Yeah, I bought it in 2018 with full knowledge that it would be many years before it worked at all. Today I used it for more than an hour around town. It's amazing. I won't buy any car without an equivalent feature in the future. And today there's nothing equivalent in any other car you can buy.
A friend of mine just got one, ex-Chrome core dev so a fairly sharp guy, his one month review was that it was incredibly capable but had already done two maneuvers that would've led to an accident without intervention.
Sure, it still needs supervision. Today. But it has definitely passed a threshold where it is now safer to supervise it than to drive without it. And it continues to improve quickly. I expect it to work unsupervised within two years (and unlike Elon I have not been saying this every year for the past decade).
The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.
That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.
From the very beginning of self-driving people have been making this claim that supervised systems would cause complacency that would make them perversely less safe. A lot of people believe it, but it's always been just an opinion based on speculation, not data. It's actually an empirical question. The data is in and this claim is definitively disproven. There is no increase in crashes when people use FSD. Not back when it was actually bad, not recently when it was just OK, and still not today when it's actually quite good but not perfect.
With all of the videos circulating online of the Tesla self-driving getting itself into extremely dangerous situations (like increasing speed once a child appears on the road), I'm not really sure that their self-driving tech is there yet
It's less of a bet against him.
It's more of a bet for the future of humanity.
And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
Elon helped save the future of humanity by causing a massive shift in how people treat opinions that don't goose step with the rest of the media. That happened when he bought Twitter and it continues with grok being balanced (and confirmed as such by independent testing of multiple models).