FSD is functionally autonomous. Agree?

[hemiarch]

I’ve tried editing Google Maps and have editor status. It sort of worked for our gated Florida community, where the shortest way in is a chained and locked gate, and the only correct way in is a large front entrance circle a block further down. For a while it worked okay (by my edit blocking off the side road in edited Google Maps), but now both of our Teslas insist on going the wrong way and simply giving up. This requires an intervention in every drive. And assuming it gets navigation right, what would it do to open the gate? It currently waits paitiently while we use our MyQ app or Community app to open it up, but in unsupervised/robotaxi mode it would sit there forever without a clue. And how about how it handles restaurant and pharmacy drive-throughs? Not at all.

How does Waymo deal with this? These aren’t edge cases, and for actual unsupervised FSD to work, must be answered. From Ai on the Waymo questions:

“The vehicle will drop you off at a designated street-side access point, requiring you to walk the rest of the way or meet the car at the gate.

Gated Communities
Waymo vehicles operate strictly within their highly detailed operational design domain and do not have built-in systems to communicate with neighborhood call boxes, gate codes, or security guards.

• Drop-offs & Pick-ups: If a friend’s address is inside a gated community, the Waymo One app will usually route to and from the community’s main gate or a nearby public street, rather than driving directly to the residence.
• Rider Action Required: You will need to manage the gate on your own and physically walk to or from the vehicle at the community’s perimeter.

Drive-Throughs
Autonomous Waymo vehicles are not programmed to navigate active commercial drive-through lanes.

• Traffic Flow: The vehicles are designed to avoid unmarked or private paths that might confuse their routing software, instead favoring mapped, standard public roads and intersections.
• The Alternative: If you want to grab food or coffee, the car can drop you off safely at the business’s curbside or front entrance, and you can walk inside to order.”

I doubt the above solutions will work for 90% of drivers - I therefore have at least two interventions per day - one due to FSD trying to park at Starbucks instead of using the drive-through, and one to get to the correct gate at our community. These seem to me to be nearly insurmountable issues - but I never bet against Tesla given how good it is now. My lizard brain just can’t come up with solutions for these issues.

Yeah. They definitely need to solve this. In fact, it’s going to become in the best interest of some businesses to have super accurate mapping and a clear programmed way to handle drive through services.
That’s the incentive that will likely drive resolution somehow I think.
Some of the decision making even at Tesla’s own superchargers which should be mapped to perfection at this point still leaves a lot to be desired too.

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[PungoteagueDave]

Is driveway to driveway actually what other people see? I have a long gravel driveway and it never worked. I would engage FSD and it would move about 10 feet then stop because it was confused. if I tried going home it would get a few hundred feet from my house then just stop in the road.

Do you have the current FSD? My truck and MY Launch Edition have no issues navigating our farm’s mile-long gravel driveway with several dogleg turns. I also have a complicated marina access road inside the private fenced area and it does just fine navigating un-lined pavement for a half mile, through parked cars and random boats on stands to arrive at the pin next to my slip.

 

[chaosmarine92]

Do you have the current FSD? My truck and MY Launch Edition have no issues navigating our farm’s mile-long gravel driveway with several dogleg turns. I also have a complicated marina access road inside the private fenced area and it does just fine navigating un-lined pavement for a half mile, through parked cars and random boats on stands to arrive at the pin next to my slip.

It was a few months back that I last tried. I don't bother trying to use FSD at all anymore.

 

[seussiii]

There have been some suspect interventions that I wouldn't want to sleep through tbh. One where it didnt have the tight turn it needed in a busy intersection to get through a u-turn and tried to back up.

Also, the major one is unprotected left turns. It doesn't know its own size and leaves its ass hanging out still. Where I live, we have a lot of median gaps to shoot. Pretty much makes it unusable.

The navigation issues are the biggest problem.

 

[gtgarner]

FSD now drives better than most people.

I've followed it since 2017 in my P3D.

Now both my P3D and CT drive better than most people I know.

 

[PungoteagueDave]

It was a few months back that I last tried. I don't bother trying to use FSD at all anymore.

Then you have no idea. The latest versions are night and day vs a few months ago. No need to opine if you don’t know current status.

 

[chaosmarine92]

Then you have no idea. The latest versions are night and day vs a few months ago. No need to opine if you don’t know current status.

There's no need for me to try if I don't have manual speed control available. Until they bring that back I'm not using FSD.

 

[gtgarner]

There's no need for me to try if I don't have manual speed control available. Until they bring that back I'm not using FSD.

"Manual" control of an autonomous feature?

Yep, you have made the right decision to stay away.



For those who haven't quit using FSD - There is an option that allows for "5 different levels of aggression " of FSD. "Right scroll wheel"

 

[PungoteagueDave]

There's no need for me to try if I don't have manual speed control available. Until they bring that back I'm not using FSD.

You do have speed control by learning the profiles. Sloth won’t speed. Ever. Chill only goes a couple over. Standard or Hurry drives like a normal person. Mad Max is just that. I agreed with your position at first but have come to appreciate a nuanced ( Ai?) approach to speed relative to conditions and traffic. It’s smarter than imposing rules-based behavior, which is essentially what demanding manual speed control is asking for. That’s a regression as we approach (maybe?) unsupervised self driving. There’s a lot to occur between now and then, more than just software and navigation improvements, such as working out the legal liability framework, but this is how it learns. If we pen in its autonomy, more responsibility remains with the driver, and FSD’s advancement is perhaps thereby constrained.

