Dammit! Tesla’s Self-Driving Has Gotten Amazing

Just kind of wish the tech came from a better company

In 2018, my wife and I bought our first Tesla. (Yes, this was long before Elon entered politics, and yes, we bought the sticker.)

At the time, I also paid $4,000 to sign up for the full self-driving feature—FSD for short. Which was insane for two reasons: First, who pays thousands of dollars for a software feature in a car?

And second, full self-driving didn’t exist. It was literally something Tesla said would eventually come. (A limited beta program finally began in 2020.) But I dove in because Tesla said that the FSD wait list would get more expensive each year. Indeed, the price eventually hit $15,000.

(Lately, it’s been $8,000 as a one-time purchase, but that option goes away this week. Now you have to rent FSD for $100 a month. And you know what else is going away? · The Model S and Model X. Among other heartbreaks, that means that the four Tesla cars’ model names no longer spell S3XY.)

Anyway. In the beginning, full self-driving was flaky and sometimes dangerous. It would slam on the brakes for no reason—in the middle of a clear, empty road on a clear, bright day. YouTubers posted videos of the car choosing idiotic routes.

And there were crashes. People died using FSD.

Tesla wanted to point out that humans driving cars cause 1.3 million deaths every year; statistically, you’re much, much safer in a self-driving Tesla. But as slogans go, “Hey, we kill a lot fewer people!” didn’t have much of a ring to it.

For over a decade, Tesla tried to code self-driving, writing one rule after another: “Stop at a red light,” “Go on green,” and so on. But real-world driving involves tens of thousands of edge cases, judgment calls. That pedestrian waiting at the crosswalk—is he going to cross, or is he just texting? Is it safe to drive over that black thing in the road?

(One engineer told me about a time his team was testing in Singapore during a lobster festival. During a test drive, some guy ran out into the road wearing an eight-foot, red foam lobster costume. The engineers had not coded for that.)

But then the generative AI revolution happened. Most generative AI is built from machine learning: algorithms trained on examples. Chatbots like ChatGPT, for example, were born by feeding it billions of pieces of writing from the internet (and, as it turns out, from pirated books).

Well, as the maker of millions of cars with six cameras each, Tesla has the largest set of human driving videos in the world. What if they just fed it all to the AI and said, “Learn to drive like a person?”

So in 2024, Tesla abandoned the 300,000 lines of code it had written over the years. The new, AI-controlled software version drove much more like a person. Periodic software updates have made the self-driving steadily better ever since—and as of today, it’s positively freakish.

You can start in your garage. Plug in an address. Press Start Self-Driving. The car backs out, does a three-point turn, smoothly makes its way to the highway, waits on the entrance ramp until it’s safe, and then merges.

It passes slowpokes courteously and smoothly. When your exit is approaching, it changes to the right lane. It effortlessly navigates those multi-branch exits that can be terrifying if you’re not sure which one you’re supposed to take. It handles side streets, construction, pets or balls darting into the road. It enters a parking lot, cruises around looking for a spot, and parks itself. (When coming home, it opens your garage door, pulls inside, and parks.)

It gives a wide berth to cyclists, joggers, and dog walkers. It slows down and shifts away when a parked car’s door opens. It slows for speed bumps. It beautifully navigates busy parking lots and jaywalkers in chaotic cities.

YouTube videos show how it handles horrible NYC traffic in the rain, threading through pedestrians at a blinking yellow light, then finding a legal parking spot on the curb. Or how it handles roads narrowed by snow, making a multi-point turn to back out of a dead end. Last year, a guy let FSD drive him across the entire country, and he didn’t have to take over even once.

And two recent examples of my own:

My 97-year-old dad was in town for Thanksgiving. Afterward, I drove him into my sister’s place in NYC. It was a worst-case driving scenario: Pouring rain, night, worst traffic of the year. He’d never seen self-driving, and he was absolutely gobsmacked.

He can no longer drive at night; he pointed out that a self-driving Tesla would instantly restore his independence.

But then, while we were stopped at a light in Manhattan, the light turned green—and the car didn’t budge.

I was just mustering up some mumbled explanation, when BOOM—a grungy guy in the street bolted from behind the left side of the car, cutting diagonally directly in front of the hood. If I’d been driving, I likely would have run him down. But the car’s cameras saw him coming and calculated his trajectory.

Then, more recently, I was on a two-lane road. There was construction in my lane. A worker held up his hand, indicating that I should stop; it was the other lane’s turn to go. The Tesla stopped.

When it was my turn, the guy gave a “let’s go” hand motion—and the Tesla pulled into the oncoming lane, around the construction, and smoothly found its way back to the original lane.

(ChatGPT doubts that the car was actually reading the guy’s hand signals. “It doesn’t think, ‘the worker told me to go.’ It thinks ‘the environment now allows forward motion.’ And in construction zones, those two things usually happen at the same moment.” But man, could have fooled me.)

Waymo’s self-driving taxis (here’s my “CBS Sunday Morning” story) might be even better—they’ve never killed anyone—but with a huge difference: They can drive only inside prescribed zones, where they’ve been taught the road maps. You can’t plop one down in a new city and expect it to work. Even in Waymo’s hometown, San Francisco, they can’t take you to the airport.

I now use self driving almost all the time. Short drives, long drives. Even my wife, who used to hate FSD, now acknowledges that it’s a safer driver than I am—and she uses it now, too.

This is a changed game, and the world hasn’t quite caught up to it. All those lawsuits, all those investigations—they’re talking about old self-driving software that no longer exists.

Tesla thinks that it’s almost time to remove the humans altogether. In Austin, the company is testing out its Robotaxis, which are basically Uber with self-driving Model Ys.

In truth, Tesla FSD is not there yet. Its mistakes are far less frequent, but it still makes the occasional baffling move, usually having more to do with bad navigation than with bad driving. (Here’s an example on YouTube.)

But it’s also clear that Tesla will get there—and, eventually, other companies will, too. It’s time to start thinking about what that means.

What happens to car insurance when people aren’t driving? What happens to driver’s ed and driver’s licenses, when even a 12-year-old can hail a self-driving taxi? What happens to car ownership when it no longer makes economic sense?

When only a fraction as many people own cars, will they convert their garages to living space? What happens to parking lots? Will the layout of cities change?

In the short term, I’ve discovered that I’m forgetting how to drive. When I have to drive a rental or a friend’s car, I’m literally rusty. I mean, not dangerously. But it’s enough for me to recognize that the scary part won’t be self-driving cars taking over; it’ll be the transition period from humans driving to AI.

In the meantime, it’s not easy being a Tesla fan. Most people, let’s face it, no longer admire Elon Musk (only 33% of Americans still like him). The company itself isn’t exactly a teddy bear, either, with a reputation for “workplace violence” and retaliation.

And yet the cars are spectacular, especially the recent models, with their dreamy suspension and much quieter ride. The other carmakers are years away from matching Tesla’s self-driving software.

So yeah. I love the cars. The technology is magic.

I just wish it all came from some other company.