Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter with a classically off-the-cuff announcement: The next version of the company’s error-ridden, untrustworthy, and downright dangerous “Full Self-Driving” software beta wouldn’t be a beta at all — it would be a full, stable release. This came as a shock to anyone watching FSD’s development, who can clearly tell that the software isn’t ready for prime time, but it appears to have been a surprise on Tesla’s end too: The company is now hiring a slew of test drivers for a three-month summer stint training the FSD software.
New Glassdoor job postings from Tesla, as spotted by Electrek, show that the company is looking for “Vehicle Operators” for three-month temporary gigs. The job is focused on data collection, helping to teach Tesla’s software how to drive a car — y’know, the kind of core functionality that you’re only supposed to refine immediately before software comes out of beta.
Now, to be fair, “operating a vehicle” is supposed to be FSD’s whole deal. It’s not absurd for Tesla to hire more testers and collect more data, in advance of a full release. What is absurd, however, is only building up that data collection capacity after the announcement of a stable release — not beforehand, which would give engineers more time to parse through the information and apply changes to the software.
Even better, Tesla could have done this from the beginning — use internal test drivers, rather than relying on its customers (and all other drivers on the road near them) as guinea pigs with its “beta” scheme. Sure that’s a slower process, one that trades the quantity of data ingested for experimental control and safety of those involved, but it’s also a responsible approach. Not very disruptiano, I know, but it’s an approach to software development that Tesla no longer seems to be against. Why not do it from the start?