I also get that supervised means what it says, but it’s a bit like watching a three year old. Gotta let them make mistakes and get a few scabs, intervening when required to head off a bad event (or speeding ticket). But we do have the tools to help FSD avoid tickets if we understand this interim phase’s limitations and ramifications for the next level of FSD.

You can participate in moving forward or not, totally your call, and I respect that. But do it based on facts.

 

[willsonrobert]

There's no need for me to try if I don't have manual speed control available. Until they bring that back I'm not using FSD.

I was 100% in this camp for a long time. But it is a lot more complicated than that, and it’s been proven out (for me, at least) by using FSD in multiple highly varied situations. The speed control understands when road conditions and prevailing traffic patterns demand a higher or lower speed than what I would normally select for a manual speed control. It knows (again, this is my experience) when 80 in a 65 makes sense and seems to know when to knock it down to 74 just before a cop comes in view. At this point, I’m not sure if I want to go back to manual speed control because I feel like I’d be constantly changing it, whereas now I can do a 600 mile drive with zero interactions.

 

[dalton108]

There's no need for me to try if I don't have manual speed control available. Until they bring that back I'm not using FSD.

Then you won’t be using it, ever. That’s not coming back.

 

[shurley1975]

Two things can be true. 1. FSD will get me there. 2. FSD sucks as a driver. I'm constantly disengaging because it's too slow, too fast, too cautious, too crazy, too something. It's not consistent in it's temperment at each mode, so you can't anticipate it's next move. I could leave it on FSD and get there, but I'd be baffled at half it's decisions, and 20 min late.

 

[chaosmarine92]

You do have speed control by learning the profiles. Sloth won’t speed. Ever. Chill only goes a couple over. Standard or Hurry drives like a normal person. Mad Max is just that. I agreed with your position at first but have come to appreciate a nuanced ( Ai?) approach to speed relative to conditions and traffic. It’s smarter than imposing rules-based behavior, which is essentially what demanding manual speed control is asking for. That’s a regression as we approach (maybe?) unsupervised self driving. There’s a lot to occur between now and then, more than just software and navigation improvements, such as working out the legal liability framework, but this is how it learns. If we pen in its autonomy, more responsibility remains with the driver, and FSD’s advancement is perhaps thereby constrained.

I also get that supervised means what it says, but it’s a bit like watching a three year old. Gotta let them make mistakes and get a few scabs, intervening when required to head off a bad event (or speeding ticket). But we do have the tools to help FSD avoid tickets if we understand this interim phase’s limitations and ramifications for the next level of FSD.

You can participate in moving forward or not, totally your call, and I respect that. But do it based on facts.

FSD either can't read speed signs or chooses to ignore them constantly in my area. About 60% of the time it has the wrong speed limit so the profiles are useless to me. In my neighborhood it thinks the limit is 55mph. On the highway near me it thinks the limit is 45mph. This is true with both FSD and TACC. Hence why FSD is useless to me.

Maybe it works great in your area, but it doesn't in mine. Taking away the manual speed control made it useless to me. It is literally easier to just drive myself than to supervise FSD and constantly correct it's speed.

 

[PungoteagueDave]

FSD either can't read speed signs or chooses to ignore them constantly in my area. About 60% of the time it has the wrong speed limit so the profiles are useless to me. In my neighborhood it thinks the limit is 55mph. On the highway near me it thinks the limit is 45mph. This is true with both FSD and TACC. Hence why FSD is useless to me.

Maybe it works great in your area, but it doesn't in mine. Taking away the manual speed control made it useless to me. It is literally easier to just drive myself than to supervise FSD and constantly correct it's speed.

Agreed the sign thing is huge issue. And true everywhere. Kinda weird because AP back in 2015 could read signs accurately most of the time. This is very recent, with 14.3. Because it was a total rebuild of FSD from scratch, my sense is this is a missing feature that will be returned. That’s the answer in my view, not a return of a user-defined speed differential or cap. More intelligence, not less.

It appears the switch to new underlying programming language and methodology has serious looses ends, some of which are acknowledged in the release notes. Until the coming revisions we must cope but I think the engineers understood the challenge, and so much else is better and being set up for the unsupervised use case.

I agree there are some steps backward but find it’s still better in a lot of ways such as shadows, phantom braking, speed bumps, animals, emergency vehicles. It’s now backing into the driveway and garage and picking better parking spots.

The sign reading thing is a clear regression but it can be fixed because Tesla already licked that twice in the past, first with MobilEye technology from a third party in AP, and then internally after abandoning radar and other sensors. I wasn’t happy with the initial attempts for either of them and have lived through every version of FSD starting with the drunk teenage version in my ‘19 MX.

I’m not highly confident about unsupervised due to the massive remaining hurdles, but am fairly confident that Tesla can make most of us happy with FSD handling things like signs and speed limits because they have a long track record on those specific things. Software is hard.

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