FSD is currently using neural-network style AI, and it's frankly amazing to use and watch and is massively useful.
Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful.
I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.
E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something.
I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).
There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement.
But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/
It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic.
Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead.
I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!
While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.
For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.
It has a very long way to go before it is better than a human. We won’t know the true stats until it is allowed to operate without supervision.
It's a sad state of affairs - though I imagine its mostly cross-over of younger generations blending in their polarizing reddit politics over here. It is a dilutive process unfortunately.
FSD will be "close to magic" when it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, and it still gets you home.
If FSD didn't work in those conditions, and this encouraged you to wait it out, then it might have just saved your life (or the lives of other road users).