Full disclosure. I am currently shorting TSLA so take what I am about to post with an appropriate amount of salt.
I gotta say I am continuously amazed how much Musk is allowed to get away with. I know he can get some things done and he is, apparently, skilled manager, fund raiser and bs'er of epic proportions, but I have a hard time understanding how all this didn't catch up to him yet.
If it's true that Musk is getting rules changes so that SpaceX can be included in the S&P earlier than the current rules allow, I think there's a non-zero chance of Musk falling even more out of favor than he currently is, if not worse (if the SpaceX IPO ends up losing people money in the first 1-2 years)
The hype train will ensure the SpaceX IPO is successful beyond the 2nd year mark. Musk keeps making these moves because he knows, he doesn’t want it catching up to him. Better to offload the risk to Wall Street.
:D As Abraham Lincoln once said, one cannot trust anything on the internet. Still, it is a carefully considered risk. I certainly didn't put money on it I am not ready to actually lose.
well he is the wealthiest most powerful person in the world right now, mainly because of SpaceX - I think this gives him plot armour until his eventual demise in 8.3 years
He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.
Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.
Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/
It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.
Bought FSD with my Model 3 back in 2018 here in the states. FSD still not delivered and no realistic timeline. Tesla is hoping we upgrade or sell car, but luckily we don't drive much and plan to keep it as long as it keeps running, so they'll have to make us whole eventually.
I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).
It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.
rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.
People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.
That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.
FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.
Same here. Car took a left turn through an orange filter light, detected oncoming traffic and decided 'nope' to the turn and just ... stopped ... in the oncoming lanes.
I find it less cognitive load to drive it myself. It's easier to predict what other vehicles will do than my own. Boo.
I have sympathy with the challenges as I worked in the field.
This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.
It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.
This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."
That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.
Run on premade, static tracks with clearly divided "roads" from the rest of road participants.
Their role is to stop the train in an emergency and adjust to speed etc. to track/driving conditions.
Automating their job probably wouldn't even need the complex ML used for self-driving because the context is significantly simpler and relatively well defined. Maybe a team in city might need such a model but it would still be a significantly simpler task than driving a car.
Oh don't worry the LLMs absolutely can kill us, just slightly more indirectly.
Triggering psychosis is not difficult and the LLM is easily capable of doing that. For a person they soon get freaked out and are likely to summon help. "Johnny started acting crazy and I'm not sure what to do, please come". But the LLM isn't a person, Johnny needs to know more about the CIA's programme to cross breed Venusians with Hollywood stars? Here's an itinerary with the address of a real hotel in LA and an entirely hallucinated CIA officer's schedule.
Next thing you know, Johnny is shot dead by officers responding to a maniac with a fire axe who broke into an LA hotel and was screaming about space aliens.
Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.
I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?
I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.
If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.
This is a subject that has been studied quite a bit, as there are a bunch of jobs where people have to monitor for rare emergencies, and react fast if an emergency should arise. Things like pilots on flights with autopilot; lifeguards watching for swimmers in distress; CCTV monitoring; operating airport X-ray machines, and so on.
Previous studies had found that a human and a computer performed markedly better than either a human alone or a computer alone - but in those studies failures were quite common, so they didn't give the humans time to get bored or distracted.
When researchers got test subjects to perform a simulated flying task, monitoring a system with 99%+ reliability, they found the humans were proportionally much worse at stepping in than they were on less reliable systems.
Swimming pool lifeguards will often change posts every 15-20 minutes and and get a 10-15 minute break every hour, to keep things interesting enough that they can pay attention. Good luck getting drivers to do that.
Funny, I was going to mention exactly that. I'm a private pilot with a modern autopilot and flying is exhausting. Partly because the piston engine is rattling your brain the entire time but also because you're on high alert the entire time. You're always making sure the autopilot is keeping the plane on the blue (or green) line and is being predictable. And my smartwatch shows my heart rate is usually more elevated on autopilot than not.
It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.
This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.
A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.
