At some point in the not-to-distant future I expect them to bundle most of what they currently package as FSD and sell it as enhanced autopilot again, for a whole lot less than $7K. Then I might buy it.
I was interested in FSD but autopilot is so shitty and unreliable it has convinced me to not buy the upgrade. If they want to sell an expensive upgrade from autopilot to FSD they need to make the autopilot flawless at its job.
Yes, I can't imagine spending $10k on the promise of some half-baked FSD--especially when regular Autopilot is a reality today, and it's freaking fantastic. I, too, use it daily.
Yeah, that’s fair, although FSD also goes for $12k right now and you can get the Comma 3 + required car harness for like $2400, so if it’s providing me at least 20% the value of FSD then I’m happy. I’d say it probably gives ~70% of the value of FSD, and without phantom braking. Not hating on the progress Tesla is making with FSD, but I think it is overpriced for now.
Also, openpilot has gotten much better over the past year, you might be surprised if you get the chance to try it again. They’re not even using the whole field of view of the new wide angle camera in the model currently, although it’s coming in openpilot 0.8.14. Their rate of improvement now that they’re developing for the Comma 3 is really impressive.
I don’t disagree. What I mean to say is that FSD is not worth $12k or whatever insane price it is today and there’s no sign that it’ll ever be worth it in the near-term 2 years. And when I say FSD I mean the literal FSD that’s supposed to navigate everything (city, highway, weather, etc) from one address to another address cross country with zero interventions.
With that said, yes I agree, highway driving with Autopilot is worth somewhere on the order of $1-2k to me personally. It’s made long highway drives a lot more pleasant — just used it this past July 4th for 500+ miles of highway driving.
Just bought 2021 Model 3 SR+. Did not opt for the FSD package because the features it delivers were no worth $10k to me. The included Autopilot is more than sufficient for my foreseeable needs.
For me, “foreseeable” also includes FSD actually becoming a real software package we can download for a fee. I expect that package along with Tesla Network would be worth somewhere around $US30k/year for the first couple of years until no more taxis are driven by humans.
I also expect that either FSD/TN will become available as a subscription option where I can send my car to take part in Tesla Network while I am not using it, or I will be able to finance the purchase of a new FSD capable vehicle and the car will earn me enough money to cover the cost of ownership and participation in TN ie: it will cover the cost of commercial registration and insurance, tyres, maintenance, and payments on the principal + interest loan used to purchase the vehicle. I don’t expect it to be printing money for me, but I do expect a better ROI than having my money in a term deposit or superannuation (somewhat like 401(k)) account.
IMHO once any vehicle hits the commercial market with fully autonomous capability, the concept of private ownership of passenger vehicles will be dead within ten years.
I fully expect this Model 3 to be the last car I buy for my own use. I anticipate robot taxis being reality within a decade, even for limited scenarios such as inside specific geofences covering the “safe” roads inside a city’s metropolitan limits, and the well maintained highways linking those geofences regions.
In the meantime I am enjoying the comfort of a car designed for long distance travel with pleasant seats, quiet interior (quieter than my Jazz), and reasonably attractive styling.
Bought a Model Y last month. I did not opt for FSD.
If the rumors come true and they offer it as a monthly subscription service, I might buy it for a few months at a time for summer road trips. Navigate on Autopilot would make a long drive like that more comfortable.
But otherwise I made the decision on the feature set it has now, and I can’t justify spending 20% of the car’s price on that.
If they brought out the “enhanced autopilot” feature they offered in the EU for roughly equivalent to USD $4000 I’d jump on that in an instant.
I agree 100% on why I purchased FSD at $2k. But I'll add that I almost never use Autopilot, as I've had too many negative experiences with it. I do frequently use (and generally love) the smart cruise control feature, though - steering the car in traffic just isn't that much work for me and I don't have to worry about the car lunging to the side when an exit ramp splits off.
I think it heavily depends on when they bought it given the increase in pricing.
I bought it at $7k, knowing full well that I’d never likely see true FSD, but the features it added were worth it to me like navigation on autopilot, and lane changes on the highway. We figured that just those two were enough to spring for it, given we commuted a lot and did road trips a lot. So it was nice to have it take over every once in a while.
At $7k, it was pricey but not very out of line with other car companies upgrade packages.
I think the ROI really depends therefore on what price point it was got at (someone who got it at $3k probably likes it a lot more than someone who spent 10k), and what they were expecting out of it.
I think true FSD is a smoke and mirrors trick that Tesla will not achieve with their current sensor loadout.
FSD has been sold since... years ago. I don't even remember when they started selling FSD, its just an option on Tesla cars for a long long time now.
That's the thing: the features of this are are named "autopilot" and "full self driving". What do you expect people to do when they spend $5000 or $10,000 on "full self driving" ?
I agree with you. I don't personally have a problem with the claims around Enhanced Auto Pilot, but the FSD option is really bad marketing, IMO. It is nowhere close to being ready to do the things that they talk about and may never achieve some of them.
The owners who buy that are really donating a few thousand dollars to Tesla without getting anything in return. Its really strange.
I always thought people who “prepaid” for FSB were kind of silly. So I don’t have much sympathy for rich people who drop such money on things that don’t exist yet.
It seems 360k people have bought this since it went on sale in 2016[0]. 7 years is a long time to wait.
I imagine people will end up end of lifing their cars before FSD actually comes out.
It’s odd though as I have a friend who didn’t buy the total one but prepaid for some things and they say they are pretty happy with what it can do now- adaptive cruise control and lane changes. So that seems similar to Subaru and Toyota and everyone else’s adaptive cruise control. And I think those folks charge a few grand too.
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.
I’ve been using FSD in my 3 for months now and I’d miss a car without it. It’s still definitely beta quality, but it’s a clear step up from enhanced autopilot and can take me from the on-ramp to my office without intervention (about thirty miles in California’s central coast). It would be door-to-door, but it doesn’t work well in parking lots and there’s a couple complicated intersections in my small town that it can’t handle yet.
I bought it, but I bought it as a donation towards funding R&D in the space of autonomous driving. I’ve found FSD useless outside of highway driving, which adaptive cruise control does ok at. That has however changed in the last year and the FSD has improved dramatically over months to the point I can reasonably navigate door to door in a hostile and negligently adversarial driving environment like seattle without fear of imminent death. If I were evaluating it on “what could I have materially attained for the price of FSD” I don’t think I got a good deal. But again, I didn’t spend the money with that in mind. I bought it with the idea that $3b in consumer crowd funding of FSD will materially advance the end of human intermediated driving - which I think is akin to curing cancer.
I find highway driving more relaxing using FSD. It will request lane changes appropriately and then I can just approve instead of having to constantly wonder which lane I should be in to make the exit in time. I have to take over quite often but on the whole it’s definitely made driving more enjoyable. So I use it almost every time on the highway. I bought it when it was 7k and at least half of my motivation was to see how it progressed (since I am in the AI field myself), which it has significantly since then.
I was one of the first people to get FSD Beta access and have given it a try every single time they pushed an update, and honestly, it's unusable and dangerous.
The car just does not behave like a regular driver in any capacity. It's a neat trick to show when there is nobody on the road, but besides that, I have lost all faith in FSD ever coming out in any meaningful way. I only paid $2k for FSD ($7k total w/ Enhanced Autopilot), but even that is too much for what FSD actually is.
At some point in the not-to-distant future I expect them to bundle most of what they currently package as FSD and sell it as enhanced autopilot again, for a whole lot less than $7K. Then I might buy it.
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