While not without its faults and issues, like all vehicles, my Tesla really is an overall excellent car. While I love the car it’s probably best not to get me started on a lot of things Elon Musk has done recently. One of the few good things he’s done is give everyone a free month sample of Full Self Driving (FSD). Which, from a sales perspective, seems like a “clever idea”. Really, It’s the drug dealer’s tactic: try a free sample and you’ll keep coming back.

During this trial, Tesla also significantly reduced the cost of purchasing FSD—both the outright purchase price from $12,000 to $8,000, and the subscription from $200/month to $100/mo. In my mind that brings the yearly subscription from “Roughly $2500/year” to “About $1000/year”, which is almost in the realm of reasonable.
Lets start with The Good

The visualizations are quite impressive. I love being able to look at the display to see what the car sees, feeling like the car actually understands its surroundings on the road. This is a major step up from the basic Autopilot visualizations, which only showed the lane you were in and other lanes as simple lines – more or less a projection of basic mapping onto the often imperfect world. In contrast, FSD visualizations show road markings and real-life line curves. It also indicates if nearby cars are using blinkers or brake lights, enhancing driver awareness.
Another feature I enjoyed is the ability to change lanes on the freeway more seamlessly. Previously, you had to turn on your blinker, disable Autopilot, move over, then reactivate Autopilot and turn off the blinker. Not that it was a huge inconvenience but now, a simple tap on the blinker lets the car wait for a free space and move over—quite handy.
The Bad
However, FSD drives like a 16-year-old and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing – but mostly bad. It is very impressive that the car is capable of driving itself down the road and doesn’t seem totally robotic about it. It’s not totally robotic in the way it drives and it certainly get the job done. The fact that we have gotten from cars without any sort of smarts to a car that can drive itself, even if not exceptionally well, in just a few years’ time is just really impressive from a technologist’s perspective.

However, saying it drives like a 16-year-old is not exactly gracious. If you’ve ever taught someone to drive, or been in the car with a new driver you know that their driving is very herky-jerky. They tend to be very unsure of themselves. The steering is overcompensating, their acceleration and braking are rougher, more frequent, and stronger than necessary. Certainly anything but smooth. Most especially they are very hesitant doing things like making unprotected turns. All of these things are true about FSD, and more.
While I said I liked the feature of changing lanes, this is also one of the major detriments of FSD. In one instance, while attempting to switch to a faster lane, FSD activated the blinker, began to move over, then abruptly hit the brakes and aborted the maneuver. This was in the middle of the day during a not particularly busy time on the freeway. Yes, there was traffic in the left lane approaching the rear of the Tesla, but nothing so close as to be even remotely concerning. As a human, I would have easily made that turn or that lane change without issue, however the car aborted it. When it decided it wanted to change lanes, it didn’t really *need* to change lanes, FSD simply decided it wanted to go faster. And this is part of the problem. The car loves to change lanes on the freeway, loves it so much, and it drives me and my wife nuts.

FSD also frequently and unnecessarily changes lanes on the freeway. We were coming back from the airport at 1 am and there is barely any traffic on the road. I moved the vehicle into the rightmost lane, which is exactly where we should be. There is no one in front of us and we were already doing above the speed limit. There’s no reason to be anywhere but the right lane at this time of night, and the car decides that it’s going to move over to the left one lane because reasons….? One commenter online called this “left lane camping” and that seems to be a very apt description.
There’s a lot of behavior like this out of the lane-changing in FSD. It wants to move over to go faster, wants to move over because it doesn’t want to be in the right-hand lane. And then it won’t move back over to the right. This irritates me because you only move to the left to pass someone and then you go back to the right. You should stick to as far to the right lane as you can unless you’re actively passing someone. FSD doesn’t do that. There a solution, of sorts, and that’s the “minimize lane change” option. Great. You can turn that on and it generally won’t change lanes unless the car absolutely has to, say to make the merge of a freeway or an on-ramp or off-ramp.