As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.
It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.
While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.
It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.
I suppose that comfort is an individual thing - having to sit in place, staring ahead, watching the road, with nothing to do, sounds to me like a kind of torture. I rarely use cruise control; operating the vehicle is what keeps me engaged enough in the drive that my mind doesn't wander. But cruise control is obviously popular, so there are clearly many people who experience driving differently.
> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.
In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.
On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.
What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.
Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.
I regularly ride down I-40 and back in North Carolina in my Rivian. I don't touch the wheel from the moment I get on the highway until the moment I get off, pretty much, unless I decide to take a rest stop. The universal hands free is as good or better than what my old Tesla had, and it'll get updates while a 2019 Model 3 almost certainly won't.
On the other hand, when I got FSD trials in the model 3 in the last year or so, it never managed to get more than ~a mile without me having to disengage.
The big issue is that Tesla has sold all of their cars with an option for FSD until a month or two ago, but everything before 2023 is basically confirmed never going to actually have FSD because the latest software cannot run on the hardware in the old cars.
What's worse is this is all going to end up happening again when HW5 comes out and all of the HW4 cars start getting a trimmed down version of the FSD software from HW5, like HW3 is currently receiving.
He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.
It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.
I've had this experience with Subarus. And it's fucking annoying. If the car is tracking where it should go, why do I need to put force on the wheel? It's like I have to keep steering it slightly the wrong way so that it fights back against me just a bit to keep itself in the lane. Otherwise, it thinks my hands aren't on the wheel and bitches the whole time. My hands ARE on the wheel, there's just been zero reason for me to put any turning force on it.
It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.
That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.
Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.
And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.
Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.
literally every single competitor will do it because they don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg
You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.
Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.
I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.
David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn’t work for Tesla, and Tesla didn’t know about him until one of his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and Tesla went along with it, I’m not sure what to tell you.[1]
Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone has gone thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What information would need to exist to convince you of this?
How about if a guy who wrote an article titled Five Things My Roomba Does Better Than My Tesla[1] later drove across the country without intervening?[2] Unless all three people in the car are lying, it seems like an independent example of going thousands of miles without intervening.
That’s a terribly low bar for evidence - it’s deciding to pick whatever self-reported data confirms your priors.
Far more than 3 individuals believed that Ivermectin cured them of COVID - I, however, chose to not believe them and get vaccinated instead.
FWIW, my experience with FSD on HW4 is that I don’t need to intervene roughly for a 100ish miles on a clear day on a freeway without construction or accidents. That’s good enough for me to subscribe during roadtrips, but Musk and his legion of supporters is overselling capabilities - as usual.
One key difference in that analogy is that covid can clear up on its own, allowing people to convince themselves that some quackery worked. But cars don’t drive themselves thousands of miles, so anyone claiming their car did so (and posting photos of their FSD stats) would have to be deliberately lying.
Have Tesla and its fanboys overstated FSD’s capabilities? Absolutely. But I’m not saying that FSD is currently good enough that one should expect to have thousands of miles between interventions. I’m trying to convince someone that it has been done. The reason I’m trying to do this is because that same cannot be said for any other self-driving technology available in a consumer vehicle today, so claiming that FSD is no better than competing offerings is not accurate. FSD overhyped? Sure. Late? Extremely. Fraudulent, bordering on criminal? I could see that. But it’s still in a league of its own in terms of what it can do.
> Both are deeply knowledgeable about Tesla’s Full-Self Driving suite and Roy stressed that he couldn’t have completed the trip without them.
Totally fully self driving even though you need not one, not two, but three autonomous driving experts with you. And be sure to have a second car with you when your first autonomous vehicle strands you. Sure sounds like a reliable system ready for the masses to use on public roadways!
I think you misread the article. The stranding was because they left a place without one of the passengers and had to go back to get him. It had nothing to do with autonomous driving. I’m not sure what help the autonomous driving experts added beyond recommending cleaning the cameras at each stop. None of them work for Tesla, and it’s not like they could tweak the software along the way.
