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Comment by homefree | Hacker News Reader

You should really try FSD, I have it drive me from SF down the peninsula and back every day and it’s amazing, basically requires zero intervention.

I think the political complaints are dumb and people over index on stuff that doesn’t matter because of partisan politics. HN has hated on Tesla and musk for years despite continued success across multiple difficult industries.

If the robotaxi work in Austin succeeds they’ll have a massive advantage. There’s really nobody close to what Tesla is doing.

I had a 2018 M3P and now a 2025 Model S Plaid, the vision stuff works better, the quality is a lot nicer, there are a lot more superchargers and more are v3 or v4.

The quality of the comments on this thread suggest there’s still value here to buy. When people dismiss stuff for dumb reasons it’s easy to make money. It’s been the story of Tesla from the beginning.

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Just FYI "basically requires zero intervention" is nowhere close to what's needed for self-driving.

It needs to be probably 1-2 orders of magnitude better than what the vast majority of people would actually experience as "zero interventions ever".

One intervention every 80 miles ("basically zero") is 178 interventions per year for the average American driver. Let's say conservatively that 10% of those avoids an accident, you're looking at 17 accidents caused by each driver per year, never mind the accidents they're just victim to due to misfortunate of being near someone else's 17 annual accidents.

It’s still supervised, the Austin robotaxi is running unsupervised with newer software in a more controlled rollout.

For supervised minimal intervention is fine and 99% of the time I’m just sitting there watching. It’s still extremely valuable and useful and something nobody else is close to. It makes driving a lot simpler and safer. I already think it’s better than most people and would rather have a driver use it than not if I’m a passenger.

Unsupervised will be amazing if they can pull it off generally and will have major market effects, but obviously it’s harder for the reasons you describe.

I'm sorry for the direct snipe, but: what the fuck are you talking about?

I'm sure Teslas automated features work well in California, where their engineers are based. They do not, however, work as well in the varying climates found on the East Coast. This is funny as a "works on my machine" approach to testing, but tragic since real lives are at stake.

My dad takes his from Western New York down to Florida pretty regularly and does FSD most of the way.

I think these complaints are just outdated - it has improved rapidly over the last two years. If you never use it why would you think you have an accurate model for how good it is in different environments?

SF is also hardly a simple environment to drive in, it’s more complicated than most east coast driving.

I know you are making stuff up as I own a Tesla and live on the East coast and FSD is nowhere close to what you are describing. You can barely use FSD 4 months out of the year.

I use their adaptive cruise control; and unless they intentionally nerfed it compared to their FSD, I have to be really careful using it in the DC area, as it will randomly brake in certain places.

With the latest Tesla Updates I can tell it thinks there's a grade or curve issue that is causing it to brake; but before the latest update it would just randomly brake in certain places (coming down from 70 to 40 very quickly) and that is just dangerous in the DC area.

It’s nerfed, it’s much worse than FSD

Do you have hardware 4? I’m not making things up, it works for me and I use it a lot.

> My dad takes his from Western New York down to Florida pretty regularly and does FSD most of the way.

To avoid the winter weather (which a Tesla finds problematic), one presumes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbird_(person)

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