I'm someone whose been more skeptical of v11, so my expectations weren't high by any measure. In fact I was convinced it was going to be a downgrade. I got the 11.3.3 download prompt last night, installed it in about an hour. And today was my first test, grocery day.
I'm extremely impressed. This isn't level 5 levels of impressed, but i think v11 is nearing being usable for the normal person as a level 2 system kind of impressed.
First off, driving conditions. I live semi rurally on the outskirts of a city. My roads are comparable too small town roads out here and there isn't anything near me. This means to do any shopping, I have to drive for about an hour into the city then an hour back. Most of this driving is on an interstate which has medium to heavy traffic on the weekends, heavy traffic on the weekdays. Importantly, I don't drive into the heart of the city for my shopping, so I consider my driving conditions to be navigate on rural on suburb roads, less so navigate in city streets. Lastly, my driving style is slow and defensively. So I'm overly cautious with my disengagments. Oh, and speed limits are a myth here. No one knows what those weird signs with the numbers on them means. A mystery lost to time.
On 10.69, I felt it delt with backstreets fairly well as long as it didn't need to yield or turn at an intersection. For intersections, it would turn correctly about 10 percent to 20 percent of the time. For this reason, I didn't use fsdb on intersections. Bopping out of fsd for the turn then bopping back in. NoA however was very useful for interstate driving. In stop and go, I'd have to disable it for being too harsh on breaking. While it would do lane changes, It would often be overly cautious causing me to have to intervene in heavy traffic. As far as lane changes go, this thing wanted me to be in suboptimal or worse, wrong lanes alllll the time. To the point that I pretty much ignored its lane change request on the interstate. Despite these issues, when the systems worked, they worked very well and virtually eliminated my fear of interstate driving. In fact it's the first time I enjoyed driving.
On 11.3.3 bacstreet performance. Wow, my car went from being able to do only about 10 to 20 percent of intersection turns poorly to being able to do 80 to 90 percent of the turns and about 60 to 70 percent of those turns well! I did put my foot on the accelerator during some turns to prevent any braking, which worked well. I only tested two yields, one it tried to treat like a stop sign, the other it was doing correctly but I accidently disengaged. Beyond that, the backstreet behavior on unmarked streets is ****ing leagues better. Before my car would hug curves on the right so closely that I thought it was going to curb the wheels and did unmarked interelsection either too wide or way too harsh. It felt like a human for many of these turns, it was incredible. On one blind, no lane corner, it would try to swerve into the opposite lane which could be accident causing. It no longer does this and handles it like a champ. I'm very impressed. It's also giving cars and people on the side of these roads much more room when it's able. Very human like. Very smooth.
For 11.3.3 on the interstate. I used the only change lanes when necessary option. Merging onto the interstate is scary. It uses the entire lane and I'm still skeptical if this would work in heavy traffic without annoying other drivers. But once you are on, ho-lee-fuk is that lane changing smooth. I didn't feel like I was changing lanes at all. It was eerie calming. For lane placement, it was better than 10.69's NoA. It never got into a wrong lane and was in the lanes I'd want it to be in on the old code. Furthermore, it was actually more calming as I wasn't getting incorrect lane change nags. I don't know what else to say. There was no jitter and it was just better than 10.69.
On the way home I briefly experimented with its normal lane change setting... it was too aggressive for my patient defensive driving style. I'll need more time to test it but I don't even care. Setting fsd to only change lanes to follow the route gave me perfect lane picking behavior for my style of driving. Make it a permanent setting and I'm good to go.
Lastly the ui and visualizations are so much freaking better. I'm very happy with 11.3.3 and I hope you guys try it soon. It's not perfect but i think it's much better overall. On my way home, on backroad and poorly marked streets it did try to run into a sidewalk. But my hands were on the yoke so it was no problem. That could have been a bad mistake but it was only one of a few, and the only noticeable one. Overall, I feel 11.3.3 makes less mistakes, is more competent, but the way fewer mistakes it makes are more dangerous. Despite this, I love v11. It's more calming than 10.69 and feels more practical.
In fact, i like it so much that I'm considering finally updating my radar y without the radar removing update to v11 when it becomes able too.
I typed this out on my phone, I'm sorry for typos! I'm not proofreading this essay.
Yup. I got the notification at about 6am eastern and it's on the car now. I first got FSD back in September after the initial 100,000 group, so I assume it's going wide. That, or I got selected because of a recent 4000+ mile road trip on NoA and that tripped a flag because they expect more of the same.
In the interest of cracking the rollout code, I'm the opposite. I drive like 6k to 7k between two teslas in a single year because I work from home. But, I think I figured it out. I use my frunk constantly! They must be picking frunk bros to test beta.
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