FSD Newbie

Because the other car companies advertise in the newspapers and would be very unhappy if the press reported, "Hey, Teslas are the only car in the world that can reliably drive themselves! It's revolutionary!" Whatever paper wrote that article would lose millions overnight from auto advertisers who are the biggest customers for many media sources. Also, Elon's not a popular guy right now, so nobody wants to praise Elon.

What's interesting is that despite its shortcomings, the current version of FSD is so impressive that many people who can't stand Musk and his ideologies are still buying Teslas. I'm one of them.

Similar boat. I test drove M3 and MY in 2020 and FSD was a parlor trick,if that. Decided to demo it in January since the FSD purchase deadline was approaching and I was blown away how well it works. I was surprised how little hype there is surrounding such a seemingly capable product. Part of that might just be Tesla. For whatever reason they think they are above advertising and public affairs. While I love FSD for what it is today, I think most people would not really be practically interested until it can be unsupervised.

Same. I cannot stand him, he’s about the antithesis of my views personally, but I genuinely do love Teslas and I genuinely do love FSD to the point that I would still make the choice today to buy another one.

It makes the news when some idiot using Autopilot (not FSD) tries to take a nap and crashes. And the general public thinks FSD and AP are the same thing. So they come to a conclusion that it’s unsafe.

Because of the lies

There's also the issue that, apparently, FSD is very hit or miss. There are many stories and posts about how it (is perfect / sucks). Setting aside arguments about bias or motivations to sell something, it seems like there are a ton of variables for any given person using FSD. Like, which version of hardware, which version of software, have the cameras been cleaned and calibrated recently, what was the weather, did the navigation choose the "correct" route, etc. So what I tell people is that nuance is very hard to advertise, and that nuance is where FSD exists currently. Some people always or almost always get great results from it. Some people never do. I would *guess* that most people's experience is in the middle between. If it works to your satisfaction on your local roads, great! Subscribe! If it doesn't work or stops working then don't subscribe. Tesla as a brand is inherently controversial and it can be really hard to cut through the noise online. I personally think that, strictly in terms of technology, newest FSD SW on a HW4 Model Y on a sunny midday is seriously impressive. But older FSD on HW3 in a drizzle might do some scary things. Both of those are the product labeled "FSD". People will likely yell at me for this post that their HW3 is perfect, but that misses the point. Tldr; "YMMV, try it on your roads" can be a tricky sell.

Continuous updates don’t make news

Just ordered my second 2026 model Y premium because my family fights over who gets to use FSD _this_ weekend. It is amazing. I’m also trying to help y’all out by pretty much guaranteeing that HW5 will come out next month. :)

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Good news doesn’t make the news

Rivian’s a good alternative. Especially once the R2 releases, and the point-to-point driving comes out end of this year (if their timelines are accurate). But if you reserve an R2 now, you probably won’t get it until mid 2027 at the earliest. So point-to-point should be out by the time you actually get the car. This is basically what I did. I reserved it immediately after their Autonomy day a few weeks ago. And by the time my reservation comes up (in 2027 probably), I can decide to buy or not depending on their autonomy progress.

I test drove a Model 3 Jan 28th. Have been seeing all the YouTubers and wanted to try it out. Ordered my first EV on the 31st, a 2026 Model 3 Performance. I’m hooked and torn. I’m a car guy that hates traffic, so I’m about 60% FSD so far. Lol

Same!!

But like you said, the R2 isn't out yet. And no one knows how its self driving will compare to Tesla's FSD when it does come out. Fortunately you can cancel if it's not looking good. In my case the timing was right so I traded my other car in for the Model Y and so far I'm very happy with it. Still hate Elon but damn, his people made a very nice car!! Although what I keep seeing and reading about Grok is pretty terrifying.

A [college football player rolled his Tesla and it caught fire](https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2026/03/01/colorado-football-backup-qb-dominiq-ponder-dies-car-crash/88936554007/) this past weekend so the ev fire will get the most attention in the news I'm sure. Sad but speed kills no matter what car you are driving.

Same.

Current Teslas are level 5; the regulators have not caught up. My friend has an older model S, and was impressed with my Highland. HW4 and FSD V14 is essentially a taxi.

