[nate]

I know there’s a lot of Tesla/Elon hate here. I’m not denying any of it. I’m just sharing a genuinely strange experience I wasn’t expecting.

We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.

My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.

And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).

Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.

Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.

Then v14.2 landed.

Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.

Two moments that really stuck with me:

While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.

At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.

I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.

I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”

I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.

[bicepjai]

Tesla drivers, the road is for everyone and the road is not an experiment. Please drive carefully & responsibly as accidents can destroy families.

[HDThoreaun]

The sad reality is that tons of people are terrible drivers. I’d much rather have Tesla self driving over a significant portion of the population.

[crishoj]

This genuine technological breakthrough is real and should be a main topic when discussing Tesla.

Admittedly, the road to a working version of FSD has been a bumpy one, with many overly optimistic timelines, but now it's finally here, and it is almost completely ignored.

[soared]

It’s been “here” or “almost here” for a decade according to Elon. The world and media are sleeping the hype because they ate up the hype for so long and never saw results.

[Rumudiez]

This reads like “ChatGPT is a better programmer than me, so I let it do all the work”

You have a real obligation to learn how to drive. Your examples indicate neglect to take the safety of your family and others’ seriously

[AppleBananaPie]

I stopped at "this reads like ChatGPT" but maybe I'm old and cynical :/

Agree with your take 100%.

[fragmede]

Other than yelling at people, how are you getting drunk drivers off the road? Even though it's not perfect this shit works better than those assholes. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Unless you're volunteering to drive Uber for free for everybody everywhere, telling people to just be more responsible hasn't worked in the whole history of humanity.

[culi]

What percent of your driving is on highways vs urban? Almost all car brands today have incredible ADAS systems for highway driving. When Consumer Reports compared ADAS systems in 2023 Tesla was ranked 8th

https://www.consumerreports.org/-a2103632203/

If almost all of your driving is on highways then you could probably rely on ADAS for 99% of your driving with almost any other car brand as well

[tencentshill]

Why did you choose to run this through an LLM?

[driverdan]

It's great until it isn't and it runs over some kids or smashes into a school bus. It doesn't matter how good the software is, the hardware is inadequate to be safe.

[soared]

Does Elon’s politics and DOGE’s impact on the US change at all how you feel? Regardless of how great a Tesla, starlink, etc is I could never purchase on myself after the gutting DOGE did.

[DangitBobby]

Aren't those "smart quotes" associated with Mac software? And which part of the story did you find irrelevant?