A Self-Driving Prompt
“Start Self-Driving,” the Tesla urged with a prominent blue-grey button in the corner of the screen.
“We should give it a go,” I encouraged as we headed home from the gym.
“I’m not a fan of FSD,” my husband, who was driving, responded.
“Wait until we’re on a straightaway,” I urged. “What harm could it do then?”
But, once we reached a straight stretch of road, he tapped the button. A test drive of the future.
First thing the car did? It lunged for the shoulder.
I hadn’t even gotten the camera on yet. He swerved hard to override it.
Welcome to Tesla FSD.
The Fastest Autonomy on the Market
FSD v14.2.1 is Tesla’s latest attempt to bring true autonomous driving to consumer vehicles. It runs end-to-end on a vision-only neural net. No lidar. No radar. Just cameras and deep learning.
And unlike Waymo or Cruise, Tesla doesn’t fence its self-driving into safe zones or call centers full of remote operators. If you have the hardware (HW4), a steering wheel, and enough courage? You’re in.
According to Elon Musk, FSD v14.2 is finally ready for “wide release.” He’s called it Tesla’s best software yet — and hinted that v14.3 could be the leap that makes unsupervised driving real. The plan? Get rid of human drivers entirely by 2026.
But right now, as our hands hovered near the wheel, one thing was clear:
This car still needs a babysitter.
FSD in the Wild: What It Got Right
To its credit, FSD did a lot well:
* Green light handling: No hesitation. It read signals clearly and moved through smoothly.
* Flashing red: It interpreted the signal as a stop sign (correct) and executed a proper stop.
* Speed match: When behind another car doing 65 in a 50, it accelerated to match. Aggressive? Sure. But natural.
* Traffic signal warnings: On Monterey Highway, it correctly ignored a blinking red paired with a “signal ahead” sign. Old versions might have phantom-stopped.
These were clear improvements over FSD on HW3 (which I also drive). On that system, traffic lights felt like roulette. Here, they felt normal.
That’s no small leap.
...And What Still Feels Weird
The system also:
* Changed lanes without asking. We hadn’t entered a destination, but it picked routes anyway. Turns out FSD will sometimes act on latent nav preferences unless explicitly turned off.
* Refused to let us adjust speed upward. Chill mode limited acceleration. We tried scroll wheels (nothing), accelerator (worked, but temporarily disabled braking), and eventually discovered we could slow it down with the scroll wheel — not speed it up.
* Creeped back to slower speeds. Even after we added speed, it slowly dropped back into granny mode.
* Accelerated to 69 in a 50 approaching town. We did not tell it to do that.
“It’s like a very smart Autopilot,” my husband said. “As long as you’re going straight.”
Are the Cars...Aware?
After one sudden lane change, I told my husband:
“It’s just an algorithm. It’s doing what it was told.”
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