Tesla customers may need a hardware upgrade to allow their cars to fully drive themselves unsupervised, Elon Musk admitted.
"Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true."
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming...
Took my first drive as a passenger in a FSD Tesla the other day. I was rapidly underwhelmed. I mean, yeah...it's pretty cool the car drives itself, to an extent. But even as a passenger I was struck by the number of times I would have taken the wheel and made the car do what it was supposed to. Hesitant pulling forward to turn, hesitant pulling out into traffic after a turn, wrong speed for the road, abrupt turns... Did it get us there? Sure. Did it do a good job? Mid at best. Probably better as an anti-fatigue measure on highway drives instead of taking you places in town. I would not pay for FSD were I to own a Tesla...at least it seems really inappropriate for the kind of driving I do.
It's only killed a few people recently, so I assume it has to work pretty well at least 99% of the time. Though it's really funny watching tech bros talk about how great it is and then seeing it blow a stop sign.
Eh.. If full self driving got to where it needs to be then it would be safer for everyone if all vehicles were full self driving.
The safest driver is a predictable driver. When vehicles are subject to algorithms and are programmed to obey the laws of the road, and have open constant communication of their intentions with other vehicles, you can't get any more predictable than that.
I say this as someone who drives for a living, too. I don't think it's happening any time soon, but full autonomous would be way safer than people.