Elon has done us Tesla owners a solid and given us a free full month of self driving. To me, the current 12k price is pretty outrageous and the 199 monthly subscription is a bit more interesting … but free is a good price. 🙂

So how well does it work? Well, I found myself pleasantly surprised. I was not expecting a hands off experience and certainly did not get it. But I did think it made my driving experience easier.

My initial experience was with engaging it on the highway. At the default setting of Average (Chill/Average/Aggressive) I still found it passing too aggressively for my taste, so I ended up turning on a “minimize lane changes for this drive” setting. That was much less aggressive … almost equivalent to autopilot. Later in the day, I would discover that using the turn stalks directs the FSD to perform a lane change. So, in summary, I settled on FSD’s chill mode and without the “minimize lane changes” setting as my sweet spot. If I want a lane change, the turn stalk does that for me and I don’t find that burdensome.

We passed through a couple of tollways … but I was not brave enough to keep FSD engaged to see what it would do.

Later in the day, I found myself on some rural highways. FSD was not good about going with the flow of traffic or hovering around the speed limit + the specified offset. For some reason, it would constantly go about 10 mph slower than I wanted it to and there seemed to be no way to get past this short of constantly depressing the accelerator to encourage it to go faster. It also constantly reset its speed, requiring me to constantly fiddle with the scroll wheel or accelerator.

For two short trips, FSD did quite well navigating to the destination, but, at the final turn-in, it would turn in early, missing the destination completely and requiring me to correct it. This even contradicted the nav system guidance, which seems odd.

The behavior at stop lights was rather strange. It would both launch too aggressively and brake too aggressively at these rural highway traffic lights. I suspect the combination of highway speed limits (50 to 60 mph) interspersed with traffic lights is causing it to accelerate and decelerate too quickly … as, by way of comparison, I didn’t see such behavior in the Bay Area. This seems like something that shouldn’t be an issue in 2024, but it also seems easily solvable? In general, I think there needs to be some negative reinforcement in the training around excessive G forces. This type of issue seems so unnecessary.

Finally, along with FSD came Autopark. This was a big favorite with the wife, even though I am the one mostly driving. Once you slow to a crawl in a parking lot, an external visualization comes up with parking spots that you can tap on to select them. Then, you can press a button to park. The car will set itself up and then back in slowly.

I found this to be quite fun and convenient. It can even parallel park. However, I did not stress test its behavior with cars on both sides or spots that were too small, so someone else will have to give you that info. My only criticism of this feature is that while it parked well, it sometimes didn’t center itself perfectly within the lines. I found this odd as one imagines a computer should be able to do this perfectly every time.

Overall, irrespective of price, I found FSD to be useful, but still requiring some obvious tweaks, and Autopark to be quite useful. I do not know how much I would pay for these features and suspect I might not ever know unless the price comes down to something that would make it an actual decision. Tesla’s default autopilot is quite good and takes a lot of the pain out of long highway stretches, and I generally don’t find it that hard to park. I’m comfortable with my own driving style, but, in the future, could see myself shelling out for these features to keep my kid, wife, or parents safer.