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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

The article answers the wrong question of 'is FSD perfect?'.

A better question is whether it's 'cost-benefit positive'. That's all that matters when users decide whether or not to use something.

If FSD reduces fatigue and allows you to arrive to work fresher, it might be worth tolerating the odd wrong turn extending the drive time by 2 minutes.

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The conclusion addresses your point:

> Without FSD, you pay attention to the road and everything else is within your control. With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control.

For the author, FSD is a worse experience in addition to costing a lot of money.

When you are new to it, yes. For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle. I use it extensively on roads I know it works well on, and use it sometimes tentitively on new roads when I'm in the mood. That I spend almost all of my driving time on the same few routes makes FSD very valuable to me. It's probably still not a net benefit if you're mostly driving new places or places where it doesn't work well, but it's getting better.

> For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle.

How would you know that, though? That's the reason why at this point I can't see myself ever using that kind of a feature. The added stress of the unpredictability would make the experience miserable.

I disagree with the author. I have a Comma 3x and use a fork of openpilot.

It's comparable to tesla but not as good overall. It 100% reduces my cognitive load and definitely reduces fatigue. There is no question.

Also, I paid only ~$1500.

I believe the author isn’t dishonest about how they felt. But that supportive reasoning is pretty discardable. They emphasized one change as additive but glossed by the subtractive change implying there was none in concurrent executive decisioning. Experience around cognitive load can be a result in part from a users anxiety with the momentarily unfamiliar, and i think this probably is more at play than author is self aware of in the comparison.

The article answered that.. the author experienced increased cognitive load while using FSD, needing to be hyper aware of not only the road conditions but being vigilant and ready to correct mistakes.

But as the article points out, you won't arrive fresher if you have to still stay alert, but with the addition of needing to anticipate the car randomly doing something crazy. I find it more stressful than driving myself.

I think some other interesting questions are:

Is it getting better?

Is it going to continue to get better?

When will it be good enough to not have a driver?

No technology that's actively being worked on is "done". It seems silly to decide that because it isn't perfect today, it's only a useless technology demo.

The odd wrong turn I am worried about is into a tree not to the wrong street.

Why would it take a wrong turn if it knows your commute?

Take the example in the article. What if the car had taken that first right turn it tried to but couldn’t then correct due to traffic.

The point has been made it makes incorrect choices - not all can be easily corrected.

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