7 ms·

I Tried Tesla FSD

84 points by robin_reala 3y ago

porphyra 3y ago
I think that FSD v12 is at a point where it went from a useless liability to a useful product. It's definitely not perfect though.
- brk 3y ago
  Possibly, but this has kind of been the summary of each FSD software update over the years. I recall similar amazed comments when FSD v9 came out 3 years ago, and transitioned from radar to vision for depth perception. Each release likely has gotten measurably better, and more usable, but at this point I seriously doubt that V12 is "the one". Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 11 times and I'm just going to buy a Mercedes EV.
keikobadthebad 3y ago
> The car then asks you to leave a recorded message explaining why you intervened, and the struggle is to use words instead of screaming over and over. Lol
unshavedyak 3y ago
I don't follow Tesla terminology, is this actually FSD or fake FSD? If not actual FSD, is there a name for "actually FSD"?
- michaelt 3y ago
  The article says Tesla's "Full Self Driving" requires you to keep your hands on the wheel. I would say that is obviously not full self driving - but I suppose I'll never succeed in marketing with an attitude like that.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  It's full, until it's not. i.e. it does drive the car "fully", but can and does refuse at times if you get too far off where it knows, into terrain it doesn't understand, weather it's not trained on, roads it doesn't like, drivers around you doing things it's not expecting, etc.
- toddmorey 3y ago
  This is the genius or fallacy of Tesla's marketing, depending on how you look at it. There IS a standard from the SAE for describing autonomous driving that everyone else uses. By that standard, FSD is still at Level 2 out of 5. (But probably approaching level 3 in the next few years.) FSD as Tesla markets it (above the asterisk of course) would be level 5 autonomy where the car can complete a trip to any destination completely independent of any driver intervention. The current tech is not that. The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions.
  - FeloniousHam 3y ago
    > The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions. Wouldn't this be the case with Tesla's FSD? I make trips that are fully driven by FSD (I'm using it again this month, but I had a 3 month trial when I bought the car), would you consider routinely successful operation within non-prescribed boundaries a "certain area"? I guess the disconnect between the critics and fans (I am one) is over the marketing; my understanding of "Tesla Full Self Driving" is not level 5 autonomy, it's "can drive better than my teenager most of the time". I (think I) understand the catastrophic downside risk of computer operated machinery in an uncontrolled environment, but my experience has been very positive. I think I understand the feature for what it is, an amazing and useful if imperfect tool, regardless of what it's called. (caveat: FSD is the only automated driving I've experienced)
- elif 3y ago
  I used it to go from Atlanta to San Diego to Oregon to Ohio and back last fall. On the highways it was like a train on rails, in national parks it was like a slow roller coaster. In cities it was a free Uber driver. I never had to take over for safety, and total ended up manual driving less than 1%.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Tesla's "Full self driving" is a driver assistance system, a.k.a smart cruise control. At no point while using it are you supposed to stop driving, you simply stop providing control inputs to the vehicle. Systems where the human is not directly operating the vehicle are referred to as autonomous. You may also see them referred to by the SAE level system as L3, L4, or L5, each denoting autonomy in successively larger parts of the driving space.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Fake. The actual term is for literal full self driving is SAE Level 5, and, helpfully, it does not exist.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Fake Scam Driving?
hermitcrab 3y ago
I suspect self-driving mode will be safer than human drivers only when every car is driving itself. Meat and silicon brains sharing the same road in large chunks of high velocity metal is a scary prospect.
- jantissler 3y ago
  But that's not enough. What about motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians? You will always have to deal with "meat brains".
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    Tech bros looove to reinvent train over and over again. Let's make self driving, which does not work with other participant, so let's put it on special roads, with special signage and nobody else is allowed to enter such roads. Whoops, train again.
- dgellow 3y ago
  Or disable self-driving in hyper-dense areas such as cities? I know close to nothing about cars and driving but I guess it's an ok thing to have outside of cities?
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    A self-driving car is probably going to be safer in dense traffic, because of the low speeds.
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      I imagine it could also make congestion more efficient. I believe a big factor to congestion is human behavior. We at least have good ideas about better ways to drive during congestion.. which humans rarely follow.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      If your self-driving car lacks the scene understanding to notice a kid's about to run out from behind that truck, chasing that ball - safer to be on the freeway, where there are no kids chasing balls. Or if your self-driving car struggles with tight corners, or complex junctions? You won't see many of those on the freeway. On the other hand, if your self-driving car suffers random failures to stop, unexpected swerving or a propensity to hit into stationary objects - I agree lower speeds would be safer.
scylla 3y ago
I, and apparently a lot of other people on the Internet find the latest Tesla FSD update pretty incredible. There's a reason why Tesla gave it as a free trial to everyone. I drove it downtown and back without any interventions this weekend. Is it 100% perfect? Of course not. But this article is the ultimate in low effort. A person who felt that the car might hit another one but probably not. Yes, real value there.
- tr3ntg 3y ago
  > the article is the ultimate in low effort. What’s low effort in sharing your personal experience? It’s very clearly written as an opinion. Any reader would be reasonable to assume that there are other opinions out there, and that this opinion may be in the minority. That said, I’m happy to see a dissenting opinion in the comments here! Would be curious to see others thoughts in the sudden appearance of a free trial.
  - porphyra 3y ago
    The author went in with a negative attitude opening with hate for the CEO and then proceeded to diss the product based on how it "felt like it was about to" do something bad rather than what it actually did. It seems that the author has already decided that it was bad before trying it and then decided to confirm their bias based on vague feelings. I find it extremely biased and lacking in substance. I get it though... Elon does deserve a lot of hate so I guess the HN crowd is gleefully cheering out of schadenfreude whenever someone says something along the lines of "Tesla bad".
    - krainboltgreene 3y ago
      > The author went in with a negative attitude opening with hate for the CEO I hate to break it to you, but that's going to be a lot of people. He's made himself extremely hateable by the general public.
- ggkjiuoh 3y ago
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tr3ntg 3y ago
> So would I pay the money for it? Fear on this level seems like a pretty poor use of $12,000 or $199 a month. You can rent a horror movie for $2.99, and paying attention to America is free. I like the way the author writes this. Interesting to hear unfiltered thoughts from a first-time user of the software.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  Something this (unironically) comedic is probably far from "unfiltered". Fun read though!
- ajross 3y ago
  To be clear: the author wrote it because they knew you'd like it, and interpret their florid prose as "unfiltered". The rest of us using boring English to tell you that it's been driving us around for almost two years now don't get the same kind of click traffic. Meh. Believe what you want; read what you want; fear what you want. Whether it "works" or not is a question susceptible to factual analysis, not vocabulary.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Actually, articles like this can kneecap the service using regulatory pressure if enough people don’t want to even wait for “factual analysis” since that’s actual human lives on the line. HN talks a lot about “we need FDA to preemptively block chemicals that seem like they’d be dangerous”. This is the logical extension of that.