I’m not making any claims about FSD’s safety or how ready it is for mass usage on public roads. I am trying to figure out what information would convince you that someone has used FSD for thousands of miles without intervening. Does this count or not? If not, why?
The verified, raw data of at least 1,000 other people's worth of data, so the data has a chance of being statistically significant, rather than 1 random dude out of billions posting on the car company CEO's website (on which said CEO is infamous for moderating content to suit his views and ego).
I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD" (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every time its made some kind of moving violation including nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.
I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware needed for FSD a decade ago, for real this time.
I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its really there. This time it won't even run people over, and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of the time.
Is the amount of money they'd have to refund if they just refunded everyone prohibitive, or is it more of an image/messaging thing, admitting you, erm, took them for a ride? It's clear those customers are never going to get it.
Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.
FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".
Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]
It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.
I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.
So many people worshipped the jobs distortion field but it was nothing compared to the gaslighting Elon has been able to do with Tesla. The man promised things he couldn’t deliver over and over and over again and investors are it up turning his company into a meme stock devoid of any kind of fundamentals.
The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.
You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.
I was responding to the HN headline which doesn't clarify the context in which FSD is not available because I know people don't read articles. He could and should try to sue Tesla for the $6k refund which the article already says he's trying to do.
Full disclosure. I am currently shorting TSLA so take what I am about to post with an appropriate amount of salt.
I gotta say I am continuously amazed how much Musk is allowed to get away with. I know he can get some things done and he is, apparently, skilled manager, fund raiser and bs'er of epic proportions, but I have a hard time understanding how all this didn't catch up to him yet.
As it turns out, having unfathomable amounts of wealth lets you get away with just about anything.
If it's true that Musk is getting rules changes so that SpaceX can be included in the S&P earlier than the current rules allow, I think there's a non-zero chance of Musk falling even more out of favor than he currently is, if not worse (if the SpaceX IPO ends up losing people money in the first 1-2 years)
The hype train will ensure the SpaceX IPO is successful beyond the 2nd year mark. Musk keeps making these moves because he knows, he doesn’t want it catching up to him. Better to offload the risk to Wall Street.
What's the old saying, again? "Musk can remain untouchable longer than you can remain solvent."
:D As Abraham Lincoln once said, one cannot trust anything on the internet. Still, it is a carefully considered risk. I certainly didn't put money on it I am not ready to actually lose.
well he is the wealthiest most powerful person in the world right now, mainly because of SpaceX - I think this gives him plot armour until his eventual demise in 8.3 years
Hey maybe he actually is a genius. After all, he committed securities fraud at least twice and so far has suffered zero consequences.
He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.
Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.
I guess that’s the point, FSD is not available. What you buy is lvl 4/5 available is lvl 2+.
I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.
One upgrade is more economical than two, but I would be annoyed for sure as well.
The definition of what “Tesla FSD is has changed over time. Earlier buyers were promised more, so they have a stronger case on that basis as well.
> I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.
HW5 is unlikely to solve FSD.
Doesn't canceling the original purchase agreement mean you have to give the car back?
Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/
It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.
Maybe Elon can argue that no reasonable person would have taken his FSD promises seriously.
it worked for fox news!
And MSNBC in court.
Thank Fox for paving the way for inserting your opinion in news. Did you not know that Fox did it in court first?
Bought FSD with my Model 3 back in 2018 here in the states. FSD still not delivered and no realistic timeline. Tesla is hoping we upgrade or sell car, but luckily we don't drive much and plan to keep it as long as it keeps running, so they'll have to make us whole eventually.
But how? In the states you can’t even take legal action but are forced into arbitration?
Paid twice into Full Scam of the Decade since 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3HCTVk3qME driver is just there for legal reasons)
I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).
It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.
rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.
People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.
A while back, Tesla gave me free FSD for a month and so I tried it out. It drove me to work just fine, and I was impressed.
Then, on the way home it drove me home on the wrong side of the street and I had to take over. Such a silly mistake.
