Tesla explains what’s happening to Autopilot with FSD Beta v11, adds voice feedback
In the release notes of the latest Tesla FSD Beta v11, Tesla explains what is happening to Autopilot with the new update, and it adds the capacity to send voice feedback.
Tesla FSD Beta v11 is both an exciting and scary step as it is supposed to merge Tesla’s FSD and Autopilot highway stacks.
FSD Beta enables Tesla vehicles 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 rests 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 driving capabilities.
Tesla has frequently been releasing new software updates to the FSD Beta program and adding more owners to it.
Since the wider release of the beta last year, there are currently over 400,000 Tesla owners in the program in North America – virtually every Tesla owner who bought the FSD package on their vehicles.
However, the bulk of these owners have yet to receive significant FSD beta updates as Tesla was supposed to release v11 to the fleet in November 2022, but the update has been stuck in testing within Tesla’s closed fleet since then.
The update is an important step because it includes many new neural networks, as Elon Musk stated, but from a consumer perspective, it’s also important because it is expected to merge Tesla’s FSD Beta software stack primarily used on roads and city streets with Tesla’s Autopilot software stack, which is used as a level 2 driver assist system on highways.
It has been delayed several times, but recently, Musk confirmed that a new version (v11.3) is going to a closed beta fleet this week – indicating that it might finally be about to be more widely released.
Now NotaTeslaapp, which tracks Tesla software updates, has obtained the FSD Beta v11.3 release notes, and they contain some interesting information.
Tesla starts out by explaining in more detail what it going to happen to Autopilot with this update:
Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was setup to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision making.
As expected this leaves the door open for some regression at first, but Tesla makes it clear that it believes this is the way to go long-term.
Another interesting new feature revealed by the release notes is the capacity to send Tesla voice memos about your FSD Beta experience. That’s something that Beta testers have been asking for a while as they can use it to give Tesla more details about a specific situation that they experience with the system.
A big part of the rest of the notes appears to focus on curbing some potentially dangerous driving behavior that FSD Beta has been known to do and has recently been described by NHTSA in its FSD Beta recall notice.
As we noted in our reporting of the recall, the notice made it sound like Tesla’s “fix” for the “recall” was simply its usual next software update, but now it looks like they did try to address some of these things more specifically as described in the release notes.
Here are the full Tesla FSD Beta v11.3 release notes:
- Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was set up to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision-making.
- Added voice drive-notes. After an intervention, you can now send Tesla an anonymous voice message describing your experience to help improve Autopilot.
- Expanded Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) to handle vehicles that cross ego’s path. This includes cases where other vehicles run their red light or turn across ego’s path, stealing the right-of-way. Replay of previous collisions of this type suggests that 49% of the events would be mitigated by the new behavior. This improvement is now active in both manual driving and autopilot operation.
- Improved autopilot reaction time to red light runners and stop sign runners by 500ms, by increased reliance on object’s instantaneous kinematics along with trajectory estimates.
- Added a long-range highway lanes network to enable earlier response to blocked lanes and high curvature.Reduced goal pose prediction error for candidate trajectory neural network by 40% and reduced runtime by 3X. This was achieved by improving the dataset using heavier and more robust offline optimization, increasing the size of this improved dataset by 4X, and implementing a better architecture and feature space.
- Improved occupancy network detections by oversampling on 180K challenging videos including rain reflections, road debris, and high curvature.
- Improved recall for close-by cut-in cases by 20% by adding 40k autolabeled fleet clips of this scenario to the dataset. Also improved handling of cut-in cases by improved modeling of their motion into ego’s lane, leveraging the same for smoother lateral and longitudinal control for cut-in objects.
- Added “lane guidance module and perceptual loss to the Road Edges and Lines network, improving the absolute recall of lines by 6% and the absolute recall of road edges by 7%.
- Improved overall geometry and stability of lane predictions by updating the “lane guidance” module representation with information relevant to predicting crossing and oncoming lanes.
- Improved handling through high speed and high curvature scenarios by offsetting towards inner lane lines.
- Improved lane changes, including: earlier detection and handling for simultaneous lane changes, better gap selection when approaching deadlines, better integration between speed-based and nav-based lane change decisions and more differentiation between the FSD driving profiles with respect to speed lane changes.