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- klooney 3y ago
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the_optimist 3y ago
Guy seems like a panicky type. Would like to see him hop in a car with my relatives. Is FSD perfect? No. Much better than many human drivers? Yes.
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Yeah… I have to intervene frequently when my mother is driving - she frequently turns to talk to me or whoever the passenger is, and while I’d in principle trust her judgment, she’s had a head-on with another car and driven off the road twice while doing this, and that’s only the times I have been present. My wife does this too, and has fishtailed on the highway when she has suddenly realised she’s drifted across two lanes while not looking at the road. She frequently decides to read and write messages while driving, with me and our infant daughter in the car. I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    > I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers. Further compounded by entitlement of freedom, imo. Yes, we all want freedom, but our ability to reduce public safety should be earned i suspect. We are very lax with driving safety and requirements (in the US at least). I mean hell, what percentage of people actually drive the speed limit, anyway?
  - seadan83 3y ago
    I don't know if competence is overestimated compared to the willingness to persistently pay attention and simultaneously remember that it takes approximately 3 seconds to go from happily driving along to stopped in the highway in a wreckage wondering if your family is still alive or if you'll ever walk again. Which is to say, the risks of driving have become so sanitized, that we think it's something that is easy to automate. Arguably, if all road lanes were made 18 inches more narrow, we'd have a lot of the same effects. You have to pay a lot more attention in a narrow lane than one that is super wide. Generally though, humans are very competent drivers when paying attention and patient. The other part, it's hard to be patient given how much time is spent travelling via car and stuck in traffic jams. People get used to zooming around at 40 ~ 70mph, combined with the over-confidence of from the illusion of safety (all the road signs, extra wide lanes, road markers, obstructions removed from the road)... I think it just combines to a place where humans are poor drivers because they become impatient and stop paying attention all the time. It's like that first day of work, where everything you do - you have to think about incredibly hard. Eventually it all becomes 'auto-pilot', and this is encouraged by the road infrastructure; even to the extent that we think it's an easy problem to automate.
lenerdenator 3y ago
> But usage of the feature has been low, perhaps in part because if you’ve spent $40-90,000 on a car, spending another five figure sum is annoying, and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love. <s>Pssh. These people are letting the emotions of humans keep them from innovating, disrupting, and generally becoming certified Silicon Valley sharks.</s>
gitfan86 3y ago
For people who have not been following FSD closely it is important to understand this is the equivalent of GPT-3. The RoboTaxi will be running the equivalent of GPT-5.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  Can't wait to have a self-driving taxi hallucinate while I am in it.
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    I can't wait until people with DUIs lose their license permanently since there is a safer alternative
    - jerlam 3y ago
      There are places with accessible taxis, Ubers, and public transit where people with DUIs still have their license. Not that a suspended license would prevent them from driving anyway.
    - drewrv 3y ago
      There are already safer alternatives.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  Is the FSD's gpt5 actually on the horizon? Or is it like Trump's 6G? We know well at this point that progress, especially when it comes to AI, is anything but linear
- danans 3y ago
  That's a bad analogy because not only is autonomous driving not generative AI / LLM based, but the problem space, objective, and risk profile is fundamentally different.
kjksf 3y ago
Don't fall for confirmation bias i.e. seeking out information that confirms your priors. If you want to get an accurate picture of FSD 12, watch random youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+12.3 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+12.3 The majority of people are over the moon about how good the latest version is.
- dawnerd 3y ago
  You can’t trust those Tesla influencer YouTubers. Tesla is well aware of the popular channels and go out of their way to fix their specific problems with their routes. They even sent a team out to fix chucks left turn.
- ericd 3y ago
  Nah, random Youtubers aren't at all a representative sample. Much better to just try it out, since it's now deployed on a large number of cars. We have it on our Y, we're in suburban America, and its average number of attempted very-obvious moving violations per 15 minute trip seems to be about 2, and 1 attempt at curbing the wheels or something similar. It doesn't seem to have any concept of things like conditional school zone speed limits (it consistently ignores those), school busses with their stop signs out, or any unusual scenario like that. I'm not willing to try it in anything dicier at the moment, like taking turns at an all-way stop. Even multi-lane left turns are hair raising, because it doesn't seem to consistently stay in its own turn lane, instead drifting toward the car next to us. This experiment has ended for us for now, it's much too stressful to actually use, like being driven around by a bottom-percentile drivers' ed student. It's an incredibly impressive bit of technology, but simultaneously nowhere near good enough to not be an incredible liability. I'm biased for them, if anything - I’ve been a shareholder since before the Model S launch - but it's not there.
  - radoomi 3y ago
    I'm curious, when did you try it? On which version was it?
    - 3y ago
IncreasePosts 3y ago
Regardless of safety, I won't use FSD because it is too embarrassing when it takes forever to figure out it can safely go. It also drops down to 2mph in my neighborhood to go over a small pot hole, that everyone else would just go around.
- kbos87 3y ago
  With v12, all you have to do is tap the accelerator and FSD takes the hint that it's safe to proceed or safe to go faster.
giobox 3y ago
A shame the author doesn't mention what FSD release the car he used was on? There is significant differences in performance now, especially the cars on the 12.3.x branches that have the new end-to-end route planner etc. It would be my first question to anyone reporting on an FSD experience. Someone trying an 11.x version and someone on 12.x will have significantly different experiences at the moment, with 12.x having some of the biggest advancements we've seen since Tesla began doing this. 12.x is still rolling out to fleet now, with only ~40% of cars on it if the online Tesla fleet version trackers can be believed. I'm not suggesting it might change the author's feelings completely if he was on a 12.x branch of FSD, but the jump from 11 to 12 has been siginificant. EDIT: not sure why the downvotes - its a legitimate question the original article doesn't answer...
- ParacelsusOfEgg 3y ago
  I'd guess the author of the post is on v12.3.3. Their experience with the automatic update and auto engaged FSD demo appears identical to my experience the past two weeks on v12.3.3.
  - giobox 3y ago
    While I think there is far to go in development terms, and I wouldn't recommend buying it either, my experiences on 12.3.3 are not identical to this at all. Looks like the free trial cars are currently split across v12.3.2.1/12.3.3 depending on OS update.
low_tech_love 3y ago
“Hi! Welcome to the volunteer program for Tesla’s QA division. Thank you for doing for free and without any risks (for us) something that would cost us millions of dollars and a lot of headache. Our mini… ehm, customers are the best! Please don’t forget to leave a detailed description of why you had to intervene 18 times during your 10-minute ride to your kids’ school earlier today. Remember: your feedback means a safer system (otherwise, no updates!)”
correlator 3y ago
TLDR They drove down narrow 1-lane streets and had to disengage once. While this sounds quite impressive, the article spends a lot of time focused on fear of FSD. There's even a hypothetical comment that he will surely be hit by an FSD enabled car.
neither_color 3y ago
