I wonder how this breaks down by state. Obviously driving from Miami to Orlando (or all the way to Tallahassee) is a different drive than driving in the cities of New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Austin or whatever densely populated city there is. I wonder if that influences decisions. Maybe consumers are saying "I've read so many weird headlines about FSD and its flaws, my typical daily drive is so complex, let me not even bother trying."
To me it seems like an incredible number of purchases. $1-3 billion on vaporware depending on pricing distribution. Interventions per mile seem to be 4 orders of magnitude worse than the big players in the space (though they limit operating area).
FSD has dramatically improved over the last three to four months. I would be interested in seeing the trend on that metric with autopilot. For my own experience I’ve found my interventions on local street driving has reduced to zero or a small number per session (which is an easier metric for me to mentally track than per mile, which is subject to highway and straightaway driving skewing down - local street driving is insanely complex, especially in an urban area and doubly so in a randomly planned urban area like seattle)
I think it's more that your perception of FSD has improved over the last 3 or 4 months.
As a non-Tesla driver forced to drive alongside many Teslas on my regular commute (I drive past Hawthorne, i.e., SpaceX), my experience is that FSD/AP has actually gotten worse. Phantom breaking, extreme tailgating, veering across double-yellow lines, right turns that narrowly miss pedestrians...
My coworker has a Tesla and he refuses to engage AP or FSD anymore. He had multiple interventions/disengagements during every drive (in his words: every few miles) and the last one involved his Tesla veering into the opposite lane because it mistook a drainage groove in the road for a lane marker.
My perception is based on my ability to successfully navigate in complex situations without intervention much more than before. As a user of the product that’s my primary concern. If it’s merely perception then it’s the perception I’m optimizing for, so great.
It’s improved based on a heuristic for you based on whatever area you tend to drive in. (Maybe interventions is reported by the car after a session, but it’s still a small sample size.)
At the end of the day, you still don’t have the feature you paid for, you’ve paid to be part of a (very risky) beta test. I don’t think that’s how most people buying FSD planned on this going.
I paid to fund research into autonomous driving, because I believe human steering of cars is a huge public health problem. I generally find FSD with highway driving level attention to be safer overall because it’s pervasively aware. I can’t maintain 360 degree awareness 100% of the time no matter how hard I try, but the car does. I keep my attention on the big dangers and monitor it’s performance closely and that’s enough to improve my overall driving safety. My goal was never press a button and take a nap - although that would be cool. My goal was to crowd fund research into methods to make driving assistance more complete and accessible to everyone. I have been satisfied with the progress, even if teslas research doesn’t pan out into what they advertised as their aspiration. Research rarely does. But I believe they’ve materially advanced the state of the art, have created broad awareness, and have driving investment in other R&D efforts in both established car makers, new entrants, tech companies, and labs, etc. Solving traffic safety will be akin to curing cancer, so I feel well rewarded for my donation. Plus, whether you want to accept my metric, my metric is the one that matters to me, and it was I who spent the money for it. (I would note again that per driving session accounts for most traffic accidents better than per mile as highway driving accumulates miles faster than local driving and has significantly less accidents, and all sessions start and end with local driving).
You didn’t buy “crowdfunded yada yada”. You bought a product called “full self driving”.
You did end up paying for Tesla to figure out how to build the product that didn’t exist when sold. (all of which should’ve become a useable product “next year” by the way)
The fact you’re ok with that doesn’t mean everyone else is. It doesn’t mean it was marketed ethically.
I’m not even saying you were swindled. I think teslas seem like nice cars. You’re just making the wrong argument.
They sold everyone a snickers. Just because you’re happy to have nougat and a little Carmel doesn’t change the fact you’re missing peanuts and chocolate.
> especially in an urban area and doubly so in a randomly planned urban area like seattle
Seattle is a wonderful planned city with very predictable roads, and very safe drivers.
I want to see how a tesla navigated Boston. That’s a city that wasn’t planned, has much more aggressive drivers, and inclement weather much more often.
Yes I have. It’s mostly a north/south grid everywhere, broken up a bit by neighborhood (eg belltown is different than Queen Anne). Some of the smaller neighborhoods (Mt Baker, near university, etc) aren’t great grids but you shouldn’t need to traverse them unless you live in it.
It varies a bit by neighborhood, but for the most part Avenues run north/south and streets run east west. Makes it very easy to navigate. Much of the city also uses numbered names, for avenues. If you’re trying to get to 22nd ave and you’re on 17th, you know you need to travel west - along a street (any street) and you should reach it.
On a larger level, the city planners have done a great job wrt gradual density increases in the city, and consistent up zoning along transit corridors. They’ve done a good job at promoting biking and alternative transit by building out a useful set of bike paths (if imperfect). I think the link expansions missed the mark, cost too much, and will take too long to build, but that doesn’t impact driving experience. I think the city should have dumped a ton of street cars (like in SLU and cap hill) across the city instead.
Boston, by comparison, is based on animal trails, and the grid is not consistent within a neighborhood, and is non existent across neighborhoods. The street names give you almost no insight into where you’re going.
Oh and as far as drivers go, Boston drivers are way way more aggressive. I won’t claim they’re worse at driving or break more laws, but they’re used to way more traffic, and they’re way more aggressive.