- Improved longitudinal control response smoothness when following lead vehicles by better modeling the possible effect of lead vehicles’ brake lights on their future speed profiles.
- Improved detection of rare objects by 18% and reduced the depth error to large trucks by 9%, primarily from migrating to more densely supervised autolabeled datasets.
- Improved semantic detections for school busses by 12% and vehicles transitioning from stationary-to-driving by 15%. This was achieved by improving dataset label accuracy and increasing dataset size by 5%.
- Improved decision-making at crosswalks by leveraging neural network-based ego trajectory estimation in place of approximated kinematic models.
- Improved reliability and smoothness of merge control, by deprecating legacy merge region tasks in favor of merge topologies derived from vector lanes.
- Unlocked longer fleet telemetry clips (by up to 26%) by balancing compressed IPC buffers and optimized write scheduling across twin SOCs.
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BYD’s luxury brand, Yangwang, has claimed a new Nürburgring Nordschleife record for a production electric vehicle with its U9 hypercar.
The automaker released video of the Yangwang U9 Xtreme, a limited-edition version of the car, completing a lap of the “Green Hell” in a blistering 6:59.157 last month.
It made the U9 the first production EV to break the 7-minute barrier at the legendary German track.
Today, the run, driven by German racer Moritz Kranz, was officially certified by Nürburgring officials.
BYD announced:
Only weeks after becoming the fastest production car in history with a top speed of 496.22 km/h, the YANGWANG U9X has now conquered the Nürburgring Nordschleife in record time, completing the lap in 6:59.157, making it the fastest EV production vehicle around the track.
The time shaved a significant five seconds off the previous record, a 7:04.957 lap set earlier this year by the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra.
The production EV record at Nürburgring has been frequently broken over the last few years. It even changed hands several times in the same month at times – a testament to how rapidly EV technology is improving.
It is also a somewhat controversial title due to what people consider to be a “production vehicle”.
The Yangwang U9 Xtreme isn’t your average EV. It’s built on a 1200-volt platform and uses four electric motors (one at each wheel) to produce a combined output of nearly 3,000 hp. This is the same car that also claimed the world record for the fastest production car, hitting a top speed of 308 mph (496 km/h) last month.
It’s built in a limited-run production with only about 30 units reportedly planned – hence why some people might question the “production EV” part.
Electrek’s Take
I know there’s going to be some pushback on this, but regardless, a sub-7-minute lap in any car is serious business, and doing it in an EV is doubly impressive — credit where it’s due.
Does a Nürburgring lap time matter for 99.9% of EV buyers? Absolutely not. But it is an excellent showcase of the rapidly improving EV technology.
BYD and Yangwang are clearly utilizing the U9 platform to push their engineering capabilities, relying heavily on their “e⁴ Platform” and “DiSus-X” intelligent body control system to manage the immense power on a demanding track.
It’s impressive to see BYD produce something like the U9 at the very high end of the automotive spectrum, and then something like the $10,000 Seagull at the other end.
That’s quite a range.
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According to the latest “US Wind Energy Monitor” report from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association (ACP), developers installed 593 megawatts (MW) of new wind capacity in Q2 2025 – a 60% drop from the same quarter last year. But the US wind industry is expected to rebound fast, with 51% of forecasted capacity to come online in Q4 and full-year installations projected to hit 7.7 gigawatts (GW).
Onshore developers are in a race
The onshore wind market outlook rose 3.6% quarter-over-quarter (2.4 GW) as developers push to complete projects before federal tax credits expire.
“We are seeing this uptick in the near term because many projects are shovel-ready or under construction, fully permitted, and with a turbine order in place,” said Leila Garcia da Fonseca, director of research at Wood Mackenzie. “However, we will face uncertainty later in this decade due to tariff investigations and permitting challenges.”
Federal policy uncertainty has created a lot of headaches for the wind industry in H1 2025. While the Treasury Department’s guidance on tax credit eligibility provided a 7% boost to near-term installations, new tariff investigations could negatively impact two-thirds of the supply chain for wind turbine components. The Department of Commerce’s national security probe into imported turbine components threatens to raise project costs by as much as one-third, potentially delaying or derailing late-decade projects.
