Presumably there are a ton of beta testers that put a 100,000 or so miles running this actively in a wide array of road driving scenarios before they roll this out to customers as well. Under beta testing scenarios, a single driver should be, even with time for charging, be able to do about 250 miles/day of driving - figure 10,000 miles/month. So, to get 100K of real-world road experience, would only take 10 drivers/month (or 20 drivers 2 weeks, etc.... Mythical Man month doesn't apply here)
Tesla is accumulating ~1 million miles of data every 10 hours fleet-wide [1]. With their environment, they could presumably beta test across the entire fleet, as the changes are inert and only data is sent back as to what the vehicle would've done (compared to what it actually did).
Understood they do inert testing with their existing fleet. I'm talking about real, rubber hits the road, vehicles actively running the firmware. I have to believe that prior to rolling out firmware on the fleet, Tesla rolls it out to be actively run on some set of beta testing vehicles - perhaps actively run by Tesla Employees driving a variety of real-world road conditions.
Correct, but you need to sign an NDA to run (or rather, for your vehicle's VIN to be whitelisted for pre-release firmware bundle retrievals) a non-GA release.
Actually, I think they record all of the data all of the time anyway, so they can turn the sensor on and turn off the decisionmaking, and gather info using real-world data to see what the new version would have done.
It's like beta-testing without actually beta-testing.
