I think we have to be clear about what we're talking about, but I do have questions!
First, I completely understand prior to the beta, what the use cases were, and that many of those are quite useful. I'm not at all talking about NoA/AP etc.; this is not part of FSD so that's not what I'm talking about (it's part of EAP). I use these frequently. On the freeway it does pretty well, although I do sometimes have to apologize to my wife or passengers. Overall, these features are useful. I'm really not talking about outside the city use. There's also a lot of additional value on country roads outside the city (where perhaps AP might be unavailable sometimes). It probably does very well on these types of roads as long as they're not too twisty.
Yup, very useful on highways and rural roads with no turns, no doubt about that.
Perhaps my case doesn't accurately represent other people here - my wife doesn't drive, and we are in our 50s. Even my wife wants FSD Beta to work so badly because some day, she wants to rely on it to carry me to hospitals (
), and do stuff when I'm not available to drive.
Plus driving long hours is no longer a easy job for me. Not needing to focus all the time on the road makes driving so much more comfy.
Older versions didn't take corners well on rural roads (retains the same speed). The version I have properly slows down on fast corners. There are small yellow signs to slow down, yet the previous versions didn't slow down. This alone turned FSD Beta on rural roads from sort-of-useful into 95% utilization rate. The only time I don't use it is when I don't see clear white lines on the right side, yet there are some steep grade. Don't want to go into the ditch. But as soon as I see white lines, I turn it back on.
Twisty roads don't appear to cause issues for me.
I too use it a lot in these situations, and it's pretty natural to turn it on on the freeway, as long as it's not too busy.
However, that's not what we're talking about here. We're discussing the city streets aspect ONLY of course, since we're talking about FSD Beta. So in that context, I have a lot of questions about it being "weird to drive without it."
I am still including it in rural areas since FSD Beta is what's driving on those situations after all. Long rural roads, but with stop signs and traffic light turns here and there. Current version nicely handles these situations, although corners needs smoothening. Looks like 10.69.1.1 solved this issue.
On bumper-to-bumper traffic highways, it is always on.
But I do agree, FSD Beta doesn't work anywhere near as well within Toronto with busy traffic turns.
1) What sort of city-type roads do you use it on?
2) What sort of traffic do you use it in?
3) Do you use it to turn corners, negotiate complex intersections, etc.?
Not sure about other cities but Toronto has lots of straight roads. Lots of stop-and-go situations with traffic. I tend to leave FSD on in these situations.
I do not use it when there are complex intersections. This belongs under the 30% situations where I don't currently use FSD Beta.
For simple turns, I tend to leave FSD on, even when I'm within Toronto.
4) Do you use it with passengers in the car frequently?
Yes. My wife, all the time. She too has experienced some serious phantom brakes and ugly energetic turns. We both laugh, and report. When we arrive at corners that we know FSD turns ugly, I just press brake, complete the turn manually then double-click. Not a big deal.
But as I mentioned before, we both are hopeful about FSD Beta, especially given where we are in our stage of our lives. We both observed FSD Beta improving, which is a good thing.
5) If you're not using it to turn corners, and you're on surface streets, you really re-engage it all the time for just the straight stretches?
If it can complete all turns 100%, yes it would be super nice and neat. But if you have lots of straight lines in your route with lots of traffic, "re-engage it all the time" doesn't seem all that painful. You gain more than you lose. Yes, your mileage may vary here.
Also, 10.69.1.1 seems to be doing better. My re-engage rate should go down. IMO, drives with some "re-engage" is MUCH more useful than not using it at all depending on situations, of course.
6) If you do use it to turn corners, what do you do when it goes super slowly? Do you use it when other traffic is around? Do people honk at you?
Once again, my goal is not to test and see how well FSD Beta works by letting it go that far. If it looks complex, just disengage then re-engage when I'm past that. When no cars are around, I let it go further and see how it handles to learn where FSD Beta lies in its skills.
Didn't get any honking so far.
7) What % of the time do you use it in these situations?
I'm just trying to understand. It's very strange to see Whole Mars' use scenario, for example - it doesn't seem useful at all for him (it's extremely slow, doesn't do stop signs well, etc.)! So I wonder if you're talking about that type of scenario, or something a bit different? I definitely can understand that in simpler city situations (for example I have a several mile long straight stretch with a lot of traffic lights, where it could be useful, if it could figure out not to camp next to other cars when driving), it would be a lot more useful.
Just want to know what we're discussing.
I understand why you are puzzled.
If you look at FSD Beta as a perfect problem solver, it is still far away, especially on busy complex big-city roads with lots of turns. If your drives always look like this, I would not be satisfied with the current form of FSD.
But in my case, I look at FSD Beta as a jar 2/3 full, about to become 3/4 full. Other than complex situations, I can use it everywhere and this actually represents 90% of my drives. Hence, now I would feel weird driving without FSD on.
Will FSD Beta be good enough to be used as a Robo-taxi by the end of the year? I'll just
on that. But that's ok with me.