“We’re seeing policy whiplash,” Garcia da Fonseca added. “Treasury guidance helps the advanced development pipeline, but tariff investigations and permitting hurdles are creating uncertainty beyond 2027.”
Western states are expected to lead wind activity through 2029, accounting for 31% of new capacity, followed by the Midwest. Illinois is set to overtake Texas with the most new onshore capacity in 2027, with more than 1.8 GW expected to come online.
Offshore wind’s five-year outlook
The offshore sector continues to face headwinds of federal stop-work orders and regulatory uncertainty. Even so, Wood Mackenzie projects 5.9 GW of offshore capacity will come online by 2029, with most of it arriving in 2026 and 2027.
“Recent federal stop-work orders and regulatory uncertainty have disrupted the offshore wind sector, weakening already fragile offtake opportunities and exposing the high investment risk in US offshore wind development,” Garcia da Fonseca said. “However, our five-year outlook remains unchanged, and 70% of forecasted capacity is already under construction.”
The next big year for US wind
Wood Mackenzie expects average annual installations of 9.1 GW over the next five years across onshore, offshore, and repowering projects. By the end of 2029, total installed wind capacity is projected to hit 196.5 GW, including about 35.5 GW from new onshore builds, 6 GW offshore, and 4.5 GW from repowering.
A major spike is expected in 2027, when shovel-ready projects are slated to connect at a record pace, adding 12.3 GW of new capacity.
“Despite political headwinds, wind projects are demonstrating market resilience,” said Garcia da Fonseca. “Wind continues to secure interconnection service agreements in 2025 despite anti-wind rhetoric. The technology maintains meaningful market presence even as solar and storage lead interconnection activity, with leadership concentrated in SPP and ERCOT.”
Read more: FERC: Solar + wind made up 90% of new US power generating capacity to July 2025
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General Motors today pulled the plug on its BrightDrop electric delivery van program, announcing it will permanently end production at its CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario.
This is a disappointing reversal for a program that was supposed to be a cornerstone of GM’s commercial EV ambitions.
In a statement, the company blamed a “slower than expected” commercial EV market, a “changing regulatory environment,” and the elimination of US tax credits for the decision. Production will not be moved elsewhere; the BrightDrop Zevo line is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
The move comes just two years after GM, with $500 million in Canadian government support, celebrated opening CAMI as Canada’s “first full-scale EV manufacturing plant.”
The company delivered a marginal 146 vans in the US in 2022 and just 497 in all of 2023.
But things were finally picking up this year despite a production pause in April.
Data from 2025 shows the ramp was finally hitting its stride, with sales reportedly jumping to 2,384 units in the third quarter alone—a massive 869% increase year-over-year. The company was on track to sell around 4,000 units this year.
That’s not a massive number, but it was heading in the right direction.
GM, however, sees it differently. As noted by industry observers, GM executives are comparing BrightDrop’s 4,000 sales to the 60,000+ sales of its ancient, gas-guzzling Chevy Express and GMC Savana vans, a platform that dates back to the 1990s.
While GM’s official statement to the CBC was that the decision was “simply a demand and a market-driven response,” the Unifor auto union isn’t buying it. The union, which represents the 1,200 laid-off workers, squarely blamed the “dangerous and destabilizing auto policies” of the Trump administration for undoing EV supports.
Furthermore, vehicle programs that cross the US-Canada border have faced significant challenges in 2025 due to the trade war launched by the Trump administration against Canada.
Electrek’s Take
It’s another EV pullback partly based on government actions.
But we can’t blame everything on Trump. GM is quick to pull back its EV programs due to political considerations, which do drive demand.
The company took half a billion dollars in taxpayer money to retool a factory, only to abandon it less than 36 months after the first van rolled off the line. They are abandoning what will undoubtedly be a growing market in the long term, ceding ground to Ford’s E-Transit and Rivian’s van, and blaming “low demand” at the very moment sales were beginning to spike.
Brightdrop’s lineup was a bit bigger than other commercial electric vans, which might have limited its market, but I still think that long-term, there will be a singnifcant market for electric vans in this segment.
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