> It was silly. Can we just accept that? Okay, thank you. Moving on. For what it's worth one of my clients installs charging stations and after meeting maybe hundreds of Tesla owners I assure you(anecdotally) that 19 out of 20 don't mention the CEO at all. Most Americans don't even have a twitter account(less than a third do) so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Most are non car people(as in, they wouldn't have bought a BMW or Mercedes, they were happy with a toyota) just excited about the tech that goes into the car. It means no more to the average driver on the road than what Henry Fords' opinions were(and they were worse)
- deleted 3y ago
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- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Maybe true about Twitter or Elon specifically, but i suspect if we ignore "on Twitter" specifically, far too many people are "chronically online" or chronically drinking news cycle drama. Ie i generally agree that people often think e-drama is more real than it is, but i also suspect we shouldn't undersell how many humans are addicted to tube fed drama. Fear sells, and we've got a lot of industries that focus on this. Wonder what studies test this, outcomes, etc.
_whiteCaps_ 3y ago
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-and-cycling/road-safety-rules-and-consequences/self-drive https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-an... Self driving cars have recently been banned in British Columbia. I wonder if this applies to Tesla FSD?
- porphyra 3y ago
  That applies to SAE levels 3, 4, and 5, which would ban useful and safe robotaxis like Waymo but not Tesla FSD (Supervised), which is a level 2 driver assist system that requires constant supervision.
lenerdenator 3y ago
Regardless of how good FSD turns out to be in any manufacturer's vehicles, I can't help but think that there are better ways to tackle transportation than giving every single person their own car that they have to pay for. I live in a city with an unusually high number of highway miles per capita. I have to drive 24 miles each way to and from work. AI that can complete this task for me, safely, is pretty cool, but still largely hypothetical and not available to most people. What I'd really like is public transit and an honest national conversation about urban sprawl. My metro area is more-or-less three Manhattans placed side-by-side, but with 2.5 million in population. That's insane. Another automotive technology isn't going to solve that.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  The solution to traffic is definitely not self driving cars. If truly self driving cars became available which cost no more than comparable (non self driving) cars, then the total cost of driving would go down. Here in “total cost” I’m including the obvious costs like insurance and gas/electricity as well as the total physical energy required driving. With true self driving (i.e. not Tesla FSD in which many are left stressed wondering if it will work right), the act of driving will be easier. In fact, the cost of sitting in traffic will be lower since you can space out while the car does the work. The natural consequence is that the amount of traffic on roads will _increase_ and overall traffic will increase. The solution to traffic is the same as it’s always been: increase throughput on fewer vehicles. In other words, you should take the bus or the train or increase carpooling or really anything that gets fewer vehicles out of the transportation network. Most importantly the solution is to be less individualistic and more focused on the problem as a collective. Self driving cars are the opposite of that solution.
  - porphyra 3y ago
    The problem is that car-dependence is a problem with a lot of hysteresis to it: If everyone already has cars, it takes a lot to get people out of cars --- if someone already has a car, taking the bus to go somewhere slower than driving is completely out of the question. Conversely, if everyone doesn't have cars, it takes a lot to get people to drive cars due to the upfront cost of car ownership. I think more transit-oriented city development is definitely the way to go. But nibbling away at the problem is going to take a long time. I think robotaxis are definitely going to play a part in this: by being compatible with existing car-dependent infrastructure and providing a similar speed and flexibility as privately owned cars, existing car owners are more likely to give up personal car ownership. Once people stop owning cars, they would be more amenable to development that gets rid of parking spots, improves walkability, increases density, implements mass transit, and so on.
mrbonner 3y ago
I tried this FSD beta for the model X in a 30-minute test drive recently. I used local street to test. It failed pretty hard when encountering the 4-way stop. The FSD couldn't decide whether to go or not and just stuck in the drive-n-brake cycle for a few times. I didn't want to piss off the drivers behind me so I had to disengage the FSD to get over the 4-way stop. After that, it was able to drive itself to the dealership parking lot. This feature is $8000 for that car. I'm pretty sure not going to pay that much for it.
ck2 3y ago
https://tesladeaths.com https://tesladeaths.com of course that doesn't include 1000+ serious accidents without death via FSD only the Mercedes has real Level 3 Autonomy certification, everyone else is just using you as an alpha tester
benwerd 3y ago
TFW a quick, jokey post you make on your website hits the HN front page ... (It was genuinely scary though!)
usrusr 3y ago
> and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love Simple solution, get an even heavier tank. Where it starts getting tricky is when you are dealing with people who also value lives on the wrong side of the windscreen.
morgunkorn 3y ago
Our first Model 3 from 2019 was leased with FSD, which was definitely underwhelming enough to barely ever turn it on. We drove from southern Germany to Venice Italy without even thinking of using it once. When the leasing contract came to an end, we got the refreshed model 3 from 2024, this time without any driving assistant, just the plain normal car. And I haven't missed any of it, just the park assistant was nice because now I can't park it on the side of the small European streets first try, but I'll learn eventually. It was a horrible deal back then for 5000€, now it's more expensive and hasn't gotten any better.
claar 3y ago
What a crap article - I couldn't disagree more with his fearful conclusion. FSD on my Model Y is fun. There's no reason to fear because it's extremely intuitive to take over if it makes a poor decision - any resistance on the steering wheel immediately disengages Full Self Driving. I've used FSD for thousands of both highway and city miles, and like any new experience, you shouldn't judge it based off of your first few tries. After a short time, you learn which scenarios it handles with ease (highway driving, clearly marked roads with other traffic it can follow), and which scenarios it struggles with (dips in roads, emergency vehicles on shoulder, large open intersections without clear markings, construction zones). FSD is basically magic. I'm a software guy, and I'm shocked how well FSD handles an insane variety of situations. In my local town, I feel I'm quite a bit better driver than my FSD. However, when I visit an unfamiliar city, FSD often handles new situations better than I would have. We're living in the future. Also, there's several comments here about how timid FSD can be merging or at a four-way-stop or similar; very true! Yet you just tap the gas pedal to let it know it's safe to proceed, and FSD takes it from there. Or just manually accelerate, and FSD will happily handle the steering while I handle the speed.
FeloniousHam 3y ago
I've been using it this month (I own a Model 3 and do not like Musk's behaviour but don't really care, I like car), and it's been great. I have a 30-minute commute with moderate traffic and lots of lights, occasional aggressive jerks, and it's been (mostly) predictable and useful. Caveats: I don't let it make left turns in traffic, too stressful. It's sketchy around yellow lights (go through, please). It can aggressively brake for cars getting out of the road. It makes me a more relaxed, less aggressively driver, er, supervisor, and it's quirks are pretty easily mitigated by taking over the accelerator or just reclaiming control.
ethbr1 3y ago
>> Can you imagine an autonomous RV? It would cost an arm and a leg, but if I had the money, I would 100% use one to get across country. Underappreciated observation. The "interstate-only FSD on vehicles it's uniquely suited for" seems like much better risk-reward. A less complex and variable environment, on a vehicle with greater need for it: freight trucks, long distance buses, and RVs. Hell, I'm pretty sure the only reason Tesla didn't just buy Greyhound/Megabus was because the stricter scrutiny from CDL regulators (FMCSA?).
