Comment by marlow_congdon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marlow_congdon | Hacker News Reader

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Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year.

Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked.

Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?

Because Waymo is largely unsupervised, they take a much more conservative route than Tesla does. Their route planner includes avoiding high-incident rate stretches of road.

If there is a stretch of surface road with a complex intersection and aggressive drivers, you are there to step in. The Waymo Driver instead will try to avoid that area.

Also, Tesla's hardware is not nearly complex or powerful enough to approach the low level of intervention or incident rate that Waymo has - but HW5 will be a massive step forward for them.

That's going to be the make or break for me, personally. If Tesla can't make their solution work well on HW5, then they have serious structural issues in their program.

Tried FSD once. It was very confused about a traffic circle, cruised up to it & slammed on the brakes. Got rear ended (at low speed).

The incomplete, miscategorizing and glitching display of other vehicles and obstacles does not give me confidence that the car is able to correctly identify what’s around it, let alone drive accordingly.

Even the lane departure warnings are 90% false positives (but I’d rather be warned than not).

Just driving normally is much less stressful and more fun than supervising the car’s attempt at driving like a teenager.

How long ago was it that you tried FSD? My car (HW4) had a lot difficulty like this in the early days of FSD 11 but over the past thirty months it's gone from "good at highway driving, not very good at navigating city streets and it might try to kill me" to "nearly perfect at everything". Over the past six months, most of my interventions have been to avoid it automatically parking in handicap spaces and minor navigation issues when I know there's a quicker/better route. Since FSD 14.2, I've done 23k miles with 94% of that on Full Self Driving. Longest streak was 930 miles where it took me on a road trip out of state and then back home and I never touched the wheel; it handled parking at chargers and diners, navigating strange destinations (small towns, back roads), avoiding two deer that I almost certainly would have hit, and managed to keep 85mph while navigating traffic during rush-hour in Chicago. I've never owned a product, much less a vehicle, that got so much better over time.

I’m glad to hear it’s gotten better. This was a couple of years ago, when they were pushing the free trials. It’s an earlier Model 3, and I barely drive it.

I’m clearly not a typical driver. I love keeping the camera views all on screen for situational awareness. I don’t use cruise control and rarely use GPS navigation, even back when I used to drive cross country in previous cars. I guess I just got used to memorizing entire routes in my long distance biking days. Google Maps Street View really helps me understand exactly where I’ll be going.

I’m also wondering when this was. I had similar experiences with my first Tesla (2022) and stopped paying for FSD except when I had road trips (then cancel again after). I’ve only felt comfortable using it by default in the past year.

Yeah, the car is significantly older than that, and I last tried the FSD trial a couple years ago.

Will the Tesla handle getting stuck behind a double parked car without your intervention?

Usually yes. I was very surprised it also goes through confusing road works in my area without intervention. That requires driving on the wrong side of the road, without lines, over some of these metal plates. It waits for opposite traffic that has the right of way and then drives through the section like a human would do.

Yes, it’s surprisingly good at knowing when to ignore traffic rules. As a recent example, it edged over into an oncoming lane (that didn’t have any approaching cars) to make room for a pedestrian walking on my side of the road.

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