Similar to what you said; from there on out, it was more trouble than it's worth because you can't let your guard down.
That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.
FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.
2026 hyundai driver assist is ok but the lines have to be very clearly defined on the road and won't do much under 25 mph
Same here. Car took a left turn through an orange filter light, detected oncoming traffic and decided 'nope' to the turn and just ... stopped ... in the oncoming lanes.
I find it less cognitive load to drive it myself. It's easier to predict what other vehicles will do than my own. Boo.
I have sympathy with the challenges as I worked in the field.
Was this a Tesla with HW3 or HW4? Also, was it in the US or outside the US?
This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.
It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.
This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."
That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.
what do you think it is train drivers do?
Run on premade, static tracks with clearly divided "roads" from the rest of road participants.
Their role is to stop the train in an emergency and adjust to speed etc. to track/driving conditions.
Automating their job probably wouldn't even need the complex ML used for self-driving because the context is significantly simpler and relatively well defined. Maybe a team in city might need such a model but it would still be a significantly simpler task than driving a car.
Doing their absolute best with the steering wheel not to go off those pencil-thin tracks?
Getting paid to babysit. Tesla asks you to pay to babysit.
Should Tesla pay people to use Autopilot?
Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough attention
Oh don't worry the LLMs absolutely can kill us, just slightly more indirectly.
Triggering psychosis is not difficult and the LLM is easily capable of doing that. For a person they soon get freaked out and are likely to summon help. "Johnny started acting crazy and I'm not sure what to do, please come". But the LLM isn't a person, Johnny needs to know more about the CIA's programme to cross breed Venusians with Hollywood stars? Here's an itinerary with the address of a real hotel in LA and an entirely hallucinated CIA officer's schedule.
Next thing you know, Johnny is shot dead by officers responding to a maniac with a fire axe who broke into an LA hotel and was screaming about space aliens.
Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.
I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?
I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.
If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own driving behavior.
Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.
This is a subject that has been studied quite a bit, as there are a bunch of jobs where people have to monitor for rare emergencies, and react fast if an emergency should arise. Things like pilots on flights with autopilot; lifeguards watching for swimmers in distress; CCTV monitoring; operating airport X-ray machines, and so on.
One such study is "Performance consequences of automation-induced 'complacency'" (Parasuraman, Molloy & Singh, 1993) https://www.pacdeff.com/pdfs/Automation%20Induced%20Complace...
Previous studies had found that a human and a computer performed markedly better than either a human alone or a computer alone - but in those studies failures were quite common, so they didn't give the humans time to get bored or distracted.
When researchers got test subjects to perform a simulated flying task, monitoring a system with 99%+ reliability, they found the humans were proportionally much worse at stepping in than they were on less reliable systems.
Swimming pool lifeguards will often change posts every 15-20 minutes and and get a 10-15 minute break every hour, to keep things interesting enough that they can pay attention. Good luck getting drivers to do that.
> Things like pilots on flights with autopilot;
Funny, I was going to mention exactly that. I'm a private pilot with a modern autopilot and flying is exhausting. Partly because the piston engine is rattling your brain the entire time but also because you're on high alert the entire time. You're always making sure the autopilot is keeping the plane on the blue (or green) line and is being predictable. And my smartwatch shows my heart rate is usually more elevated on autopilot than not.
It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.
This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.
A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.
As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.
Exactly. Said it before and I'll say it again.
I do not want to be the 'manager of my car'. That'd be a downgrade from being an actual driver.
Lane Assist, auto-stop-start, cruise control are enough for me and have been available mostly for decades and require a similar amount of attention.
FSD is a busted flush and I can't believe those who got conned by it aren't more vocal.
It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.
https://www.faistgroup.com/site/assets/files/1657/j3016-leve...
While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.
This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy part of the task, while making the hard part harder.
It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.