I guess if you NEED a new car within the next 1.5 years, then R2 isn't really an option. But for everyone else, that wait might actually be a blessing in disguise. Reserving now (this late in the game) means you have time to see how things will go before you gotta make a decision.

I wonder this all the time. I tell people how great it is and I get 2 responses. my car will never drive itself I hate the idea, or my car has that too. Talking about whatever adaptive cruise control their car has. People don’t realize that fsd is science fiction. I’ve had it turn in the wrong driveway or not make a right on red when it could. It makes mistakes. This mistakes are still light years ahead of adaptive cruise control. It’s like inventing a cure for cancer and people complaining about how it gives them dry mouth. No matter what happens to Tesla I hope fsd continues growing

It watches you and will turn off if you don’t watch the road.

Right, and I’m an early adopter techie, so I thought I would’ve been notified. But I didn’t know! Then I traveled to San Jose and a friend drove me around in his full self driving Tesla X and I’m like WTF? You can do that? Guess what I did? I went home and I bought a new model X.

Same lol

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I’ve got a gen2 R1S, the highway assist is nice but has some issues still with lanes that open up wide ( it has a hard time staying left or right justified, it tries to center). I don’t think Rivian will have a v12 FSD comparable product until end of the year IMO. v14 comparable maybe in 2028.

I think it really depends on where you are with the car and what conditions you’re trying to drive it in. Daytime in the bay area, probably the best mapped locale for Tesla’s? Works great!

It took Tesla a single year to go from v12 to v14 lol. Rivian will have Lidar, which should speed up the training.

That’s the exact boat I’m in. I just bought one for the reason that it is the best self driving car on the market right now.

You were probably someone that laughed every time Elon said FSD would be solved "this year". What makes you think Rivian can do it? The fact that they have a tiny fraction of Teslas training data and a tiny supercomputer to train on? This is like Mercedes catching up to Tesla with level 3...on straight highways, in perfect weather, going less than 40mph, with a lead car. Tesla has FSD now. Everything else is hypothetical and may take 5 years or more. A lot of anti-Elon folks are going to waste big money buying Tesla alternatives only to discover they don't have the same capabilities at all.

I have family that is both left wing and violently anti-Trump/Musk and right wing and violently anti-EV. Blown away by FSD. I'm expecting referral credits later this year.

Have you actually seen their autonomy day? The RAP 1 chip is more powerful than HW4. They had demos (ride alongs) even before UHF was released to the public. RJ has a very different style than Elon. Elon screamed and yelled at what they’re working on and made promises when they’ve barely started. RJ on the other hand is much more reserved, he often under promises and over deliver. I was confident Tesla would reach FSD even before v10 because the theory and technology made sense. I’m more confident about Rivian today than I was about Tesla back in the days. Rivian won’t beat Tesla in FSD. Tesla had almost had a 10 year head start. But I think they will close the gap, it won’t take them a whole 10 years to get to where Tesla is today. Tesla had a first mover’s advantage. So they were able to capture the market with no alternatives. Rivian has a second mover’s advantage. They learn from the mistakes of Tesla, use the battery infrastructure, gigacasting, supercharger infrastructure, structural battery design, and learned mistakes of Tesla FSD. They need to fight uphill for market shared but their R&D budget and timelines are much more compressed because they don’t need to reinvent everything. People look at Rivian’s financials and worry. I look at it and laugh. Rivian is in a much better situation in their R2 ramp up than Tesla was during the Model 3 ramp up. Did I mention they’re *ahead* of schedule for the ramp up? Don’t get me wrong, Teslas are great. I currently own the Model Y and have 3x my money on their stock. Objectively best cars on the market right now. But serious competition is behind them, and I think people (both Tesla and its fans) are resting on their laurels.

Rivian is aspiring to release a fleet capable of self driving on ~70% of roads. That's their immediate goal, taken straight from Autonomy Days promise of 3.5 million miles across the US and Canada. And not construction zones or other less-than-perfectly marked roads. They'll eventually get there, but for someone looking to buy a car that can drive them around right now, waiting for Rivian is not the answer. That's a 5 year wait to get to where Tesla is today. And Tesla is moving faster than anyone in the space. For instance, Rivian's magic chip pales in comparison to Tesla's AI5. And Tesla already has 8.5B miles of real world data and multiple times that amount in synthetic data. And Tesla is accumulating that data faster than anyone and has one of the world's largest super-computer training on that data. So while Rivian is at least 5 years behind Tesla, 5 years from now Tesla will be 10 years ahead. All of this is to say, if you have an elderly family member who feels unsafe driving, don't wait for Rivian. Buy them a Tesla.

