Our car drives itself: FSD lands in Australia
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Our car now drives itself! We choose the destination, and it drives all the way there, turning left, right, indicating, changing lanes, negotiating roundabouts. It’s amazing and boringly uneventful – a combination I heard called “bore-mazing”.
Tesla released FSD Supervised in Australia a few weeks ago, for purchase ($10k). This week they also started offer it as a monthly subscription ($149 = $5 per day). We subscribed for one month to try it out.
Yesterday I was picking up Amber from Melbourne airport, and decided to try FSD on the way. I paid the subscription through the Tesla app. It seemed to be instantly available, with no additional software download.
I hopped in the car. It read my destination from my linked calendar. I pressed the FSD button. The car started reversing out of my driveway. At our street, it failed to figure out what to do, and started heading the wrong way down our no through road, over the grass. Francis was watching from the garage, keeling over with laughter. Not a good start to my first FSD trip. It had the same issue the next day, leaving our driveway.
I laughed, hit the brake and turned the car around. Then I pressed the FSD button again. It drove to the (correct this time) end of our street, indicated, checked for traffic, completed the turn. It drove me all the way to the airport with basically no issues. It negotiated the complexity of the exits and merges near the leading arches in the city better than I do. I often take the wrong road here.
It changed lanes as needed. But I could also just hit the indicator whenever I wanted to get it to change lanes.
Along the way, it recalculated the route to “save 13 minutes” due to heavy traffic. It took an early exit, but then mistakenly rejoined the freeway. But it was all smooth, without stress or sudden movements. It successfully took the next exit, and took me along a windy quiet road to bypass the freeway.
Near the airport, turning left at one intersection, it mistook the concrete section to the left of the road as being part of the road. I took control of the steering to be veer to the right. I also couldn’t tell whether the concrete was part of the road, so I will let that slide. The screen then asked me to tell it what went wrong, so it could learn. I hit the microphone button and gave a ten second explanation of my intervention.
The return trip from the airport was uneventful and near perfect. It’s just a bit slower than I’d like through windy roads.
Before you say anything, yes, we watched the 60 Minutes Australia story this week on Tesla’s automated driving. It told some grim stories. Any car driving is dangerous, so we take it seriously. We also watched the full video on YouTube by Sixty Minutes of driving through Sydney. Just the driving, without the sensationalised editing. It mirrored my experience – amazing and boringly capable, with one intervention.
i have HW3 so i’m reading this in envy 😅
Like you we are pondering the “value” of fsd.
I do like the idea of the car largely making the decisions, but wonder about the real value compared to cost for the mostly local driving we do, driving that is easy and very, very familiar to us.
Then again, I think for a long trip, like VIC to QLD, might be worthwhile, however adding $149 to the cost of the trip, could maybe fly.
I really wish FSD was say $60pm, would then be a choice between it and foxtel or kayo or prime or such and I reckon I would buy it.
For the moment jury is out.
Going forward, if you keep it, could you may consider doing a bit of a cost/benefit post in two or three months time, might help me, (and maybe others) with the choice? Could be things I am not factoring in. Cheers.
After early elation I’ve decided to follow the screen prompt to keep my hands ( well at least one) on the wheel.
The car has consistently made some potentially dangerous errors turning towards the lane for oncoming traffic at a couple of poorly designed busy local intersections, one left and one right, Both involve sharp hills in and over 90 degree turns in our hilly bit of Sydney. It has occasionally seemed as though it hasn’t worked out what to do when both sides of à local narrow street are parked out and we’re trying to get along the one remaining lane space while another car has already entered that area coming the opposite way.
I’m also very aware that any computer can have a freeze glitch at any moment, so I’m ready to take control.
Still my overall view is that the system drives the car extremely well by itself, but certainly not perfectly, and that with my active supervision it is extremely safe. It’s a different driving expérience for sure and I wonder whether the supervision will ever be really removed.
In the meantime I’m loving it and my own brain is learning a lot.
Based just on this test:
1. FSD failed to leave my weird driveway. Human required.
2. Driving to airport: comparable to human.
3. Negotiating the spaghetti junctions in Melbourne: FSD did a better job than (this) human does.
4. Discerning whether the concrete side of the road should be used for turning: FSD and human equally confused.
5. Accelerating to find a gap in traffic to merge: human slightly better.
6. Faster through tight curves: human better.
Overall for this trip: I found that FSD (supervised) made it easier. Not perfect enough to be unsupervised, but very helpful.