NEETPILLED 3y ago
And it sucked.
nunez 3y ago
I have over 75k miles on Autopilot 2 (I.e. old FSD) and somewhere between 5-10k miles on FSD beta. I've participated in the program since FSD v10. I have lots of thoughts on pieces like these (of which there are many). This will be a long reply. I absolutely love FSD. It is THE feature that keeps me locked into the Tesla ecosystem. I am absolutely willing to die on this hill. That said, I am not surprised and can empathize with the author's experience here. FSD is an extremely new way of driving, an activity that is integral to most people's daily lives. One's enjoyment of FSD is inversely proportional to the sum of the amount of control the driver wants while driving AND the driver's expectation of FSD being an SAE Level 5 autonomous driving solution. Many drivers want lots of control up front, and everyone drives differently (another problem that I'll save for another post). So between FSD being short for "Full Self Driving", FSD not driving 100% like them, and it being a $12,000 add-on (despite many drivers being completely and totally fine spending way more than this in aggregate on vehicle option packages that do way less), articles and Reddit posts like these OP sprouting like wildflowers in the spring now that FSD is temporarily free isn't a surprise. I surmise, based on this paragraph, that the OP might err on the side of "more control": > I’ve rarely been so frightened behind the wheel of my own car. As an experience it ranks right up there with driving that one stretch of the 880 where you’re supposed to go at 45mph and everybody drives twice that, the time I was riding in a Lyft and was jackknifed by a tow truck, or that one time I was driving on the 101 North and a tech bro Lamborghini shot out of the Highway 12 offramp and came within two inches of hitting me, spun around in the road, and careened off into the distance. All of these are driver decisions that are tied to the driver's risk profile. One person's "jack-knifed" is another person's nothing-burger. Some people feel pressured to speed due to traffic flow; other's hold firm against the posted limits. (I've been both of these people!) --- Here is the "I'll die on this hill" portion of my response to this article. First unpopular opinion: I paid for FSD at purchase twice; once at $7k and again (this year) at $12k. (Okay, I rolled it into my finance loans, so I'm actually paying more after interest!) I don't regret either purchase for a second and would gladly do it again. There is nothing like Tesla's FSD Beta (FSDb) program. I am okay with FSDb being imperfect, just like me. FSDb isn't scary for me since I know that it will do wild ass shit sometimes (it hit a cone once during construction zone). However given that FSD mostly works as expected and spares me tons of toil that comes with daily driving, I don't mind a few mess ups here and there. (I mess up all of the time while driving by hand, and I consider myself to be a good driver.) It's insane how much toil FSDb spares me. My wife and I road trip with our cars. 2000+ miles; all on FSD. I will absolutely not road trip without FSD; no exceptions. --- Second unpopular opinion: Nobody else can and will touch FSD with a 100-ft pole. This one requires some explaining. Common retorts against FSD are: - That it's basically adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, - Waymo, Cruise et. al are way better, and - It's inferior to hands-free assistance systems, like SuperCruise, BlueCruise and Comma.ai. The first retort is completely false. Anyone saying this either hasn't used autopilot at all, has _only_ used base autopilot and is projecting to FSD, or has not _really_ used TACC and LKAS. I've driven many rental cars with these systems. Having them present is definitely better than not having them, but they don't come remotely close to Autopilot and aren't even in the same universe as FSDb. Here are some limitations of these systems that AP does not have: - They disengage when roads with mild curvature are detected. - They DO NOT disengage in problem areas, like construction zones. - They often disengage silently with no warning. - Many of these systems are unable to center the car on curves they can handle. - They do not interact with traffic controls, like stop signs and traffic lights. (Autopilot without FSD will not stop for these controls but will scream bloody murder if you're about to ignore them!) Then there is the absolutely slipshod UX that accompanies many of these systems, such as: - Them having several duplicative configuration interfaces (I.e. you can configure them either through the menu on the dash or the menu through the infotainment) - Them having confusing ways of telling you when they are active - Them allowing you to keep auto-steering/LKAS on without cruise control enabled, causing you to fight with the system when you think it is not active but it is. The second retort is closer but misses the forest for the trees. Indeed, FSD underperforms compared to systems supplemented with LIDAR and RADAR. However, they are (a) small-scale taxi networks and have been for a long time, and (b) are super geofenced and have a laundry list of exceptions whereas FSDb works in nearly all situations and geographies to the best of its ability. This argument is like some posts on HN that argue that modern web stacks are way too complex and "you can run Uber/Yelp/whatever with a few VPSes, Redis and Kafka." All true until 100,000 people want to use your thing every day for all sorts of use cases you didn't plan for. Vertical or horizontal scaling alone won't work fast enough, and you'll go broke trying. The final retort (BlueCruise, SuperCruise, etc.) is more correct, but ignores how Big Auto fundamentally works. Those systems do enable a hands-free driving experience in the road segments that they support (most mapped highways). However, the hands-free-ness of those systems is replaced with (IMO) extremely aggressive eye and face tracking that might or might not be update-able depending the system on board and the car's model year. They also rely on manufacturer-provided pre-mapping topologies and do not work at all when road conditions change (like interstate construction, which is a given on long road trips). Pre-mapped topologies also don't scale (imagine trying to support a rural road), so these systems working off-highway is unlikely, though this remains to be seen. I am optimistic in Big Auto catching up and providing a FSD-like experience at some point. All signs are pointing to this happening, albeit more slowly than projected back in 2018. (To be fair, everyone was going ape shit over autonomous driving back then.) However, Big Auto also considers autonomy to be mostly a feature to check a box next to. Tesla does not. They see autonomy as critical to their survival. This is a big reason why they charge so much for FSD. Tesla is hugely outspending the competition on this effort. It's not even close. Dojo, their training system, has, what, HUNDREDS of H100's in their cluster? They also have handfuls of well-compensated PhD's in this domain working on nothing but autonomy. I am almost positive that no other auto manufacturer has anything like Tesla's autopilot program. Investing in this would be a huge moonshot and financial investment for them, and they are (a) bleeding money in trying to keep up with Tesla's EV platform in general, (b) bleeding money in trying to do away with ICE by 2030, and (c) way too conservative to make these kinds of risks (see also: how they are handling the outdated dealer model). The best alternative we'll probably get is Big Auto slapping MobileEye's new platform on their cars, but that's just another integration that is probably vehicle and model year dependent. --- So there you have it: a semi-rabid FSD fanboy's take on this article. They're not wrong, but they're also not thinking big enough.
bananapub 3y ago
it really is astonishing that the FTC or some state AG hasn't intervened in this absolutely mental situation.
stuckkeys 3y ago
Everyone that had it during trial period, enjoyed it. They started to pay for it, all of the sudden they did not feel safe lol. I wonder if they rolled out the feature for free would people still carry out a positive feedback or still feel uncertain. I never owned an electric car also I refuse to pay subscription services for the car. Aside from Musk being an online troll, if the product is great it should not impact the investment. I think lot of Tesla owners got sold on the hype.
senectus1 3y ago
>And, yes, I tried it. >And let me be clear: nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. Saved you the click.

