Tesla Releases FSD Beta 10.6: What's New

Tesla has now released FSD Beta 10.6 to public testers. The beta is still rolling out slowly to all beta testers.

The 10.6 beta went out to employees on Friday evening and started being released to the first public testers on Saturday night. The rollout is continuing to additional testers now.

The beta was released as version 2021.36.8.9. Many were likely hoping it would be released in the 2021.40 branch so that it would contain additional new features such as Waypoints and Tidal, but it looks like we'll need to wait for the next beta for that.

Early impressions of this beta appear to be an improvement over 10.5, but not as drastic of a change we've seen in previous beta. Beta 10.5 saw big improvements for many. It took turns much smoother and more confident than previous betas. The release notes for this beta indicate that there is better object detection for vehicles and static objects which has been a common theme among the last few months of beta releases.

Improving object detection is definitely still needed as the car can't identify as many cars as a human can, but it's getting quite good. In a crowded area such as a parking lot or busy road the car is doing a great job at picking up more vehicles that are only just partially visible. It's leaps and bounds better at recognizing vehicles when compared to the production releases.

This release also introduces a new visibility network and improved stopping position at unprotected left turns, which appears to be an area that Tesla is focusing on in the last few releases.

It also contains improved merging by allowing more time to merge into the new combined lane. I thought this behavior was already fairly good and much better than the bouncing from left lane marker to right lane marker that we sometimes see with Navigate on Autopilot on the highway.

The last improvement appears to be related to vehicles transitioning out of your lane or taking up space outside of your traveling lane.

We're awaiting various visualization improvements such as emergency vehicle detection, turn signals, hazards and more, but those don't appear to be included in this release.

Another big feature we're all looking forward to is FSD on a single-stack where Tesla applies everything it does and knows about in FSD city driving to highway driving. The current highway driving stack on the FSD Beta is the same as production versions. One improvement we're excited to see for highway driving is smoother merging, but we're not expecting to see FSD on a single stack until FSD v11.

Our list includes all known FSD visualizations and we'll continue to update that as new visualizations are released.