4 ms·

It's shockingly good and definitely worth 20% of the value of a car, for me. Two main reasons: 1. Your body doesn't feel tired after driving, because besides t

It's shockingly good and definitely worth 20% of the value of a car, for me. Two main reasons: 1. Your body doesn't feel tired after driving, because besides the effort of a hand resting on the bottom of the wheel, your body can be completely relaxed the vast majority of the time. 2. When FSD is on, you can completely stop paying attention to navigation-related decisions. You still have to pay attention to driving and intervene sometimes (most interventions are just a tap on the gas to give the car the confidence to go, because it's biased to caution) but every decision about when and where to turn is completely taken care of for you. This frees up a lot of mental overhead when you're in totally unfamiliar territory, including overhead that, without FSD, would pull your attention away from driving, making you less safe. I didn't get the magic of #2 until I used it on an unfamiliar drive home in New England backroads with lots of turns and realized I was paying attention to the road and my conversation with my partner, and none at all to where we were going. Then we were home. The one non-ideal thing about FSD Beta right now is that it's really easy to lose it for an arbitrarily long period of time. What happens is it's fairly easy to have your hand on the wheel on a straight stretch of highway and still get the nag. And there's a small but non-zero false negative rate when you wiggle the wheel to satisfy the nag but your wiggle is insufficient. And because it becomes so habitual and because the car beeps at you for other reasons too, there's a fairly high rate (at least for me) of wiggling to satisfy the nag and failing to notice that you didn't wiggle enough. The odds are small but after months of long drives it's pretty easy to accumulate the 5 "strikes" that trigger loss of FSD Beta without violating the intent of the nag, i.e. taking your eyes off the wheel or the road.

holmesworcester 4y ago
I'll also say that all of this value will probably be completely unapparent to someone who tries FSD Beta for the first time or infrequently, because like ChatGPT, FSD Beta is not a human-replacing AI that always gives you the right answer. It's a tool you learn to use, by building up a mental model of it over time. The first time you use FSD Beta will be a lot more like the first time you drove a car in actual traffic, or the first time you drove with a student driver. You'll feel safe enough to keep doing it but it will be very unsettling. But over time as your model builds of how it behaves, it becomes a tool you'll want to turn on in a growing number of situations. And you'll miss it. The value will also be much less apparent to someone who does short (<1 hour) drives on familiar roads.
newaccount74 4y ago
I am a bit annoyed that people think "resting the hand on the bottom of the wheel" is enough. Why can't people hold the wheel properly, with two hands, in ten-to-two (or quarter-to-three) position? If something unexpected happens, you can react much faster.

holmesworcester 4y ago

I'll also say that all of this value will probably be completely unapparent to someone who tries FSD Beta for the first time or infrequently, because like ChatGPT, FSD Beta is not a human-replacing AI that always gives you the right answer. It's a tool you learn to use, by building up a mental model of it over time. The first time you use FSD Beta will be a lot more like the first time you drove a car in actual traffic, or the first time you drove with a student driver. You'll feel safe enough to keep doing it but it will be very unsettling. But over time as your model builds of how it behaves, it becomes a tool you'll want to turn on in a growing number of situations. And you'll miss it. The value will also be much less apparent to someone who does short (<1 hour) drives on familiar roads.

newaccount74 4y ago

I am a bit annoyed that people think "resting the hand on the bottom of the wheel" is enough. Why can't people hold the wheel properly, with two hands, in ten-to-two (or quarter-to-three) position? If something unexpected happens, you can react much faster.