84 points by robin_reala 3y ago

I think that FSD v12 is at a point where it went from a useless liability to a useful product. It's definitely not perfect though.

brk 3y ago
Possibly, but this has kind of been the summary of each FSD software update over the years. I recall similar amazed comments when FSD v9 came out 3 years ago, and transitioned from radar to vision for depth perception. Each release likely has gotten measurably better, and more usable, but at this point I seriously doubt that V12 is "the one". Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 11 times and I'm just going to buy a Mercedes EV.

keikobadthebad 3y ago

> The car then asks you to leave a recorded message explaining why you intervened, and the struggle is to use words instead of screaming over and over. Lol

unshavedyak 3y ago

I don't follow Tesla terminology, is this actually FSD or fake FSD? If not actual FSD, is there a name for "actually FSD"?

michaelt 3y ago
The article says Tesla's "Full Self Driving" requires you to keep your hands on the wheel. I would say that is obviously not full self driving - but I suppose I'll never succeed in marketing with an attitude like that.
danpalmer 3y ago
It's full, until it's not. i.e. it does drive the car "fully", but can and does refuse at times if you get too far off where it knows, into terrain it doesn't understand, weather it's not trained on, roads it doesn't like, drivers around you doing things it's not expecting, etc.
toddmorey 3y ago
This is the genius or fallacy of Tesla's marketing, depending on how you look at it. There IS a standard from the SAE for describing autonomous driving that everyone else uses. By that standard, FSD is still at Level 2 out of 5. (But probably approaching level 3 in the next few years.) FSD as Tesla markets it (above the asterisk of course) would be level 5 autonomy where the car can complete a trip to any destination completely independent of any driver intervention. The current tech is not that. The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions.
- FeloniousHam 3y ago
  > The best autonomy I've seen is from other players like GM's Cruise were the car can complete trips without having a driver on hand to intervene... but only in certain controlled areas / conditions. Wouldn't this be the case with Tesla's FSD? I make trips that are fully driven by FSD (I'm using it again this month, but I had a 3 month trial when I bought the car), would you consider routinely successful operation within non-prescribed boundaries a "certain area"? I guess the disconnect between the critics and fans (I am one) is over the marketing; my understanding of "Tesla Full Self Driving" is not level 5 autonomy, it's "can drive better than my teenager most of the time". I (think I) understand the catastrophic downside risk of computer operated machinery in an uncontrolled environment, but my experience has been very positive. I think I understand the feature for what it is, an amazing and useful if imperfect tool, regardless of what it's called. (caveat: FSD is the only automated driving I've experienced)
elif 3y ago
I used it to go from Atlanta to San Diego to Oregon to Ohio and back last fall. On the highways it was like a train on rails, in national parks it was like a slow roller coaster. In cities it was a free Uber driver. I never had to take over for safety, and total ended up manual driving less than 1%.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
Tesla's "Full self driving" is a driver assistance system, a.k.a smart cruise control. At no point while using it are you supposed to stop driving, you simply stop providing control inputs to the vehicle. Systems where the human is not directly operating the vehicle are referred to as autonomous. You may also see them referred to by the SAE level system as L3, L4, or L5, each denoting autonomy in successively larger parts of the driving space.
rsynnott 3y ago
Fake. The actual term is for literal full self driving is SAE Level 5, and, helpfully, it does not exist.
TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
Fake Scam Driving?

hermitcrab 3y ago

I suspect self-driving mode will be safer than human drivers only when every car is driving itself. Meat and silicon brains sharing the same road in large chunks of high velocity metal is a scary prospect.

jantissler 3y ago
But that's not enough. What about motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians? You will always have to deal with "meat brains".
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Tech bros looove to reinvent train over and over again. Let's make self driving, which does not work with other participant, so let's put it on special roads, with special signage and nobody else is allowed to enter such roads. Whoops, train again.
dgellow 3y ago
Or disable self-driving in hyper-dense areas such as cities? I know close to nothing about cars and driving but I guess it's an ok thing to have outside of cities?
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  A self-driving car is probably going to be safer in dense traffic, because of the low speeds.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    I imagine it could also make congestion more efficient. I believe a big factor to congestion is human behavior. We at least have good ideas about better ways to drive during congestion.. which humans rarely follow.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    If your self-driving car lacks the scene understanding to notice a kid's about to run out from behind that truck, chasing that ball - safer to be on the freeway, where there are no kids chasing balls. Or if your self-driving car struggles with tight corners, or complex junctions? You won't see many of those on the freeway. On the other hand, if your self-driving car suffers random failures to stop, unexpected swerving or a propensity to hit into stationary objects - I agree lower speeds would be safer.

scylla 3y ago

I, and apparently a lot of other people on the Internet find the latest Tesla FSD update pretty incredible. There's a reason why Tesla gave it as a free trial to everyone. I drove it downtown and back without any interventions this weekend. Is it 100% perfect? Of course not. But this article is the ultimate in low effort. A person who felt that the car might hit another one but probably not. Yes, real value there.

tr3ntg 3y ago
> the article is the ultimate in low effort. What’s low effort in sharing your personal experience? It’s very clearly written as an opinion. Any reader would be reasonable to assume that there are other opinions out there, and that this opinion may be in the minority. That said, I’m happy to see a dissenting opinion in the comments here! Would be curious to see others thoughts in the sudden appearance of a free trial.
- porphyra 3y ago
  The author went in with a negative attitude opening with hate for the CEO and then proceeded to diss the product based on how it "felt like it was about to" do something bad rather than what it actually did. It seems that the author has already decided that it was bad before trying it and then decided to confirm their bias based on vague feelings. I find it extremely biased and lacking in substance. I get it though... Elon does deserve a lot of hate so I guess the HN crowd is gleefully cheering out of schadenfreude whenever someone says something along the lines of "Tesla bad".
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    > The author went in with a negative attitude opening with hate for the CEO I hate to break it to you, but that's going to be a lot of people. He's made himself extremely hateable by the general public.
ggkjiuoh 3y ago
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tr3ntg 3y ago

> So would I pay the money for it? Fear on this level seems like a pretty poor use of $12,000 or $199 a month. You can rent a horror movie for $2.99, and paying attention to America is free. I like the way the author writes this. Interesting to hear unfiltered thoughts from a first-time user of the software.

jstummbillig 3y ago
Something this (unironically) comedic is probably far from "unfiltered". Fun read though!
ajross 3y ago
To be clear: the author wrote it because they knew you'd like it, and interpret their florid prose as "unfiltered". The rest of us using boring English to tell you that it's been driving us around for almost two years now don't get the same kind of click traffic. Meh. Believe what you want; read what you want; fear what you want. Whether it "works" or not is a question susceptible to factual analysis, not vocabulary.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Actually, articles like this can kneecap the service using regulatory pressure if enough people don’t want to even wait for “factual analysis” since that’s actual human lives on the line. HN talks a lot about “we need FDA to preemptively block chemicals that seem like they’d be dangerous”. This is the logical extension of that.
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klooney 3y ago
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the_optimist 3y ago

Guy seems like a panicky type. Would like to see him hop in a car with my relatives. Is FSD perfect? No. Much better than many human drivers? Yes.

