Guadaloopy

I hear you. There are a lot of morons on the road and a lot of morons on the road in Teslas. I get the sense that a large portion of Tesla’s early adopters bought their cars because of the technology and the perceived environmental benefits of EVs. That group can be further broken down into technophiles and technoflexers. The technophiles respected the technology and were genuinely interested in testing and experiencing it. The technoflexers were more interested in creating viral videos of themselves sleeping behind the wheel while doing 80 on the freeway. I think the technoflexers were a small, but very visible minority that saddled Tesla owners with a terrible image. I say all of that to get around to this point - there have been a lot of FSD miles driven with very low accident rates. Up until March of 2024, there were only about 400K Tesla owners in the FSD beta program. FSD beta has been in limited public release since October 2020, with more general availability since October 2022. In 3.5 years, there have been very few accidents attributed to Teslas in FSD. In March 2024, Tesla opened the floodgates and gave every Tesla driver a free month of FSD. If this system was so irresponsible and inherently dangerous, we should have seen a spike of FSD-related accidents over the past month. Maybe the data collection and reporting is lagging a bit, but we haven’t seen that spike as of yet.

It’s got that cord…

I don’t see where one post contradicts the other? re: first quoted post - The driver in the article was using Autopilot not FSD. re: second quoted post - Tesla is leapfrogging Level 3 with FSD and aiming towards Level 4 certification.

No ethical qualms at all. I bought the vehicle in September of 2020 because of the technology and performance. At the time, I also had Tesla home solar and Power Walls. It was pretty cool having all three on the same app to manage. The other deciding factor was the supercharging network. No one else came close to providing the charging availability of the Tesla fleet. It's still a huge competitive advantage for Tesla IMO. Fast forward to now... I probably won't buy another Tesla unless the company regains some of its earlier focus on accelerating the transition to renewable energy. The Cybertruck has been a huge misstep from concept to execution and has diluted the focus of the company. I never bought into the cult of Elon, but I really loved the Tesla brand circa 2020. To say the shine has come off is a huge understatement. My next vehicle will probably be an F150 Lightning once Ford shifts over to NACS.

I don't know why anyone would assume that Autopilot does anything more than the accepted dictionary definition that Hank shared above. That's exactly what Tesla's Autopilot does.

Not a great performance by Tesla for sure. One caveat that I will toss out there is that the tested version of FSD is a year old. Current version is MUCH better.

But that's the problem with a lot of the discussion in this thread. People continually conflate Tesla's Autopilot features with FSD. Tesla's "Autopilot" feature is simply TACC + Lane-keeping. Tesla's Enhanced Autopilot takes it a step further and adds in automatic lane changes based on traffic conditions and set speed. There is a third level of Autopilot called "Navigate on Autopilot" which will navigate highway interchanges and take highway exits. FSD (Supervised) - the current revised Tesla nomenclature - does all of the above plus navigation on city streets. The vehicle in the article above was in "Autopilot" = TACC + Lane-keeping.

I should have been more clear. I am comparing my experience with Tesla's TACC and Autopilot (lane-keeping) to my experience with Volvo's. Tesla has more overt notifications when engaging these systems along with on-screen warnings as compared to Volvo. Driver-monitoring is more frequent and obvious in the Tesla than the Volvo. FSD is a different animal.

Maybe so, but there are plenty of dipshits who also misunderstand cruise control. This is my anecdotal evidence, but I get more reminders and warnings from my Tesla’s driver assist features than I have ever gotten from any other make of vehicle. I have a Volvo that has TACC and lane-keeping. I get nothing but a “ding” when I engage it. I have also had it turn off the lane-keeping function with no notice multiple times. It’s quite disconcerting. I am far more comfortable using Tesla’s features than the Volvo’s.

“Distracted Driver Kills Motorcyclist” doesn’t really get the clicks does it? Tesla’s Autopilot is not FSD. It’s different software altogether. But that’s beside the point. If the headline was “Ford Driver Using Cruise Control with Lane Assist Caused Fatal Crash” no one would give it a second look, because…

This is just unreal.

Tesla is not putting the public in any more danger than every other manufacturer that puts TACC and Lane-keeping in their vehicles. We've had vehicles equipped with dumb cruise control on our roads for 65 years.

They're all Twix!

System only works below 40 mph with another vehicle in front. Tesla could probably go through the motions to get their system certified at this level with these restrictions, but ...

Never said it was unfair. I said it was engineered to produce a failure. The fact that so many complicating factors had to be introduced in order to generate the failure is an important piece of the story, IMO. My takeaway from the test is that Tesla has important work to do to address performance in these difficult edge cases. But the good news takeaway is that the system performs so well in normal situations that the critics ignore those scenarios.

100% agreed. It has to be monitored constantly, but even though you are monitoring it, you are still watching the car drive itself without your physical input. That’s a weird feeling at first. It used to feel really weird, because the maneuvers were mechanical and herky jerky - more digital if you will. As the system developed further and especially with the shift over to AI-trained V12, it is now much more analog and human-like with its maneuvers.

JV Day could provide the spark.

It’s a very uncomfortable feeling the first few times you use it. I don’t think that’s an indictment of the system, but a natural response that comes from trusting a machine to do something that you have had control of for your entire adult life.

That’s a three year old video, so it’s not an FSD Tesla in the video. It specifically says in the video that the initial speed is driver controlled and it is relying on the Pedestrian Automated Emergency Braking System to avoid the collision. It’s obvious that in this test, the non-production LIDAR assisted PAEB system outperformed the standard production PAEB system in older Teslas. Since the timeframe of the test in this video, Tesla has significantly improved its low-light image processing software. Couple that with the advances in FSD in the past three years, and I would be very interested to see a new comparison test between these technologies.

Not moving goalposts. Just replying with related experience. I do not have the specific experience of a child running in front of my vehicle while in FSD. I do have experience driving in my neighborhood and observing how the car sees and visualizes and behaves around the kids that play, skate, and ride bikes and scooters in the street.

I have driven around plenty of pedestrians and watched closely how the car reacts to them while in FSD. It’s almost maddeningly cautious. My experience has also been that the car sees and visualizes pedestrians on the display before I even notice them.

Pantsed? MrBig pointed out information that I had not noticed. I acknowledged it and I thanked him for it. It would be a better world if we could all admit that none of us always has the whole picture. I admit that I am biased based on what I experience consistently while using Tesla’s FSD system. I’m still a bit puzzled by that video because it doesn’t match my experience observing first-hand how this system operates. But I’m willing to admit that my experience isn’t definitive. Clearly, the majority of folks on this thread have decided that they have the whole picture regarding Tesla’s approach to FSD and have passed final judgment. They highlight information that supports that bias and dismiss any information that doesn’t. I’m willing to participate in this thread and be a bit of a punching bag because I think it’s important to share another perspective. But y’all tell me to fuck off and leave the thread, and I will.