Ah, but this setting doesn’t stay on. It’s for the current drive only. Every single time you get in the car you have to go digging in the menus in order to change this. To my knowledge, there’s no other setting in the Tesla control panel that is for the current drive only. Everything else is a set-it-and-forget-it option… Except for “minimize lane changes”.
Before you’re on the freeway, that’s another area where the system just fails to drive like a reasonably experienced human, and that’s on and off-ramps. On the same previous drive I just mentioned, when getting on the freeway at one particular onramp, FSD decided that the speed limit for the on-ramp was 35 miles an hour. This extremely long onramp, at almost half a mile in length, the car tried to stay at 35 mph. Of course, being that I pay attention while driving, I was stepping on the gas. It wasn’t until the car was fully on the freeway did it acknowledge that it could go faster than 35 miles an hour, which then bumped up to 65 miles an hour, and then after it had been on the freeway for roughly a quarter mile then went to its auto max setting, which is a little bit higher than the speed limit. This entire time I had to override the cars behavior by pushing the accelerator. Being unable to merge onto a freeway at speed, especially with such a long run-up, is just embarrassing for a vehicle that really so performant.
Now when it comes to getting off the freeway, depending on the exit, FSD will oftentimes decelerate long before the exit. The point of the long on and off-ramps that we have, especially in my area, is that you use them to get to and from freeway driving speeds. That means when you hit the off-ramp, you should still be doing 65 mph. At that point you then have a quarter mile of off-ramp upon which to decelerate. It’s California so there’s traffic always behind who really does not appreciate me slowing down to 50 miles an hour on the freeway.

Earlier on I mentioned that the car accelerates and decelerates in a very jerky fashion. I can tell you from the trip efficiency reports which drives Tesla FSD is being used on versus which I’m driving normally – because FSD is significantly worse. Unfortunately, this has very little todo with the FSD Profile, of which there are three: Chill, Average & Assertive. This single profile toggle is the only real setting you have to control how FSD behaves and it controls every aspect of the driving singularly. If you do not like how slow FSD is to negotiate unprotected right turns, you can turn FSD up to “Assertive” but then it also uses the accelerator like there are only two settings: “slam on the breaks” and “Test 0 to 60 Time”. When you use Chill, the vehicle drives like the 16 year old has been replaced by a 90 year old… who drives once a year. I’ve stuck to the “Average” setting which seems reasonable and it just drives…poorly.
What does the internet say?
This, of course, is all my perspective of the FSD trial mixed a bit with my wife’s complaints. It goes without saying, but she’s really not a fan of FSD. However, I wanted to see what the internet thought so I found some popular reddit threads about this topic and I pulled out common complaints that I can also speak to:
- Who’s Sold on FSD
- FSD — from a passengers perspective
- FSD Too Human-like?
- Why doesn’t fsd/ap use regen braking more?
- Today’s FSD experience: car tries to drive into median ditch at 80mph, twice.
To summarize some of the common complaints:
- Lack of anticipation on the freeway around exits — Almost without fail, FSD avoids that right lane (as previously noted) and only tries to move over in the last quarter. On busy freeways this is far too late and requires the car to either muscle its way in, or miss the exit.
- Too slow on city streets — Not that I want the car to drive fast on residential streets, but in the area around my home the car refuses to drive faster than 18mph. There is not other traffic on the roads not even pedestrians. It just refuses to drive the speed limit.
- Passengers getting Car Sick — Fortunately my wife doesn’t get car sick, but I do. FSD hasn’t made me sick yet, probably because I’m so actively involved in trying to prevent it from killing someone (or myself) but based on its jerky driving, this really should shock no one.
- Inability to handle stop signs intelligently — In my experience on residential streets the car stops well before a stop sign. Waits. Then creeps up to the line. Waits. Then creeps very slowly forward (if needed to get a clear view), waits a slight bit more…then finally goes. Anyone behind you is painfully irritated.

In these threads, you’ll find a lot of the same complaints I had but also a bunch of people who are excited about FSD and how well it drives. Don’t get me wrong, SOME of the maneuvers it pulls off are impressive. Sometime I’m downright impressed with how it handles certain situations. However, as a whole, FSD is half-baked at best. This really summarizes peoples love for FSD the best:
“I’m starting to get a sense that many of the people that think FSD is great are bad drivers themselves.”
— jcasper on reddit
Where does that leave us?
I am lucky in that I do not commute by car everyday and I’m extremely thankful for that. If I was stuck in traffic everyday, FSD and its costs would have more appeal. Though the simple Adaptive cruise control and lane keeping of Autopilot is generally enough to make stop-and-go-traffic really not so painful. FSD does it a little better as its more predictive, but I’m not sure if it’s $100/mo better.
Regardless, since I don’t drive everyday, this FSD trial has been an excellent lesson in “See, you’re not missing out” and I have no interest in paying for it. Perhaps if Elon wasn’t so driven to push the company to the brink by forcing their engineers to work on stupid things like garbage automatic wipers via AI, rather than a $0.25 sensor… FSD would be better. Elon’s ego and behavior is what’s driving Tesla stock off a cliff, not FSD. I’d wager that after this month the number of FSD subscriptions and purchases will not have dramatically increased, yes, some will buy…but most will not. Try as Elon might by marketing handwaving, FSD is not Level 3 Autonomous Self Driving, let alone “Full” Level 5.