madaxe_again 3y ago
Yeah… I have to intervene frequently when my mother is driving - she frequently turns to talk to me or whoever the passenger is, and while I’d in principle trust her judgment, she’s had a head-on with another car and driven off the road twice while doing this, and that’s only the times I have been present. My wife does this too, and has fishtailed on the highway when she has suddenly realised she’s drifted across two lanes while not looking at the road. She frequently decides to read and write messages while driving, with me and our infant daughter in the car. I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > I think there’s a tendency to vastly overestimate the competence of human drivers. Further compounded by entitlement of freedom, imo. Yes, we all want freedom, but our ability to reduce public safety should be earned i suspect. We are very lax with driving safety and requirements (in the US at least). I mean hell, what percentage of people actually drive the speed limit, anyway?
- seadan83 3y ago
  I don't know if competence is overestimated compared to the willingness to persistently pay attention and simultaneously remember that it takes approximately 3 seconds to go from happily driving along to stopped in the highway in a wreckage wondering if your family is still alive or if you'll ever walk again. Which is to say, the risks of driving have become so sanitized, that we think it's something that is easy to automate. Arguably, if all road lanes were made 18 inches more narrow, we'd have a lot of the same effects. You have to pay a lot more attention in a narrow lane than one that is super wide. Generally though, humans are very competent drivers when paying attention and patient. The other part, it's hard to be patient given how much time is spent travelling via car and stuck in traffic jams. People get used to zooming around at 40 ~ 70mph, combined with the over-confidence of from the illusion of safety (all the road signs, extra wide lanes, road markers, obstructions removed from the road)... I think it just combines to a place where humans are poor drivers because they become impatient and stop paying attention all the time. It's like that first day of work, where everything you do - you have to think about incredibly hard. Eventually it all becomes 'auto-pilot', and this is encouraged by the road infrastructure; even to the extent that we think it's an easy problem to automate.

lenerdenator 3y ago

> But usage of the feature has been low, perhaps in part because if you’ve spent $40-90,000 on a car, spending another five figure sum is annoying, and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love. <s>Pssh. These people are letting the emotions of humans keep them from innovating, disrupting, and generally becoming certified Silicon Valley sharks.</s>

gitfan86 3y ago

For people who have not been following FSD closely it is important to understand this is the equivalent of GPT-3. The RoboTaxi will be running the equivalent of GPT-5.

hermitcrab 3y ago
Can't wait to have a self-driving taxi hallucinate while I am in it.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  I can't wait until people with DUIs lose their license permanently since there is a safer alternative
  - jerlam 3y ago
    There are places with accessible taxis, Ubers, and public transit where people with DUIs still have their license. Not that a suspended license would prevent them from driving anyway.
  - drewrv 3y ago
    There are already safer alternatives.
willsmith72 3y ago
Is the FSD's gpt5 actually on the horizon? Or is it like Trump's 6G? We know well at this point that progress, especially when it comes to AI, is anything but linear
danans 3y ago
That's a bad analogy because not only is autonomous driving not generative AI / LLM based, but the problem space, objective, and risk profile is fundamentally different.

kjksf 3y ago

Don't fall for confirmation bias i.e. seeking out information that confirms your priors. If you want to get an accurate picture of FSD 12, watch random youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+12.3 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsd+12.3 The majority of people are over the moon about how good the latest version is.

dawnerd 3y ago
You can’t trust those Tesla influencer YouTubers. Tesla is well aware of the popular channels and go out of their way to fix their specific problems with their routes. They even sent a team out to fix chucks left turn.
ericd 3y ago
Nah, random Youtubers aren't at all a representative sample. Much better to just try it out, since it's now deployed on a large number of cars. We have it on our Y, we're in suburban America, and its average number of attempted very-obvious moving violations per 15 minute trip seems to be about 2, and 1 attempt at curbing the wheels or something similar. It doesn't seem to have any concept of things like conditional school zone speed limits (it consistently ignores those), school busses with their stop signs out, or any unusual scenario like that. I'm not willing to try it in anything dicier at the moment, like taking turns at an all-way stop. Even multi-lane left turns are hair raising, because it doesn't seem to consistently stay in its own turn lane, instead drifting toward the car next to us. This experiment has ended for us for now, it's much too stressful to actually use, like being driven around by a bottom-percentile drivers' ed student. It's an incredibly impressive bit of technology, but simultaneously nowhere near good enough to not be an incredible liability. I'm biased for them, if anything - I’ve been a shareholder since before the Model S launch - but it's not there.
- radoomi 3y ago
  I'm curious, when did you try it? On which version was it?
  - 3y ago

IncreasePosts 3y ago

Regardless of safety, I won't use FSD because it is too embarrassing when it takes forever to figure out it can safely go. It also drops down to 2mph in my neighborhood to go over a small pot hole, that everyone else would just go around.

kbos87 3y ago
With v12, all you have to do is tap the accelerator and FSD takes the hint that it's safe to proceed or safe to go faster.

giobox 3y ago

A shame the author doesn't mention what FSD release the car he used was on? There is significant differences in performance now, especially the cars on the 12.3.x branches that have the new end-to-end route planner etc. It would be my first question to anyone reporting on an FSD experience. Someone trying an 11.x version and someone on 12.x will have significantly different experiences at the moment, with 12.x having some of the biggest advancements we've seen since Tesla began doing this. 12.x is still rolling out to fleet now, with only ~40% of cars on it if the online Tesla fleet version trackers can be believed. I'm not suggesting it might change the author's feelings completely if he was on a 12.x branch of FSD, but the jump from 11 to 12 has been siginificant. EDIT: not sure why the downvotes - its a legitimate question the original article doesn't answer...

ParacelsusOfEgg 3y ago
I'd guess the author of the post is on v12.3.3. Their experience with the automatic update and auto engaged FSD demo appears identical to my experience the past two weeks on v12.3.3.
- giobox 3y ago
  While I think there is far to go in development terms, and I wouldn't recommend buying it either, my experiences on 12.3.3 are not identical to this at all. Looks like the free trial cars are currently split across v12.3.2.1/12.3.3 depending on OS update.

low_tech_love 3y ago

“Hi! Welcome to the volunteer program for Tesla’s QA division. Thank you for doing for free and without any risks (for us) something that would cost us millions of dollars and a lot of headache. Our mini… ehm, customers are the best! Please don’t forget to leave a detailed description of why you had to intervene 18 times during your 10-minute ride to your kids’ school earlier today. Remember: your feedback means a safer system (otherwise, no updates!)”

correlator 3y ago

TLDR They drove down narrow 1-lane streets and had to disengage once. While this sounds quite impressive, the article spends a lot of time focused on fear of FSD. There's even a hypothetical comment that he will surely be hit by an FSD enabled car.

neither_color 3y ago

> It was silly. Can we just accept that? Okay, thank you. Moving on. For what it's worth one of my clients installs charging stations and after meeting maybe hundreds of Tesla owners I assure you(anecdotally) that 19 out of 20 don't mention the CEO at all. Most Americans don't even have a twitter account(less than a third do) so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Most are non car people(as in, they wouldn't have bought a BMW or Mercedes, they were happy with a toyota) just excited about the tech that goes into the car. It means no more to the average driver on the road than what Henry Fords' opinions were(and they were worse)

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unshavedyak 3y ago
> so this mindset of associating your car brand with all that e-drama is only for people chronically online. Maybe true about Twitter or Elon specifically, but i suspect if we ignore "on Twitter" specifically, far too many people are "chronically online" or chronically drinking news cycle drama. Ie i generally agree that people often think e-drama is more real than it is, but i also suspect we shouldn't undersell how many humans are addicted to tube fed drama. Fear sells, and we've got a lot of industries that focus on this. Wonder what studies test this, outcomes, etc.

