A new Tesla, without subscription, now has worse Steering Assist than a $22K Toyota Corolla.
Back when Autopilot launched, in consumer cars, it was pretty unique. But the market has moved on significantly, and basic Steering Assist/Full-Speed-Range Automatic Cruise Control, are pretty universal features today.
My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds to keep it enabled while I watch for idiots. It has been able to do this since I bought it, and I haven’t paid a dime extra. Car cost 30k.
I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.
I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.
I have a 2023 Crosstrek, my wife has a '21 Ascent. I have the same habit you do - edging away from large trucks slightly - and both of them do the same thing you described to me.
It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Just a note for you or anyone reading who has a recent Subaru and doesn't know already: if you find the centering really bothersome, you should be able to be able to go into the settings on the instrument cluster display (up/down arrows at the lower left behind the wheel, toggle it until you get to the "hold for settings" option), find the Eyesight settings, and turn off lane centering. It will still try to keep you inside the lane markers but won't try to park you right in the center of the lane. In that mode, it's more like the Honda Sensing system I had on my 2016 Civic.
I go back and forth a bit on it but mostly keep it in lane centering mode now - I've gotten used to how it positions the car in the lane, and it lets me focus more on what's going on around me than micromanaging lane position and such.
> It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Same with Hyundai except they call them "Lane Keeping Assist" (LKA) and "Lane Following Assist" (LFA) and I have trouble remembering which one centers you and which one just keeps you from leaving the lane.
To me just based on the names I'd have expected keeping to be the one that actively positions you (it keeps you centered) and following to the one that just reacts when you are going to depart the lane (it keeps you following the lane).
Mostly now I just remember that the one that comes on automatically any time I'm going 40+ mph is the reactive one, and the one that I have to explicitly turn on is the centering one (although both come on automatically on certain highways based on data from the navigation system).
idk whether subaru is exact the same as hyundai but i basically turned lane centering off on my hyundai. when possible i only use radar cruise control, and lane follow. if i want to overtake, turn on my signal and it'll automatically safely increase speed to set cc speed and let the lane follow off. it's pretty seamless.
lane centering is a bit too annoying for me, i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
> I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
As a technologist, I like lane-keep assist because it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
GP said s/he didn't understand why anyone would want these in-betweens. I gave an explanation as to why.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
The cognitive load is greatly reduced when using these features. Honestly, adaptive cruise control in the city is a godsend. Not having to deal with watching speed . start and stop traffic is also automated for me. Driving on a highway is also great .. You can drive much further without needing a break.
Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed.
So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake.
The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
ACC generally has a 3-4 second time interval that it permits between you and the car in front of you. I live in SoCal, so a lot of my driving is on very aggressive routes. The 4-second gap is mechanically safe but it's practically unusable because it creates a void large enough to invite other cars to lane change in front of me. So when that car merges in, the ACC detects a violation of the safe braking distance and decelerates to reestablish the gap. I call it the "cut me off" loop when we're on trips.
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.
Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it.
But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly.
I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.
Have a EX90 I got on a really great deal, we drove it cross-country and it was mind-blowing how little I had to do. If it didn't make you touch the wheel / pay attention we could have basically done the entire trip without incident minus off-ramps.
But there was one thing that was quite bad, similar to yours. While passing a semi I pulled it to the left side and it actually yanked us right so hard and then over-corrected once again. Super scary moment, the only issue of the whole trip, but basically never passed with it on again.
How you like that car? I test drove an early model that was really a pre-release dealer demo. It was a great ride but I also didnt get to do a whole lot with the sales guy next to me and a tight deadline to get back home.
Made me want to invest in Volvo. They fixed most of the software issues, what's left is a shockingly nice experience. Touch screen can be a bit annoying is all, but Google integration and design of the UX in the touchscreen is really good.
My volvo also has a "not perfectly tuned" PID loop. With "autopilot" engaged it keeps weaving constantly left and right inside the lane im in. Have gotten used to keeping a firm-ish pressure on the steering wheel at all times to compensate. But drivers behind me must have thought me drunk before i got the hang of it.
This is lane keep assist not lane centering and dangerous to use as a lane centering feature as it’s not designed to do that hence the ping ponging behavior
Lane keep assist is always enabled, this "copilot" or whatever it's called is an extra feature i can manually enable over the default lane assist. And it will steer and follow the road quite well in most conditions. But sometimes it starts the ping pong behaviour.
Should also be noted that i never take my hands of the wheel. And the volvo is quite fast at beeping at me if it detects that i dont hang onto the wheel.
Don’t most of these systems release the lane-keeping when you turn on the turn signal? Does yours not, or do you not signal until you are trying to exit the lane? (Genuinely asking.)
I find managing the system to be more tiring and stressful than just driving to be honest. I do not like when my vehicle behaves in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.
Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.
I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.
I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.
> My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds
I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.
Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.
I have a newer Subaru as my daily driver. The EyeSight system is fine for what it is but it's very limited. The lane keep assist doesn't work on curvy roads. If brakes unnecessarily when the car ahead takes a highway exit. It cuts out completely in heavy precipitation where a human driver can still proceed safely at low speed.
Same with mine from last year. I don't tap the wheel, but I treat it as 'co-driving' or like the car has its own somewhat fussy opinions on where to be. If I zoom up on another car at a stop it's capable of freaking out and braking, it follows other cars at a good safe distance, and the lane keeping feels like you're holding the car's hand as it goes along, and its attention is generally better than yours. Works for me.
I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
I appreciate that to the extent that I went into a heavy car payment to be able to have these lane-keeping things. I fully expect the assistance will be able to help me undertake longer drives for exactly that reason.
Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
Clearly I needed to be more precise: Tesla's vehicle autonomy features have no meaningful competition in the consumer auto space, period. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is flogging some kind of angle, generally a political one. And I say this as someone who despises Musk's politics. But the cars his company makes are way, way, way ahead on this particular feature.
Is that a joke? Tesla's consumer vehicle autonomy features are ahead in some ways but way behind GM and Mercedes-Benz in others. In particular the Mercedes Drive Pilot system is true SAE level 3 where the manufacturer assumes legal liability for vehicle operation. Tesla has nothing like that available to consumers.
Drive Pilot cannot perform a single one of the maneuvers I listed above.
It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.
But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.
> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.
I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.
I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.
It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".
> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
I'm not repaying for the same fuel, I am paying for new fuel. I'm not rebuying for the same insurance, I pay for the potential accidents in a time frame. With registration I am paying for the wear I am inflicting on the public roads for a time frame. I expect to own the car and it is staying the same. Paying for it again is called renting.
> and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.
It's a stunt. If they believed it worked, they wouldn't need somebody dedicated to monitoring it for the entire time it's on the road. Having nobody in the car looks cool, but there is nothing different about the car's self driving capability, and the economics are even worse than having the safety driver in the car.
It's no different on a technical level than Waymo using remote operators. Presumably Tesla just hasn't wired that up, or doesn't plan to.
FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.
And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
No it's entirely different on a technical level, because waymos always drive themselves. The human operators don't drive, and in fact can't, they can only make decisions that the car then executes.
Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.
Waymo's operators can absolutely control the vehicles directly. I'm not sure what you're trying to cite here. The only effective difference in architecture here is where, physically, the backup operator sits.
I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.
Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free updates. Now if you are a person dropping 50K on a Tesla, you can likely afford FSD if that’s something important to you. FSD is not comparable to any auto steer I have tried on any car, and I drive a bunch of different rental cars because I travel a lot by road for business. I like the new flexibility of being able to pay for FSD when you are going to use it only, like during a long trip. There’s no point to be on FSD (or autopilot) to run errands in the city.
When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines. I got a Forester because for reason I typed but but aren't really topic relevant, it was far, far nicer and works amazingly. And for years whenever a Teslafriend would tout their lane keeping, I was just, "uhh yeah my base model Subaru does that." "Oh no, no this is better, this does a lot more than just the basic lane keeping you get..." "Nope, that sounds just like my Subaru."
> When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines
That’s lane keep/lane assist; not lane centering. It’s supposed to bounce between the edges of the lane. (I guess, not supposed to, but that’s what it does as opposed to actually tracking some position in the lane).
The auto industry as a whole did a massive disservice not clearly differentiating “lane keep”/“lane assist” v/s “lane centering”. They are hugely different and trying to use lane keep to stay centered is really dangerous.
Same model car with different trim levels/packages would have lane keep or lane centering making it really confusing to consumers what they had and what safe usage would be.
i have a 2020 outback, and I didnt evaluate the lane keeping as part of the purchase decision. But since then i have rented a ton of different cars for work travel, and have realized surbaru has the best system out there, outside of truly premium cars / software cars like tesla. Some of them (chevvy) are outright dangerous. Its surprising because in every other way subaru's electronic / software sucks :)
9 yo Honda and yes, lane keep assist feels more like ruts on a road - it will steer when closer to the lane, but not always, and won't align car with the lane .
To be fair, though, the subscription isn't for "Steering Assist", it's for FSD. You don't subscribe to the feature you have on your Corolla, you subscribe to an autonomous navigation solution.
This is a pretty boneheaded business decision on Tesla's part. But their technology remains clearly superior.
To underscore this: the boneheaded decision Tesla is making is forcing customers to choose between a $99/mo subscription for FSD, and no ACC or lanekeeping assist otherwise. It's like letting people buy a subscription to the iPhone Pro Max 17 or not have any phone at all.
