A driver who has been using the beta version of Tesla Full Self-Driving for about two years told how Autopilot saved him once, but almost led to fatal situations twice.

In 2018, a man bought a Model 3 and the Full Self-Driving package for 5,000 Canadian dollars. In 2019, Tesla sent a specialist to him who replaced the HW2 on-board computer with the HW3 version.

In 2022, the driver received a beta version of FSD, which is supposed to be able to autonomously control driving at intersections, city streets and highways, provided that a person is always ready to take control.

A man tested autopilot in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As he made a sharp turn to the right, the FSD suddenly decided to stop the maneuver midway and returned the steering wheel to the straight-ahead position. If the driver had not immediately taken control and braked, his car would have fallen off the cliff.

In 2023, the man tested the v11.4.7 update, which combined the highway autopilot with the FSD beta. He was driving the highway at a posted speed of 118 km/h to Montreal and the system automatically switched to the left lane to overtake the car. When performing the maneuver, the driver felt the FSD trying to make a sharp left turn to the dividing lane. He managed to seize control again. Otherwise, the man could crash into an overtaking car.

After a short time, he managed to reproduce the problem again. This time, the FSD tried to make a U-turn for the emergency vehicles at full speed.

Somehow the autopilot still worked properly, the driver notes. When he was standing in a traffic jam in the middle lane of the highway, he was distracted by an accident to the right of the car. At that moment, another car that left the right lane tried to cut him off, but the FSD reacted in time to the traffic and avoided a collision.

The driver believes that driving with FSD Beta is still safer than without it, but at the same time you need to constantly monitor the road.

In January, Tesla released the beta version of FSD 12.12 and began distributing it to customers. The update promises significant software advancements. Thus, the developers “modernized the control system on city streets to a single end-to-end neural network trained by millions of video clips, replacing more than 300 thousand lines of explicit C++ code.”