_whiteCaps_ 3y ago

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-and-cycling/road-safety-rules-and-consequences/self-drive https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-an... Self driving cars have recently been banned in British Columbia. I wonder if this applies to Tesla FSD?

porphyra 3y ago
That applies to SAE levels 3, 4, and 5, which would ban useful and safe robotaxis like Waymo but not Tesla FSD (Supervised), which is a level 2 driver assist system that requires constant supervision.

lenerdenator 3y ago

Regardless of how good FSD turns out to be in any manufacturer's vehicles, I can't help but think that there are better ways to tackle transportation than giving every single person their own car that they have to pay for. I live in a city with an unusually high number of highway miles per capita. I have to drive 24 miles each way to and from work. AI that can complete this task for me, safely, is pretty cool, but still largely hypothetical and not available to most people. What I'd really like is public transit and an honest national conversation about urban sprawl. My metro area is more-or-less three Manhattans placed side-by-side, but with 2.5 million in population. That's insane. Another automotive technology isn't going to solve that.

CogitoCogito 3y ago
The solution to traffic is definitely not self driving cars. If truly self driving cars became available which cost no more than comparable (non self driving) cars, then the total cost of driving would go down. Here in “total cost” I’m including the obvious costs like insurance and gas/electricity as well as the total physical energy required driving. With true self driving (i.e. not Tesla FSD in which many are left stressed wondering if it will work right), the act of driving will be easier. In fact, the cost of sitting in traffic will be lower since you can space out while the car does the work. The natural consequence is that the amount of traffic on roads will _increase_ and overall traffic will increase. The solution to traffic is the same as it’s always been: increase throughput on fewer vehicles. In other words, you should take the bus or the train or increase carpooling or really anything that gets fewer vehicles out of the transportation network. Most importantly the solution is to be less individualistic and more focused on the problem as a collective. Self driving cars are the opposite of that solution.
- porphyra 3y ago
  The problem is that car-dependence is a problem with a lot of hysteresis to it: If everyone already has cars, it takes a lot to get people out of cars --- if someone already has a car, taking the bus to go somewhere slower than driving is completely out of the question. Conversely, if everyone doesn't have cars, it takes a lot to get people to drive cars due to the upfront cost of car ownership. I think more transit-oriented city development is definitely the way to go. But nibbling away at the problem is going to take a long time. I think robotaxis are definitely going to play a part in this: by being compatible with existing car-dependent infrastructure and providing a similar speed and flexibility as privately owned cars, existing car owners are more likely to give up personal car ownership. Once people stop owning cars, they would be more amenable to development that gets rid of parking spots, improves walkability, increases density, implements mass transit, and so on.

mrbonner 3y ago

I tried this FSD beta for the model X in a 30-minute test drive recently. I used local street to test. It failed pretty hard when encountering the 4-way stop. The FSD couldn't decide whether to go or not and just stuck in the drive-n-brake cycle for a few times. I didn't want to piss off the drivers behind me so I had to disengage the FSD to get over the 4-way stop. After that, it was able to drive itself to the dealership parking lot. This feature is $8000 for that car. I'm pretty sure not going to pay that much for it.

ck2 3y ago

https://tesladeaths.com https://tesladeaths.com of course that doesn't include 1000+ serious accidents without death via FSD only the Mercedes has real Level 3 Autonomy certification, everyone else is just using you as an alpha tester

benwerd 3y ago

TFW a quick, jokey post you make on your website hits the HN front page ... (It was genuinely scary though!)

usrusr 3y ago

> and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love Simple solution, get an even heavier tank. Where it starts getting tricky is when you are dealing with people who also value lives on the wrong side of the windscreen.

morgunkorn 3y ago

Our first Model 3 from 2019 was leased with FSD, which was definitely underwhelming enough to barely ever turn it on. We drove from southern Germany to Venice Italy without even thinking of using it once. When the leasing contract came to an end, we got the refreshed model 3 from 2024, this time without any driving assistant, just the plain normal car. And I haven't missed any of it, just the park assistant was nice because now I can't park it on the side of the small European streets first try, but I'll learn eventually. It was a horrible deal back then for 5000€, now it's more expensive and hasn't gotten any better.

claar 3y ago

What a crap article - I couldn't disagree more with his fearful conclusion. FSD on my Model Y is fun. There's no reason to fear because it's extremely intuitive to take over if it makes a poor decision - any resistance on the steering wheel immediately disengages Full Self Driving. I've used FSD for thousands of both highway and city miles, and like any new experience, you shouldn't judge it based off of your first few tries. After a short time, you learn which scenarios it handles with ease (highway driving, clearly marked roads with other traffic it can follow), and which scenarios it struggles with (dips in roads, emergency vehicles on shoulder, large open intersections without clear markings, construction zones). FSD is basically magic. I'm a software guy, and I'm shocked how well FSD handles an insane variety of situations. In my local town, I feel I'm quite a bit better driver than my FSD. However, when I visit an unfamiliar city, FSD often handles new situations better than I would have. We're living in the future. Also, there's several comments here about how timid FSD can be merging or at a four-way-stop or similar; very true! Yet you just tap the gas pedal to let it know it's safe to proceed, and FSD takes it from there. Or just manually accelerate, and FSD will happily handle the steering while I handle the speed.

FeloniousHam 3y ago

I've been using it this month (I own a Model 3 and do not like Musk's behaviour but don't really care, I like car), and it's been great. I have a 30-minute commute with moderate traffic and lots of lights, occasional aggressive jerks, and it's been (mostly) predictable and useful. Caveats: I don't let it make left turns in traffic, too stressful. It's sketchy around yellow lights (go through, please). It can aggressively brake for cars getting out of the road. It makes me a more relaxed, less aggressively driver, er, supervisor, and it's quirks are pretty easily mitigated by taking over the accelerator or just reclaiming control.

ethbr1 3y ago

>> Can you imagine an autonomous RV? It would cost an arm and a leg, but if I had the money, I would 100% use one to get across country. Underappreciated observation. The "interstate-only FSD on vehicles it's uniquely suited for" seems like much better risk-reward. A less complex and variable environment, on a vehicle with greater need for it: freight trucks, long distance buses, and RVs. Hell, I'm pretty sure the only reason Tesla didn't just buy Greyhound/Megabus was because the stricter scrutiny from CDL regulators (FMCSA?).