I suppose that comfort is an individual thing - having to sit in place, staring ahead, watching the road, with nothing to do, sounds to me like a kind of torture. I rarely use cruise control; operating the vehicle is what keeps me engaged enough in the drive that my mind doesn't wander. But cruise control is obviously popular, so there are clearly many people who experience driving differently.
> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.
In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.
On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.
What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.
Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.
Weird. Works great in cities for me. It’s been more than fancy cruise control for awhile.
This is HN where people using text files only is the best way to do things and being semi-Luddite is the way.
FSD is amazing. Any notion it takes more effort to use it than driving is made up.
I regularly ride down I-40 and back in North Carolina in my Rivian. I don't touch the wheel from the moment I get on the highway until the moment I get off, pretty much, unless I decide to take a rest stop. The universal hands free is as good or better than what my old Tesla had, and it'll get updates while a 2019 Model 3 almost certainly won't.
On the other hand, when I got FSD trials in the model 3 in the last year or so, it never managed to get more than ~a mile without me having to disengage.
The big issue is that Tesla has sold all of their cars with an option for FSD until a month or two ago, but everything before 2023 is basically confirmed never going to actually have FSD because the latest software cannot run on the hardware in the old cars.
What's worse is this is all going to end up happening again when HW5 comes out and all of the HW4 cars start getting a trimmed down version of the FSD software from HW5, like HW3 is currently receiving.
He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.
It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.
I've had this experience with Subarus. And it's fucking annoying. If the car is tracking where it should go, why do I need to put force on the wheel? It's like I have to keep steering it slightly the wrong way so that it fights back against me just a bit to keep itself in the lane. Otherwise, it thinks my hands aren't on the wheel and bitches the whole time. My hands ARE on the wheel, there's just been zero reason for me to put any turning force on it.
It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.
Which is why you put a sticker over it.
It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.
That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.
I'm literally ready to pay cash for a Tesla, once they make one that doesn't have a steering wheel at all.
If I can't go to sleep lying down on the seat as a sole occupant, it's not yet self driving.
I've driven from Dallas to Houston barely having to touch the wheel or pedals the whole way. I don't own a Tesla.
Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation.
Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.
My R1T's autonomous driving is decidedly better than Tesla autopilot. I say that from thousands of miles driven with each.
Highest end mercedes?
No. Their L3 was a scam, never sold and not actually planned to be sold anymore.
So, the same as Tesla's L3.
Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.
And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.
Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.
Which ones are better today?
Ones that don't actively try and drive in front of trains in attempt to kill their operators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
literally every single competitor will do it because they don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg
A used toyota corolla with comma 4
You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.
Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.
1. https://www.tesla.com/customer-stories/cross-country-trip-fu...
I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.
David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn’t work for Tesla, and Tesla didn’t know about him until one of his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and Tesla went along with it, I’m not sure what to tell you.[1]
1. https://x.com/DavidMoss/status/2010608939751047484
I don't know who David Moss is, I have no reason to trust him. His tweets I can see are practically nothing but Tesla and Grok shill posts.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone has gone thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What information would need to exist to convince you of this?
More than a random Twitter feed and a news post from a company which is known to spread lies, that's for sure.
How about if a guy who wrote an article titled Five Things My Roomba Does Better Than My Tesla[1] later drove across the country without intervening?[2] Unless all three people in the car are lying, it seems like an independent example of going thousands of miles without intervening.
1. https://www.thedrive.com/opinion/40604/five-things-my-roomba...
2. https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-itself-...
That’s a terribly low bar for evidence - it’s deciding to pick whatever self-reported data confirms your priors. Far more than 3 individuals believed that Ivermectin cured them of COVID - I, however, chose to not believe them and get vaccinated instead. FWIW, my experience with FSD on HW4 is that I don’t need to intervene roughly for a 100ish miles on a clear day on a freeway without construction or accidents. That’s good enough for me to subscribe during roadtrips, but Musk and his legion of supporters is overselling capabilities - as usual.
