Hot on the heels of the purchase of my second Tesla, I did a post one month ago about Full Self Driving, since I had never experienced it before. At the time of my original post, I had very little experience with FSD, but now that the car has about 700 miles under its belt, I thought I’d freshen up my thoughts on it and talk a bit about the new iteration of FSD which will be coming out during the next few weeks.
I’ll just share some general thoughts:
- I get nervous using it. It isn’t necessarily because I don’t trust it, but honestly, it drives differently than I do. It drives much closer to parked cars than makes me comfortable, for example. I know in my brain that the car is going to carefully and constantly measure the distance and isn’t going to go crashing into the cars, but it’s still nerve-wracking.
- In a way, it’s more work to be “driven” than it is to just drive myself (which I actually enjoy, and always have). I still have to rest my hands on the steering wheel, and I rather nervously dangle my foot above the pedals, just in case.
- The self-driving is impressive about 90% of the time, but the other 10% makes me jumpy.
On that last point, there was one and only one “incident” which truly scared me, and it happened as follows: I was a few blocks from my house, driving on a basic suburban street, and I was using FSD. There was a moving truck on the wrong side of the road, evidently because it intended to park on the curb on the wrong side of the street (I suppose to unload its cargo).
We weren’t heading toward one another quickly, and I saw what was going on at a distance, so I was curious how FSD would handle this unusual situation. As it approached the truck, it did what I expected, which was to carefully move to the left (and into the “wrong” oncoming lane, which had zero traffic) in order to go around the truck. Makes sense. That’s what I would have done.
Suddenly, the steering wheel turned HARD to the right, and the car accelerated. If I did nothing, I wonder if it would have just rammed into the moving truck. Luckily, I turned the wheel away from the truck and slammed on the brakes. No harm came of it, but it scared the holy hell out of me, and the guys in the moving van probably thought I was a lunatic. So, yeah, not good (and remember, people pay $12,000 for FSD!)
Right now I’m using version 11 of FSD, but the big leap forward is version 12, which is certain someone’s Beloved Son created. V12 has been in use internally for months, as Elon demonstrated with his first test way back in August.
Hopefully, our Tesla will (finally!) get V12 in the next few weeks, and I’ll probably do a post about it after I’ve had a chance to use it some, since I should be able to articulate the qualitative differences.
In closing, I’d say my long-term view of Tesla remains positive, although I could it could be literally YEARS (two or three) of range-bound prison until it has the prospect of breaking to new highs again (the lifetime high of November 2021, a full 26 months ago, still stands).
