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I wrote the other day about Tesla “Full Self Driving” (FSD) reportedly getting much better with the 12.5 update. As I explained in that piece, I normally don’t go by what other people are saying on this because my history with doing that was massive disappointment and a tremendously different experience with FSD when I used it. However, in this case, there seemed to be broad and objective praise for the update. Also, Tesla has decided to delay updates on older Teslas without the latest FSD hardware, and my 2019 Model 3 doesn’t have the latest hardware. So, I’m going to be delayed testing the latest versions of FSD myself.
While initial reports on FSD 12.5 seemed positive, another user provided a short review that seems to bring us back to that “see-saw effect” theory I put out there years ago and Elon Musk recently confirmed. This FSD user and CleanTechnica reader noted:
“5.3 is much worse than 5.2. On 5.3 it’s lost the ability to handle highway entrances and exits. On entrances its super hesitant, gotten a lot of angry horns as it just sits there. On exits, it wants to drive right past them. The nav voice knows that it’s an exit, the car has gotten over to the right hand lane so it was preparing for an exit, but when it gets to the exit it tries to drive past it forcing you to take over. It also mishandled a merge where it was supposed to get onto the highway, it tried to take an exit instead of. 5.2 was handling these situations correctly. Hope 5.4 shows up soon.”
Again, this is one user’s experience. This isn’t everyone’s necessarily happening to everyone, and we don’t know if it’s common or rare. However, it’s a clear sign that we’ve got another case of “2 steps forward and 1 step back,” or something like that. It’s also a case of, “what the heck happened?” Why did the latest update suddenly cause this problem?
Because of how much FSD has improved this year, I’m a bit more bullish on Tesla’s approach again. But I continue to be concerned about the see-saw effect, especially due to how Tesla is improving FSD — with neural nets and machine learning. While Waymo’s progress is much slower in some regards, it seems the more specific, directed, focused development process helps to avoid such problems — as well as the broader hardware suite.
And that brings us back to my note at the top. I have seen some other FSD users in my case getting quite upset that they are no longer receiving the FSD updates because they don’t have the latest FSD hardware. With this kind of thing, I’m typically not that bothered, but in this case, the promises around this made so many years ago make it all a little less forgivable. Elon Musk didn’t promise a date for robotaxis back in 2016, as some people claim, but he did say the hardware put in cars at the time would be all the hardware needed for robotaxi capability, while also showing estimates of gross profit per mile and gross profit per year from a Tesla robotaxi. However, by 2019, he started predicting such robotaxi capability by “next year.” In my humble opinion, anyone buying a car from then on, and especially going back to those 2016 statements and presentation, was “duped” by these statements. Now, some of those buyers are getting quite upset, and even more so with FSD updates no longer rolling out to them when they roll out to Tesla owners with newer FSD hardware.
My 2022 Tesla Model S Plaid has FSD and is now worth $100k to $200k according to @elonmusk. Want to buy it? https://t.co/ZiOgvT66Sy
— Miss Jilianne (@MissJilianne) August 23, 2024
Dangle a carrot, tell them they can eat it “next year” and watch them believe it. pic.twitter.com/BPZnpJQG19
— Miss Jilianne (@MissJilianne) August 22, 2024
Tesla Cultists wake up, the new FSD doublethink is that you’re supposed to believe that @ElonMusk never said that Model 3s would make their owners money as robotaxis!
Everybody must have imagined it. If only there was a video showing what Elon promised Model 3 buyers: https://t.co/b5GPYrhKmt pic.twitter.com/VVeTTdvms4
— Dan O’Dowd (@RealDanODowd) August 21, 2024
When will the Tesla Full Self-Driving Software I paid $15,000 for actually make my car Full Self-Driving?
— Miss Jilianne (@MissJilianne) August 21, 2024
There are a series of issues above here, so let me just summarize with a bullet list:
Tesla FSD 12.5.3 has made notable improvements according to some public testers, but it has also made some odd steps backward.
Tesla owners with newer cars and the most recent FSD hardware are now getting updates much sooner than others (and this was announced earlier by Elon Musk). That said, everyone in the US with FSD hardware built into cars since mid-2019 should still be getting these updates in time.
There’s growing concern that claims about robotaxi hardware, coming robotaxi progress, and potential for robotaxi commercial service and revenue were all not just overly optimistic but wildly off the mark and potentially even very deceitful.
We’ll continue covering the story as more updates, news, and opinions come out, as we have done since 2015.
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