[Flatcircle]

rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.

People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

[hazelnut]

Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

A while back, Tesla gave me free FSD for a month and so I tried it out. It drove me to work just fine, and I was impressed.

Then, on the way home it drove me home on the wrong side of the street and I had to take over. Such a silly mistake.

Similar to what you said; from there on out, it was more trouble than it's worth because you can't let your guard down.

[gwbas1c]

That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.

FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.

[stringfood]

2026 hyundai driver assist is ok but the lines have to be very clearly defined on the road and won't do much under 25 mph

[robotresearcher]

Same here. Car took a left turn through an orange filter light, detected oncoming traffic and decided 'nope' to the turn and just ... stopped ... in the oncoming lanes.

I find it less cognitive load to drive it myself. It's easier to predict what other vehicles will do than my own. Boo.

I have sympathy with the challenges as I worked in the field.

[SilverSlash]

Was this a Tesla with HW3 or HW4? Also, was it in the US or outside the US?

[elictronic]

This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.

It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.

[ryandrake]

This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."

[Mawr]

Bonus: Replacing "Tesla fans" with "AI fans" and "FSD" with "model" works too.

[slfnflctd]

There are too many things that can go wrong, you should never look away from the road for more than a second or two.

Adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot detection and emergency braking are all the modern automation I want in a personal vehicle at this point. Other drivers are unpredictable, I want to choose how I respond to their various forms of idiocy and not delegate to a black box.

[twothreeone]

That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.

[6510]

what do you think it is train drivers do?

[rzzzt]

Doing their absolute best with the steering wheel not to go off those pencil-thin tracks?

[c0balt]

Run on premade, static tracks with clearly divided "roads" from the rest of road participants.

Their role is to stop the train in an emergency and adjust to speed etc. to track/driving conditions.

Automating their job probably wouldn't even need the complex ML used for self-driving because the context is significantly simpler and relatively well defined. Maybe a team in city might need such a model but it would still be a significantly simpler task than driving a car.

[taylodl]

Getting paid to babysit. Tesla asks you to pay to babysit.

[Mawr]

Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.

I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling. Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!

Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?

A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.

[bloggie]

Should Tesla pay people to use Autopilot?

[wofo]

Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough attention

[tialaramex]

Oh don't worry the LLMs absolutely can kill us, just slightly more indirectly.

Triggering psychosis is not difficult and the LLM is easily capable of doing that. For a person they soon get freaked out and are likely to summon help. "Johnny started acting crazy and I'm not sure what to do, please come". But the LLM isn't a person, Johnny needs to know more about the CIA's programme to cross breed Venusians with Hollywood stars? Here's an itinerary with the address of a real hotel in LA and an entirely hallucinated CIA officer's schedule.

Next thing you know, Johnny is shot dead by officers responding to a maniac with a fire axe who broke into an LA hotel and was screaming about space aliens.

[razingeden]

>Johnny is shot dead by officers responding to a maniac with a fire axe who broke into an LA hotel and was screaming about space aliens.

I’m pretty sure LAPD is too used to this sort of thing to get spooked by it?

[Hikikomori]

They'll shoot you for much less.

[wookmaster]

Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.

[JPKab]

This is where teaching my teenage son how to drive was a great preparation. Also my wife is not a great driver and I've been married to her for 20 years.

Compared to either one of them, FSD is way less stressful and is a vastly better driver.

[LightBug1]

Exactly. Said it before and I'll say it again.

I do not want to be the 'manager of my car'. That'd be a downgrade from being an actual driver.

Lane Assist, auto-stop-start, cruise control are enough for me and have been available mostly for decades and require a similar amount of attention.

FSD is a busted flush and I can't believe those who got conned by it aren't more vocal.

[dzhiurgis]

300k people subscribe every month tho.

[LightBug1]

In 2025, McDonald's served over 65 to 70 million customers daily.

In 2024, Donald Trump received 77,302,580 votes.

Do you have a point?

[dzhiurgis]

Tons of people pay for it every month and rave about it. I suspect they find it useful.

[iamjake648]

I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?

[lateforwork]

Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!

[californical]

I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.

If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization

[ImPostingOnHN]

I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.

A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.

As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.

[rented_mule]

It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own driving behavior.

