Today’s “FSD” has its limitations and requires supervision, but your description of it is not anything like my experience even on a HW3 vehicle. In fact, in many years of using Autopilot and various “FSD Beta” and “FSD (Supervised)” versions for several tens of thousands of miles I’ve literally never seen it “slam on the brakes suddenly for shadows” or “veer into the wrong lane”. I’m not a cult member and my next car won’t be a Tesla because I cannot support Musk after the horrible things he has done these last 2-3 years, but “FSD” is phenomenal when used appropriately and with the right expectations about what it is and what it isn’t. And it has improved a ton over the years, too.

The end-to-end solution was a real game changer, and while the previous solution was still useful and impressive in its own right, moving to the new stack was a night and day difference. With V13 finally taking advantage of HW4, and all the work they’ve been doing since then (plus upcoming HW5 introduction), it’s totally within the realm of possibility that they achieve viable L4 autonomy beyond this kind of small scale demo (and I hope some form of L3 maybe on HW4 before long for customer vehicles).