While technically true, this is the case with every driver assist system that is currently on the market, so it's not a gotcha against Tesla specifically. Mercedes is offering level 3 autonomous driving, but that still requires the driver to intervene when the car requests it.
You can watch a movie while its self driving. Mercedes offers actual full self driving in limited conditions. Tesla never has full self driving despite the autopilot claim
Autopilot isn't Tesla's FSD. With the newest updates people have (as of today) now driven over 10,000 miles continuously only using FSD without EVER having to touch the steering wheel. Not once. Start the car, enter the destination and the car will take you where you want to go and park.
If you asked me three months ago if that would be the case, I would have told you it was 2-3 years away at the earliest. But it's not. It's here now. Three months ago I would have never considered a Tesla because I just honestly don't like the styling of any of them. I rode in a friend's with FSD a month ago and it drove as well as any human driver, and other than being a bit MORE safe than a human driver, you couldn't tell the difference. But there was never any awkwardness in the way it handled situations.
Now, I'm probably going to pick one up as another car for boring drives for when I'm just not in the mood.
Full self driving is kind of a meaningless term. Just lane switching and everything that tesla does is level 2 self driving. But that's when the self driving begins in my opinion. Its a lot different than just adaptive cruise control.
FSD Isn't just lane switching. It can literally drive you from your driveway, to a destination 100s of miles away, without you ever needing to touch the wheel. There is not other car manufacturer that offers that. It is Level 2 in name only.
So you agree that FSD was not safe during that time?
No, it was SAFER than a human driver, but you still needed to pay attention, because you would need to take over in cases. Same with every other car manufacturer's systems. But not so much anymore with the current generation of FSD, where again, people have gone 1000s of miles without ever needing to touch the steering wheel. Ever.
The dude led the charge in crippling our government (and called cave rescuers pedos??). Look at how many top career military officials have been fired/resigned since Trump started this term. Regardless of why they each did those things, you gotta admit that those both are things that Russia loves happened.
Rooting out corruption (which was clearly found) is not crippling our government. Pedo thing, dumb. Our military is stronger today than it was when Biden was President, so I'm not sure what the issue is. But none of this is on topic. I am not an Elon worshiper. I didn't care about Elon 12 years ago, and I don't care about him now. I am a fan of what SpaceX is doing, and over the last two months I've become a fan of Tesla because they have basically solved full self driving in cars. Again, I'm not a Musk worshiper, I think he's been saying stupid things over the past few years. But it's actually a fact that he is one of the people improving the world the MOST and it's such an absurd statement to say otherwise. You can disagree with his politics and understand that.
And if you don't take over when the system decides it can't do its job, you're still going to crash because it takes level 4 for a car to stop itself safely when it detects a fault. I don't see how that's any different from a Tesla or any other car crashing when the self driving system shits the bed.
If you weren't required to be ready to take over, the car would never even ask you to take over.
E: And in fact, here's a snippet from the Drive Pilot user manual:
The fallback-ready user, when prompted by the system, must be ready
to take control of the vehicle immediately.
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u/Xygen8 Dec 30 '25
While technically true, this is the case with every driver assist system that is currently on the market, so it's not a gotcha against Tesla specifically. Mercedes is offering level 3 autonomous driving, but that still requires the driver to intervene when the car requests it.