[jerlam]

It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.

[whiplash451]

Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.

[michaelt]

This is a subject that has been studied quite a bit, as there are a bunch of jobs where people have to monitor for rare emergencies, and react fast if an emergency should arise. Things like pilots on flights with autopilot; lifeguards watching for swimmers in distress; CCTV monitoring; operating airport X-ray machines, and so on.

One such study is "Performance consequences of automation-induced 'complacency'" (Parasuraman, Molloy & Singh, 1993) https://www.pacdeff.com/pdfs/Automation%20Induced%20Complace...

Previous studies had found that a human and a computer performed markedly better than either a human alone or a computer alone - but in those studies failures were quite common, so they didn't give the humans time to get bored or distracted.

When researchers got test subjects to perform a simulated flying task, monitoring a system with 99%+ reliability, they found the humans were proportionally much worse at stepping in than they were on less reliable systems.

Swimming pool lifeguards will often change posts every 15-20 minutes and and get a 10-15 minute break every hour, to keep things interesting enough that they can pay attention. Good luck getting drivers to do that.

[iamtheworstdev]

> Things like pilots on flights with autopilot;

Funny, I was going to mention exactly that. I'm a private pilot with a modern autopilot and flying is exhausting. Partly because the piston engine is rattling your brain the entire time but also because you're on high alert the entire time. You're always making sure the autopilot is keeping the plane on the blue (or green) line and is being predictable. And my smartwatch shows my heart rate is usually more elevated on autopilot than not.

[Mawr]

There's no way to model what a "tricky situation" may be to an opaque and ever-changing piece of self-driving software. It may fail in random ways at random times — it's completely, 100% unpredictable.

Therefore, you have to be 100% ready at all times to react in case anything that's possible happens.

Sounds way more tiring than just driving yourself and only having to account for the known, relatively easy to model human failure modes.

[amalcon]

The fundamental problem is that "staying alert for tricky situations" is essentially an exercise in prediction. FSD effectively hides a bunch of variables from you, making the prediction harder.

Have you ever been a passenger of an unpredictable driver? Was that stressful? Now, add not just the capacity but the responsibility to fix their mistakes.

[burnte]

This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.

[kube-system]

It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.

https://www.faistgroup.com/site/assets/files/1657/j3016-leve...

While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.

[marssaxman]

This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy part of the task, while making the hard part harder.

[kube-system]

It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.

[marssaxman]

I suppose that comfort is an individual thing - having to sit in place, staring ahead, watching the road, with nothing to do, sounds to me like a kind of torture. I rarely use cruise control; operating the vehicle is what keeps me engaged enough in the drive that my mind doesn't wander. But cruise control is obviously popular, so there are clearly many people who experience driving differently.

[MengerSponge]

"having to sit in place, staring ahead, watching the road, with nothing to do" while accepting full legal liability should anything go wrong

[darth_avocado]

> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.

[coffeemug]

In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.

On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.

What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.

Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.

[zwily]

Weird. Works great in cities for me. It’s been more than fancy cruise control for awhile.

[skinnymuch]

This is HN where people using text files only is the best way to do things and being semi-Luddite is the way.

FSD is amazing. Any notion it takes more effort to use it than driving is made up.

[expedition32]

Yeah it's cool if you're driving from Alice Springs to Darwin.

[bastawhiz]

I regularly ride down I-40 and back in North Carolina in my Rivian. I don't touch the wheel from the moment I get on the highway until the moment I get off, pretty much, unless I decide to take a rest stop. The universal hands free is as good or better than what my old Tesla had, and it'll get updates while a 2019 Model 3 almost certainly won't.

On the other hand, when I got FSD trials in the model 3 in the last year or so, it never managed to get more than ~a mile without me having to disengage.

[vel0city]

I've driven from Dallas to Houston barely having to touch the wheel or pedals the whole way. I don't own a Tesla.

Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation.

[iknowstuff]

Just go test drive one before you attempt to make a comparison, this statement is embarrassing tbh

[satvikpendem]

Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.

[vel0city]

Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.

And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.

Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.

[satvikpendem]

Which ones are better today?

