I have over 75k miles on Autopilot 2 (I.e. old FSD) and somewhere between 5-10k miles on FSD beta. I've participated in the program since FSD v10. I have lots of thoughts on pieces like these (of which there are many). This will be a long reply.

I absolutely love FSD. It is THE feature that keeps me locked into the Tesla ecosystem. I am absolutely willing to die on this hill.

That said, I am not surprised and can empathize with the author's experience here.

FSD is an extremely new way of driving, an activity that is integral to most people's daily lives. One's enjoyment of FSD is inversely proportional to the sum of the amount of control the driver wants while driving AND the driver's expectation of FSD being an SAE Level 5 autonomous driving solution.

Many drivers want lots of control up front, and everyone drives differently (another problem that I'll save for another post). So between FSD being short for "Full Self Driving", FSD not driving 100% like them, and it being a $12,000 add-on (despite many drivers being completely and totally fine spending way more than this in aggregate on vehicle option packages that do way less), articles and Reddit posts like these OP sprouting like wildflowers in the spring now that FSD is temporarily free isn't a surprise.

I surmise, based on this paragraph, that the OP might err on the side of "more control":

> I’ve rarely been so frightened behind the wheel of my own car. As an experience it ranks right up there with driving that one stretch of the 880 where you’re supposed to go at 45mph and everybody drives twice that, the time I was riding in a Lyft and was jackknifed by a tow truck, or that one time I was driving on the 101 North and a tech bro Lamborghini shot out of the Highway 12 offramp and came within two inches of hitting me, spun around in the road, and careened off into the distance.

All of these are driver decisions that are tied to the driver's risk profile. One person's "jack-knifed" is another person's nothing-burger. Some people feel pressured to speed due to traffic flow; other's hold firm against the posted limits. (I've been both of these people!)

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Here is the "I'll die on this hill" portion of my response to this article.

First unpopular opinion: I paid for FSD at purchase twice; once at $7k and again (this year) at $12k. (Okay, I rolled it into my finance loans, so I'm actually paying more after interest!) I don't regret either purchase for a second and would gladly do it again. There is nothing like Tesla's FSD Beta (FSDb) program.

I am okay with FSDb being imperfect, just like me.

FSDb isn't scary for me since I know that it will do wild ass shit sometimes (it hit a cone once during construction zone). However given that FSD mostly works as expected and spares me tons of toil that comes with daily driving, I don't mind a few mess ups here and there. (I mess up all of the time while driving by hand, and I consider myself to be a good driver.)

It's insane how much toil FSDb spares me.

My wife and I road trip with our cars. 2000+ miles; all on FSD. I will absolutely not road trip without FSD; no exceptions.

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Second unpopular opinion: Nobody else can and will touch FSD with a 100-ft pole. This one requires some explaining.

Common retorts against FSD are:

- That it's basically adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, - Waymo, Cruise et. al are way better, and

- It's inferior to hands-free assistance systems, like SuperCruise, BlueCruise and Comma.ai.

The first retort is completely false. Anyone saying this either hasn't used autopilot at all, has _only_ used base autopilot and is projecting to FSD, or has not _really_ used TACC and LKAS.

I've driven many rental cars with these systems. Having them present is definitely better than not having them, but they don't come remotely close to Autopilot and aren't even in the same universe as FSDb.

Here are some limitations of these systems that AP does not have:

- They disengage when roads with mild curvature are detected.
- They DO NOT disengage in problem areas, like construction zones.
- They often disengage silently with no warning.
- Many of these systems are unable to center the car on curves they can handle.
- They do not interact with traffic controls, like stop signs and traffic lights. (Autopilot without FSD will not stop for these controls but will scream bloody murder if you're about to ignore them!)

Then there is the absolutely slipshod UX that accompanies many of these systems, such as:
- Them having several duplicative configuration interfaces (I.e. you can configure them either through the menu on the dash or the menu through the infotainment)
- Them having confusing ways of telling you when they are active
- Them allowing you to keep auto-steering/LKAS on without cruise control enabled, causing you to fight with the system when you think it is not active but it is.

The second retort is closer but misses the forest for the trees. Indeed, FSD underperforms compared to systems supplemented with LIDAR and RADAR. However, they are (a) small-scale taxi networks and have been for a long time, and (b) are super geofenced and have a laundry list of exceptions whereas FSDb works in nearly all situations and geographies to the best of its ability.

This argument is like some posts on HN that argue that modern web stacks are way too complex and "you can run Uber/Yelp/whatever with a few VPSes, Redis and Kafka." All true until 100,000 people want to use your thing every day for all sorts of use cases you didn't plan for. Vertical or horizontal scaling alone won't work fast enough, and you'll go broke trying.

The final retort (BlueCruise, SuperCruise, etc.) is more correct, but ignores how Big Auto fundamentally works.

Those systems do enable a hands-free driving experience in the road segments that they support (most mapped highways).

However, the hands-free-ness of those systems is replaced with (IMO) extremely aggressive eye and face tracking that might or might not be update-able depending the system on board and the car's model year. They also rely on manufacturer-provided pre-mapping topologies and do not work at all when road conditions change (like interstate construction, which is a given on long road trips). Pre-mapped topologies also don't scale (imagine trying to support a rural road), so these systems working off-highway is unlikely, though this remains to be seen.

I am optimistic in Big Auto catching up and providing a FSD-like experience at some point. All signs are pointing to this happening, albeit more slowly than projected back in 2018. (To be fair, everyone was going ape shit over autonomous driving back then.)

However, Big Auto also considers autonomy to be mostly a feature to check a box next to. Tesla does not. They see autonomy as critical to their survival. This is a big reason why they charge so much for FSD.

Tesla is hugely outspending the competition on this effort. It's not even close. Dojo, their training system, has, what, HUNDREDS of H100's in their cluster? They also have handfuls of well-compensated PhD's in this domain working on nothing but autonomy.

I am almost positive that no other auto manufacturer has anything like Tesla's autopilot program. Investing in this would be a huge moonshot and financial investment for them, and they are (a) bleeding money in trying to keep up with Tesla's EV platform in general, (b) bleeding money in trying to do away with ICE by 2030, and (c) way too conservative to make these kinds of risks (see also: how they are handling the outdated dealer model).

The best alternative we'll probably get is Big Auto slapping MobileEye's new platform on their cars, but that's just another integration that is probably vehicle and model year dependent.

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So there you have it: a semi-rabid FSD fanboy's take on this article. They're not wrong, but they're also not thinking big enough.