Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the company’s next major Full Self-Driving (FSD) release, Version 14, will outperform human drivers by a factor of two to three. Musk made the comments in response to longtime Tesla FSD beta tester @jamesdouma, who had suggested V14 could be as much as 10X better than human drivers.
Musk tempered expectations, noting that while V14 will surpass human performance, it will likely only reach 2-3X improvements in safety. He added that V15 has “a shot” at achieving the 10X benchmark.
The remarks come just days after Musk hyped FSD 14 as Tesla’s second biggest update ever, after V12, saying it “feels sentient” and “alive.” He also previously revealed that the update will be powered by a model with 10 times more parameters than the current release, promising “a dramatic gain” in performance, alongside other refinements. Once Tesla confirms safety in real-world driving, Musk has said FSD 14 will “nag you much less,” reducing the frequency of driver attention reminders.
FSD 14 is currently in training and testing, with a potential public rollout scheduled for late September if everything goes according to plan. That would put it nearly a year after Tesla began rolling out V12, which introduced end-to-end neural networks for path planning and control and was widely seen as a major leap forward over previous iterations.
Douma, who has closely tracked Tesla’s FSD progress, previously praised V12 as delivering over a 100x reduction in driver interventions compared to V11. He now believes V14 will cement Tesla’s path to “better than human” driving, with V15 potentially pushing the system even further.
