Our car now drives itself!

We choose the destination, and it drives all the way there, turning left, right, indicating, changing lanes, negotiating roundabouts. It’s amazing and boringly uneventful – a combination I heard called “bore-mazing”.

Tesla released FSD Supervised in Australia a few weeks ago, for purchase ($10k). This week they also started offer it as a monthly subscription ($149 = $5 per day). We subscribed for one month to try it out.

Yesterday I was picking up Amber from Melbourne airport, and decided to try FSD on the way. I paid the subscription through the Tesla app. It seemed to be instantly available, with no additional software download.

I hopped in the car. It read my destination from my linked calendar. I pressed the FSD button. The car started reversing out of my driveway. At our street, it failed to figure out what to do, and started heading the wrong way down our no through road, over the grass. Francis was watching from the garage, keeling over with laughter. Not a good start to my first FSD trip. It had the same issue the next day, leaving our driveway.

I laughed, hit the brake and turned the car around. Then I pressed the FSD button again. It drove to the (correct this time) end of our street, indicated, checked for traffic, completed the turn. It drove me all the way to the airport with basically no issues. It negotiated the complexity of the exits and merges near the leading arches in the city better than I do. I often take the wrong road here.

It changed lanes as needed. But I could also just hit the indicator whenever I wanted to get it to change lanes.

Along the way, it recalculated the route to “save 13 minutes” due to heavy traffic. It took an early exit, but then mistakenly rejoined the freeway. But it was all smooth, without stress or sudden movements. It successfully took the next exit, and took me along a windy quiet road to bypass the freeway.

Near the airport, turning left at one intersection, it mistook the concrete section to the left of the road as being part of the road. I took control of the steering to be veer to the right. I also couldn’t tell whether the concrete was part of the road, so I will let that slide. The screen then asked me to tell it what went wrong, so it could learn. I hit the microphone button and gave a ten second explanation of my intervention.

The return trip from the airport was uneventful and near perfect. It’s just a bit slower than I’d like through windy roads.

Before you say anything, yes, we watched the 60 Minutes Australia story this week on Tesla’s automated driving. It told some grim stories. Any car driving is dangerous, so we take it seriously. We also watched the full video on YouTube by Sixty Minutes of driving through Sydney. Just the driving, without the sensationalised editing. It mirrored my experience – amazing and boringly capable, with one intervention.