SomeJoe7777
Marginally-Known Member
I agree with @Knightshade, we drive on Hwy 290 in Houston where it had been under major renovation for about 7 years. It's pretty much done, about 3 years behind schedule, the two biggest issue I have with the renovation is 1) striping is not complete and 2) speeds are not updated for Tesla usage. The speed signs appear to be correct but the database that Tesla uses is not. Same portion of the hwy will go from 65mph to 45mph. 45 was the construction speed years ago, it is annoying and dangerous.
I drive on 290 all the time. The cause of this is indeed a mapping error, but it's not because the speed limits for the freeway are incorrect in the database. The construction speed limits of 45 MPH are not and were never in the database. The cause is that the construction has widened the entire freeway such that it now crosses places where the old frontage road was, where the speed limit was 45 MPH. When your car travels on the new lanes that go into a GPS location that used to be the frontage road, the Tesla drops the speed limit to 45 MPH. If you cruise down the freeway in the left lane, this will either never happen or will happen only once. Do the same thing down the right lane and it will happen repeatedly because you're overlapping the old frontage road a lot more often.
This, to me, illustrates one of the long-term problems with the idea of FSD: Without a perfectly accurate and fully updated map, FSD has no hope. It doesn't matter how good the FSD algorithms end up being -- if the car doesn't know where it is then it is fundamentally impossible for it to drive on its own. 290 has been widened for the most part with final construction in the finishing stages for nearly 2 years, and Tesla's maps are still not updated. For FSD to work, they will need map updates on the order of hours, not years. That's a 5-order-of-magnitude improvement required. Good luck with that.