I think it's closer to L3, just Tesla won't call it that so they don't have to assume responsibility when it screws up. Which considering how many miles of FSD their cars have, is a very low number and statistically very safe. Much safer than human drivers.

The older you get, the less time you have to sit around waiting for the next new shiny thing to come out (which is a permanent state of being since there's always something new and better in the works). You make the most of your time and buy what makes you happy today, then if you make it to tomorrow, worry about tomorrow once you get there!!

That’s the thing though their architecture allow them to NOT be always 5 years behind. Right now they’re about 5 years behind. In about a year that could very well be 2 years behind. Tesla’s stubbornness to not use lidar slowed down their training. Visual-only means they need MASSIVE amounts of data. Using lidar, Rivian, if the theory pans out, could need a fraction of the data to match the performance. Waymo is the perfect example of this. Do you think their tiny fleet in a handful of cities is anywhere near Tesla’s literally millions of miles everyday on all roads? Yet Waymo, though geofenced (like Tesla’s robotaxi) is doing well. Now imagine Waymo’s architecture with Tesla’s fleet size. That’s where Rivian will be in 2-3 years. Hell, after the first 2 years the fleet will probably be big enough for the amount of data they need with their architecture.

Unless what you want is a Rivian. Then it makes zero sense to buy a car now (any car), lose out on all that first year depreciation, just to buy a Rivian a year later. Better to wait a single year. This isn’t an iPhone, after all. And if you’re rich enough to be able to lose out on depreciation like that, why are you even waiting for the R2? Get the R1!

There is always a newer, better model coming out. It's a perpetual and permanent waiting game if that's what you're into. I'm not. With pretty much anything I'm into, cars, guitars, home theater, etc, I wait until what's on the market suits my needs and wants at that particular moment, unless I know for sure with 100% certainty that within a short time, something significantly better will be coming out. I could have easily waited for HW5 to come out but no one knows when that will happen and right now, the current version of FSD on HW4 suits my needs perfectly. You'll be waiting forever if your philosophy is "wait until the next model comes out, it will be better", because when that next newer better model comes out, there will already be another next-er, newer-er model right behind it.

Normally I'd agree with you, if it was a phone, a vacation, or something under $5000. But a car absolutely is worth waiting for, especially when it's this close. It's basically a scaling factor: something less than $5000, I'll get it now if I want it. $5000 - $100k, I'll wait up to 5 years for the better product if it's within that timeframe. $100k+, I'd be willing to wait over a decade if it's going to be released/built within 10-15 years.

> I'd be willing to wait over a decade if it's going to be released/built within 10-15 years. In 10 or 15 years, when that technology you've been waiting for comes out, there will be something much much better coming out right after it, so you'll be waiting another 10 years for that next new and shiny thing that sounds a hell of a lot better than that thing you just waited 10 years for..... Like I said, a perpetual waiting game. Some people enjoy that, I don't. That said, if there's really nothing available today that really meets your needs or wants (let's face it, a car like a Tesla is not a need, it's a want. A need for a vehicle to get from point A to point B can be filled by a 2009 Honda Fit...ask me how I know...), I agree that you don't lose anything by waiting. But the current version of the Model Y and its FSD meets my needs and my wants perfectly right now and there is literally nothing else on the market now or with any guarantee of a time frame in the future.

In the US consumer market, it is the ONLY self driving car right now. I don't consider the ones that are geofenced and limited to 40mph to be true self-driving.

lol...yeah, quite the dilemma Elon caused for himself. Piss off the primary demographic who used to buy his cars while aligning himself with a demographic that hates EVs. Brilliant! He's lucky the cars are so good. Today marks a full week that I've had mine and I'm still blown away by it. I've been in FSD every single possible minute. It doesn't understand certain local traffic patterns, and I don't really expect it to yet, but 95% of the time I can just sit back and relax while it fights SoCal rush hour traffic for me. It has reduced my driving stress immensely.

Every time you disengage, do the verbal feedback to the system. I almost never disengage, but every time I do I give the feedback. Remember, you're helping it get to 99.9999999....%