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Comment by jdross | Hacker News Reader

My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.

It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc

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Out of curiosity, do you live in a place that gets heavy snow? I've always felt that FSD would struggle to handle heavy snow fall, roads with snow banks on the sides and difficult driving/braking conditions in the snow and on ice patches.

I live in Austin TX, so no :)

For any doubters: using a 2025 model is a key detail here. It's the latest hardware version of the self driving computer. The older cars on the road are stuck with significantly worse FSD software because the hardware is far too weak.

FSD 14 lite, which is now available for the HW3 (~2019-2023) Teslas, is surprisingly good. I have a HW3 and HW4, and while HW3 isn't as confident and competent as HW4, it's good enough that I don't mind it anymore. My wife was planning on trading in the HW3 for a new Model Y next year, and now she might just wait a few more years.

I have a 2020 M3 on HW3 with v14 lite and it's very good. But even v12 was pretty good. I drove an HW4 as a loaner and did not notice a significant difference. I think the big difference would be on the long-tail of edge conditions, but I'm not sure.

There's a wide range of what people find acceptable. I think v12 was the last I tried on HW3 and it was bad. Inching into oncoming traffic trying to do left turns, extremely sudden and sharp lane changes, lots of interventions required. v14 on HW4 was the first I've seen it actually drive competently. I even got to try it in a couple snow storms and it did great. I did not try v14 lite, it's great they got it working in some capacity but I still wouldn't trust it as FSD because it's probably the equivalent of running a heavily quantized LLM (HW4 doubles the available RAM).

That's absolutely fair. I'm comparing it against v11, where I couldn't go a block before disengaging. And my routes and neighborhoods are relatively easy.

But still, even v12 can handle things like manual traffic signalers, construction zones, etc. The first time my car followed instructions of a cop waving us through a stop sign, I was amazed.

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