My FSD also auto enabled without any confirmation. While playing with the scroll wheel can get annoying, speed limits are too arbitrary here, and also auto max wants to go too fast in residential areas so manual speed is still the better option.
I found playing around with FSD hard to resist, so I became a guinea pig once more and tried it out on some difficult intersections around here, some involving a place where two busy roads come together at a traffic light and where the no block zone is more than 100 feet long, and another part involving 3 narrow lanes with zero lane markings and no shoulders. The lanes should be there, but it’s end of winter.
The car actually handled it all very well, especially when I helped it with lane selection early on. I find it makes decisions and reacts to situations much later than an attentive driver would, so helping it out makes it work better. I would say it even drove better than a nervous or non local driver would have through this same area.
It has a long way to go still, but I can see some of the promise of robotaxi if they really drill in on a geographic zone, fix each regression and focus hard on safety and not crashing. Late decisions and bad lane selection don’t matter as much if a person is being chauffeured, as long as the thing doesn’t crash and as long as it doesn’t do illegal manoeuvres. It can apparently perform almost magically well in some crazy situations, so to see it flake out and fail so badly in other much simpler situations is flabbergasting. Still, Waymo is the proof that at least in theory, it should be possible. If the hardware can handle it is another question but I guess we’re in the process of finding that out!