Hacker News Reader

Comment by questionableans | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com