a specific vehicle and driver, according to an Electrek report. Tesla has gathered video footage as part of FSD before, but it was only used to train and improve its AI self-driving systems. According to the new agreement, however, Tesla will now be able to associate video to specific vehicles. "By enabling FSD Beta, I consent to Tesla's collection of VIN-associated image data from the vehicle's external cameras and Cabin Camera in the occurrence of a serious safety risk or a safety event like a collision," the agreement reads.

Tesla has slowly added more visualizations to the car display, showing what the car can detect and respond to in its environment. Tesla initially showed just road markings and some vehicles, but then slowly added more vehicle types, pedestrians and traffic cones. However, with the release of FSD Beta version 9, Tesla has drastically increased the amount of objects the car can visualize and interact with. The visualizations in the car aren't tied one-to-one with what the car is capable of detecting and using to make decisions. However, Tesla keeps visualizations and object detection closely coupled so that drivers have a good understanding of what the car can see.

Tesla might release Version 9 of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software in two weeks. FSD beta's V9 version will help Tesla's vehicles maneuver city streets better. It seems like the next FSD beta update will roll out Tesla's pure vision take on autonomous cars, which Elon Musk has been teasing for some time. "There's no question in my mind that with a pure vision solution, we can make a car that is dramatically safer than the average person. So -- but it is a hard problem because we are actually solving something quite fundamental about artificial intelligence, where we basically have to solve real-world vision AI," explained Elon Musk at the last TSLA earnings call.