A Release Candidate/Engineering Cybertruck has been spotted in San Jose with some interesting rooftop hardware – LiDAR! This is good news for all the fans who are awaiting FSD and Autopilot, and all their features – to come to the Cybertruck.
FSD V12.5
Additionally, today on X, Elon Musk confirmed that the Cybertruck will be receiving FSD with v12.5, the next major update for FSD. While FSD v12.4.3’s rollout has been stalled recently, we have seen ADAS testing vehicles from Tesla testing on Chuck’s turn – a sure sign that v12.5 is most likely around the corner.
The big fact here is that v12.5 will be getting a stack merge for the highway and city streets stack. This is great news, as the city streets stack is running on v12.X right now, while the highway stack is still running on v11. There is a transition when you switch between stacks while FSD is running, and Autospeed gets disabled.
Elon mentioned that these vehicles on Chuck’s turn are indeed running v12.5, and not v12.4.4 or another v12.4 build. As we’ve seen in the past, once Chuck’s UPL is getting tested, a new FSD version is only a few weeks or months before release to early testers and employees.
We’re looking forward to FSD v12.5 and its various features that are supposed to arrive. We’re also hoping some features that didn’t quite make it into V12.4, including Park Seek and Banish Autopark, will also be in the upcoming update.
LiDAR?
Tesla uses LiDAR to gather ground-truth data, and then feed it into FSD. This allows Tesla to validate FSD’s depth perception and distance measurements, helping to ensure the accuracy of FSD. We talk about why Tesla uses LiDAR in greater detail in this recent article.
Tesla has finally begun to gather ground-truth data to validate the Cybertruck, which means we’re well on our way to seeing both the Cybertruck get FSD, as well as seeing V12.5 roll out soon.