One key difference in that analogy is that covid can clear up on its own, allowing people to convince themselves that some quackery worked. But cars don’t drive themselves thousands of miles, so anyone claiming their car did so (and posting photos of their FSD stats) would have to be deliberately lying.
Have Tesla and its fanboys overstated FSD’s capabilities? Absolutely. But I’m not saying that FSD is currently good enough that one should expect to have thousands of miles between interventions. I’m trying to convince someone that it has been done. The reason I’m trying to do this is because that same cannot be said for any other self-driving technology available in a consumer vehicle today, so claiming that FSD is no better than competing offerings is not accurate. FSD overhyped? Sure. Late? Extremely. Fraudulent, bordering on criminal? I could see that. But it’s still in a league of its own in terms of what it can do.
> Both are deeply knowledgeable about Tesla’s Full-Self Driving suite and Roy stressed that he couldn’t have completed the trip without them.
Totally fully self driving even though you need not one, not two, but three autonomous driving experts with you. And be sure to have a second car with you when your first autonomous vehicle strands you. Sure sounds like a reliable system ready for the masses to use on public roadways!
I think you misread the article. The stranding was because they left a place without one of the passengers and had to go back to get him. It had nothing to do with autonomous driving. I’m not sure what help the autonomous driving experts added beyond recommending cleaning the cameras at each stop. None of them work for Tesla, and it’s not like they could tweak the software along the way.
I’m not making any claims about FSD’s safety or how ready it is for mass usage on public roads. I am trying to figure out what information would convince you that someone has used FSD for thousands of miles without intervening. Does this count or not? If not, why?
The verified, raw data of at least 1,000 other people's worth of data, so the data has a chance of being statistically significant, rather than 1 random dude out of billions posting on the car company CEO's website (on which said CEO is infamous for moderating content to suit his views and ego).
Ok, try it yourself with a new HW4 and you will see.
I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD" (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every time its made some kind of moving violation including nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.
I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware needed for FSD a decade ago, for real this time.
I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its really there. This time it won't even run people over, and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of the time.
Personally I try and avoid systems that drive people in front of trains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
This is so far removed from my personal lived experience that it's almost laughable. The auto park on Tesla is an accident waiting to happen.
he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time
I thought the diver was supposed to keep hands on the wheel in case consuming hits wrong.
That's why Tesla fans buy those weighted gizmos to fool the computer into thinking they're still holding the steering wheel.
not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.
I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend endangered
You experienced Time in a Flatcircle
Is the amount of money they'd have to refund if they just refunded everyone prohibitive, or is it more of an image/messaging thing, admitting you, erm, took them for a ride? It's clear those customers are never going to get it.
Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.
FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".
Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]
It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.
1. https://electrek.co/2019/05/17/tesla-nerfs-autopilot-europe-...
this is funny because roadstar is no longer coming ever and they paid even more deposit there.
> 3,000 owners from 29 countries signed up — representing over €6 million in FSD purchases.
The math doesn't work out. It should be \euro 20,000,000 in FSD purchases, no?
I'm one of these unlucky owners. I can't believe I'll ever get anything.
After paying the full cost and being stuck on old software that had a promise of having the hardware required for it
Same here. I would totally be fine if HW3 FSD was reduced to $50 a month, but charging the same $100 as HW4 is insulting at this point.
I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.
So many people worshipped the jobs distortion field but it was nothing compared to the gaslighting Elon has been able to do with Tesla. The man promised things he couldn’t deliver over and over and over again and investors are it up turning his company into a meme stock devoid of any kind of fundamentals.
Telsa appears to be doing crime. The EU does have clas action lawsuits. I expect one way or another Elon will have to issue refunds.
Australia is also launching a class action.
I think the government is going to have to get involved for FSD from any manufacturer to actually take place.
The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.
You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.
There is something uncanny about the way you've phrased your comment, as if to suggest nothing about what Tesla did was wrong.
I was responding to the HN headline which doesn't clarify the context in which FSD is not available because I know people don't read articles. He could and should try to sue Tesla for the $6k refund which the article already says he's trying to do.