Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is slowly being improved but it’s still not quite ready to reliably drive you from point to point without driver input and correction. There are certain areas where the system can already do this with apparent safety, yet there are some environments that still pose quite a challenge for the system.
CNBC wanted to see how good Tesla FSD is, so it contacted three Tesla owners from around the country and went along for a ride with them with the system activated. First is a Model Y driver from Brooklyn, New York, who is a self-confessed Tesla fan and company stock owner.
As in other instances where we’ve seen FSD try to make sense of New York traffic, FSD doesn’t do a particularly good job here. It doesn’t fare much better with the second driver, from San Francisco, California, since FSD still doesn’t really do dense cities with complex intersections very well.
They mentioned at one point during the San Francisco drive, when the Model 3 decided to take the first exit out of a roundabout and then rerouted to avoid it, that the vehicle opted for another route just so it didn’t have do go all the way around the roundabout. We can’t say that’s what really happened based solely on the video, but it would mean FSD Beta can’t quite handle very small roundabouts like the one the vehicle chose to avoid.
FSD does redeem itself in this video, when placed in a less crowded, more suburban environment. The drivers featured in this video were all running version 10.8.1 and the third driver says that even though this version fixed some very common issues he was observing, it caused others and FSD actually began disengaging for different reasons he had not encountered before.