[vel0city]

Ones that don't actively try and drive in front of trains in attempt to kill their operators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4

[iknowstuff]

literally every single competitor will do it because they don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg

[kube-system]

A used toyota corolla with comma 4

[bastawhiz]

My R1T's autonomous driving is decidedly better than Tesla autopilot. I say that from thousands of miles driven with each.

[realo]

Highest end mercedes?

[iknowstuff]

No. Their L3 was a scam, never sold and not actually planned to be sold anymore.

[kube-system]

So, the same as Tesla's L3.

[iknowstuff]

You can go to austin and take an unsupervised robotaxi right now

[4fterd4rk]

You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.

[ggreer]

Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.

1. https://www.tesla.com/customer-stories/cross-country-trip-fu...

[vel0city]

I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.

[ggreer]

David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn’t work for Tesla, and Tesla didn’t know about him until one of his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and Tesla went along with it, I’m not sure what to tell you.[1]

1. https://x.com/DavidMoss/status/2010608939751047484

[vel0city]

I don't know who David Moss is, I have no reason to trust him. His tweets I can see are practically nothing but Tesla and Grok shill posts.

[ggreer]

Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone has gone thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What information would need to exist to convince you of this?

[electriclove]

Ok, try it yourself with a new HW4 and you will see.

[vel0city]

I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD" (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every time its made some kind of moving violation including nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.

I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware needed for FSD a decade ago, for real this time.

I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its really there. This time it won't even run people over, and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of the time.

Personally I try and avoid systems that drive people in front of trains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4

[Mawr]

> over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.

You realize that a cross-country trip makes that achievement weaker, not stronger, right? That's just a bunch of highway driving, which is the easiest to automate and will have you racking up a lot of miles quickly.

City driving is the real test, not driving a milion miles in a straight line.

[expedition32]

I am interested to see how Tesla is going to drive in Dutch cities.

I will give car makers the benefit of the doubt: it is difficult to simulate real traffic. You can't do real life tests with teenagers on bicycles.

[bastawhiz]

This is so far removed from my personal lived experience that it's almost laughable. The auto park on Tesla is an accident waiting to happen.

[freeAgent]

He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.

[satvikpendem]

It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.

[aojdwhsd]

It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.

[andrewinardeer]

Which is why you put a sticker over it.

[olyjohn]

I've had this experience with Subarus. And it's fucking annoying. If the car is tracking where it should go, why do I need to put force on the wheel? It's like I have to keep steering it slightly the wrong way so that it fights back against me just a bit to keep itself in the lane. Otherwise, it thinks my hands aren't on the wheel and bitches the whole time. My hands ARE on the wheel, there's just been zero reason for me to put any turning force on it.

[morder]

It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.

[ggreer]

That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.

[shrubble]

I'm literally ready to pay cash for a Tesla, once they make one that doesn't have a steering wheel at all.

If I can't go to sleep lying down on the seat as a sole occupant, it's not yet self driving.

[platevoltage]

They announced a Tesla with no steering wheel a while ago. Don't tell me that was vaporware.

[Rohansi]

The big issue is that Tesla has sold all of their cars with an option for FSD until a month or two ago, but everything before 2023 is basically confirmed never going to actually have FSD because the latest software cannot run on the hardware in the old cars.

What's worse is this is all going to end up happening again when HW5 comes out and all of the HW4 cars start getting a trimmed down version of the FSD software from HW5, like HW3 is currently receiving.

[Rohansi]

God bless you dear

[xracy]

Yeah, why don't people talk about how my model s tried to drive itself into oncoming traffic more? Not just anyone can drive themself into oncoming traffic.

But like, actually the reason is that the cars consistently make dangerous decisions when they're not being used as "glorified cruise control", and the sensors mean they only even get to do that during "perfect driving conditions"

[reaperducer]

he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time

I thought the diver was supposed to keep hands on the wheel in case consuming hits wrong.

That's why Tesla fans buy those weighted gizmos to fool the computer into thinking they're still holding the steering wheel.

[iknowstuff]

not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.

[outlore]

Ehh I made the same trip (HW4, latest update), it’s not particularly impressive. The car gives up under harsh sunlight, tailgates big trucks leading to rock chips, switched lanes without signaling, sometimes would teeter on lane change and then swerve back.

[brcmthrowaway]

You experienced Time in a Flatcircle

[miltonlost]

I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend endangered