NEETPILLED 3y ago

And it sucked.

nunez 3y ago

I have over 75k miles on Autopilot 2 (I.e. old FSD) and somewhere between 5-10k miles on FSD beta. I've participated in the program since FSD v10. I have lots of thoughts on pieces like these (of which there are many). This will be a long reply. I absolutely love FSD. It is THE feature that keeps me locked into the Tesla ecosystem. I am absolutely willing to die on this hill. That said, I am not surprised and can empathize with the author's experience here. FSD is an extremely new way of driving, an activity that is integral to most people's daily lives. One's enjoyment of FSD is inversely proportional to the sum of the amount of control the driver wants while driving AND the driver's expectation of FSD being an SAE Level 5 autonomous driving solution. Many drivers want lots of control up front, and everyone drives differently (another problem that I'll save for another post). So between FSD being short for "Full Self Driving", FSD not driving 100% like them, and it being a $12,000 add-on (despite many drivers being completely and totally fine spending way more than this in aggregate on vehicle option packages that do way less), articles and Reddit posts like these OP sprouting like wildflowers in the spring now that FSD is temporarily free isn't a surprise. I surmise, based on this paragraph, that the OP might err on the side of "more control": > I’ve rarely been so frightened behind the wheel of my own car. As an experience it ranks right up there with driving that one stretch of the 880 where you’re supposed to go at 45mph and everybody drives twice that, the time I was riding in a Lyft and was jackknifed by a tow truck, or that one time I was driving on the 101 North and a tech bro Lamborghini shot out of the Highway 12 offramp and came within two inches of hitting me, spun around in the road, and careened off into the distance. All of these are driver decisions that are tied to the driver's risk profile. One person's "jack-knifed" is another person's nothing-burger. Some people feel pressured to speed due to traffic flow; other's hold firm against the posted limits. (I've been both of these people!) --- Here is the "I'll die on this hill" portion of my response to this article. First unpopular opinion: I paid for FSD at purchase twice; once at $7k and again (this year) at $12k. (Okay, I rolled it into my finance loans, so I'm actually paying more after interest!) I don't regret either purchase for a second and would gladly do it again. There is nothing like Tesla's FSD Beta (FSDb) program. I am okay with FSDb being imperfect, just like me. FSDb isn't scary for me since I know that it will do wild ass shit sometimes (it hit a cone once during construction zone). However given that FSD mostly works as expected and spares me tons of toil that comes with daily driving, I don't mind a few mess ups here and there. (I mess up all of the time while driving by hand, and I consider myself to be a good driver.) It's insane how much toil FSDb spares me. My wife and I road trip with our cars. 2000+ miles; all on FSD. I will absolutely not road trip without FSD; no exceptions. --- Second unpopular opinion: Nobody else can and will touch FSD with a 100-ft pole. This one requires some explaining. Common retorts against FSD are: - That it's basically adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, - Waymo, Cruise et. al are way better, and - It's inferior to hands-free assistance systems, like SuperCruise, BlueCruise and Comma.ai. The first retort is completely false. Anyone saying this either hasn't used autopilot at all, has _only_ used base autopilot and is projecting to FSD, or has not _really_ used TACC and LKAS. I've driven many rental cars with these systems. Having them present is definitely better than not having them, but they don't come remotely close to Autopilot and aren't even in the same universe as FSDb. Here are some limitations of these systems that AP does not have: - They disengage when roads with mild curvature are detected. - They DO NOT disengage in problem areas, like construction zones. - They often disengage silently with no warning. - Many of these systems are unable to center the car on curves they can handle. - They do not interact with traffic controls, like stop signs and traffic lights. (Autopilot without FSD will not stop for these controls but will scream bloody murder if you're about to ignore them!) Then there is the absolutely slipshod UX that accompanies many of these systems, such as: - Them having several duplicative configuration interfaces (I.e. you can configure them either through the menu on the dash or the menu through the infotainment) - Them having confusing ways of telling you when they are active - Them allowing you to keep auto-steering/LKAS on without cruise control enabled, causing you to fight with the system when you think it is not active but it is. The second retort is closer but misses the forest for the trees. Indeed, FSD underperforms compared to systems supplemented with LIDAR and RADAR. However, they are (a) small-scale taxi networks and have been for a long time, and (b) are super geofenced and have a laundry list of exceptions whereas FSDb works in nearly all situations and geographies to the best of its ability. This argument is like some posts on HN that argue that modern web stacks are way too complex and "you can run Uber/Yelp/whatever with a few VPSes, Redis and Kafka." All true until 100,000 people want to use your thing every day for all sorts of use cases you didn't plan for. Vertical or horizontal scaling alone won't work fast enough, and you'll go broke trying. The final retort (BlueCruise, SuperCruise, etc.) is more correct, but ignores how Big Auto fundamentally works. Those systems do enable a hands-free driving experience in the road segments that they support (most mapped highways). However, the hands-free-ness of those systems is replaced with (IMO) extremely aggressive eye and face tracking that might or might not be update-able depending the system on board and the car's model year. They also rely on manufacturer-provided pre-mapping topologies and do not work at all when road conditions change (like interstate construction, which is a given on long road trips). Pre-mapped topologies also don't scale (imagine trying to support a rural road), so these systems working off-highway is unlikely, though this remains to be seen. I am optimistic in Big Auto catching up and providing a FSD-like experience at some point. All signs are pointing to this happening, albeit more slowly than projected back in 2018. (To be fair, everyone was going ape shit over autonomous driving back then.) However, Big Auto also considers autonomy to be mostly a feature to check a box next to. Tesla does not. They see autonomy as critical to their survival. This is a big reason why they charge so much for FSD. Tesla is hugely outspending the competition on this effort. It's not even close. Dojo, their training system, has, what, HUNDREDS of H100's in their cluster? They also have handfuls of well-compensated PhD's in this domain working on nothing but autonomy. I am almost positive that no other auto manufacturer has anything like Tesla's autopilot program. Investing in this would be a huge moonshot and financial investment for them, and they are (a) bleeding money in trying to keep up with Tesla's EV platform in general, (b) bleeding money in trying to do away with ICE by 2030, and (c) way too conservative to make these kinds of risks (see also: how they are handling the outdated dealer model). The best alternative we'll probably get is Big Auto slapping MobileEye's new platform on their cars, but that's just another integration that is probably vehicle and model year dependent. --- So there you have it: a semi-rabid FSD fanboy's take on this article. They're not wrong, but they're also not thinking big enough.

bananapub 3y ago

it really is astonishing that the FTC or some state AG hasn't intervened in this absolutely mental situation.

stuckkeys 3y ago

Everyone that had it during trial period, enjoyed it. They started to pay for it, all of the sudden they did not feel safe lol. I wonder if they rolled out the feature for free would people still carry out a positive feedback or still feel uncertain. I never owned an electric car also I refuse to pay subscription services for the car. Aside from Musk being an online troll, if the product is great it should not impact the investment. I think lot of Tesla owners got sold on the hype.

senectus1 3y ago

>And, yes, I tried it. >And let me be clear: nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. Saved you the click.