By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberDrive or something else that isn't glaringly inaccurate.
Autopilot is just cruise control/lane keep assist/slow down when the car ahead of you does.
It’s not close to FSD, Tesla wouldn’t call FSD as Auto pilot because auto pilots un the aircraft industry are pretty dumb (the first autopilot was literally a rope tied to the aircraft control stick). FSD used to be the expensive paid add on feature while autopilot was a more reasonably priced upgrade.
You should maybe read the article. Tesla is removing Steering Assist from all new vehicles sold, and your options are now either nothing or FSD for $99/month.
Previously you got the Corolla feature set included with your vehicle purchase, Enhanced Autopilot for a fee which was a step above that, and then FSD subscription which was a step-up again.
Now Tesla has downgraded the base experience to include no Steering Assist at all, and no longer offers Enhanced Autopilot. So you get two choices: No Steering Assist or FSD.
For now, the people that had the feature for free, will get to keep it. Presumably, Tesla advertised the lane assist features when they sold the car, so they cannot legally remove them.
My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point isn’t actually the gouge but to make that threat move lifetime FSD sales.
2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
3. Some consumers were sold that they would get hardware upgrades for FSD. I'm pretty sure Tesla would like to minimize that, and I expect incentives for those people to purchase new vehicle without FSD.
4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.
I honestly don't think they want a lot of people with lifetime FSD, it's disappearing without a lot of news.
>2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.
The subscription model seems to profit off of inertia/inaction/forgetfulness/laziness.
There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.
Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.
Rocket Money is an app designed for millennials to hand over their important banking information to Rocket Mortgage in exchange for "help cancelling subscriptions".
4. The details are pretty straightforward. Continual passive income is more reliable than the boom bust cycles that is buying cars. The latter requires you finding more and more customers. The former is extracting more money from an assumedly commuted customer.
In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.
The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.
I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.
Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.
> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.
There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.
> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.
If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.
Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.
Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.
With all the top heavy population age histograms around the world, the rent seeking is built into all the economies to provide benefits until it becomes too top heavy and revolution occurs.
The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.
People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.
Comma/OpenPilot is actually amazing. One of my cars is a Tesla Model 3 Performance 2025 and I love it, FSD on HW4 is great. Super fast.
I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.
I’m a fan of what Comma is working on, but to say it’s about as good as FSD (!!) would be a big misunderstanding of both products. Comma is L2 assist: basically in a lane it will keep the lane, and if a car stops ahead it will stop. It’s equivalent to Tesla standard Autopilot, but FSD is an L3 bordering on L4 system. It navigates traffic lights, intersections, indicating, merging, etc none of which Comma can do. Still good product though.
Wait a minute. My recent-ish car has LKAS. It recognizes white lines (or possibly curbs too) and if both boundaries of the lane are recongized, will steer for you - for 10 seconds maybe, before it nags you provide some steering input. But in those 10 seconds it's perfectly capable of smoothly steering around bends in the road on its own. And it is a useful safety feature even if only nudging the steering wheel while you're holding it.
So you don't get even that in a Tesla without (now) ponying up $$? Something that's a standard feature in my non cloud connected (or connectable!) "so last century" fossil fuel vehicle?
Was watching OPLive last week. Every week they have a segment called "Triple Play" where they have law enforcement send them videos of crazy chases and other interesting experiences.
This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back and forth between the lane lines because the car had LKAS enabled, effectively keeping the car from driving off the road.
The state trooper followed the car for several miles trying to decide what he should do. He tried several times by running his lights and sirens, honking, etc to no avail. He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop. During the pit, the man suddenly woke up - for obvious reasons.
They later found out he had been working 22 hours straight and then was driving to his GF's house several hours away for the weekend and was just exhausted and fell asleep at the wheel.
I've never actually tested what happens if you ignore the "steering input required" nags from LKAS. Does it truly keep driving at cruise control speed? I assumed it would eventually slow to a stop.
As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumble strip excursions that would not have happened in the LKAS-equipped car. And for the asleep guy in the parent post, it may have made the difference between still being alive and dead in head-on collision or rollover.
A few cars will go as far as to apply the brakes and pull over. I think a lot just end up disengaging the steering and cruise control while beeping loudly at you a lot.
If the weight of your foot was somehow enough to push the pedal though, you could certainly keep going.
Some lane keeping systems purposefully ping-pong between the lines to prevent you from relying on it by making it somewhat annoying.
If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.
But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.
> He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop.
No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.
I agree with the recommendation that you yourself replied to: move in front of the vehicle, and gradually slow to a stop, with lights and sirens optional but recommended
I am thrown by the question of "What else should have been done" though, after grandparent made an explicit recommendation
There was a news story here in town a few years back where a private citizen - not cop - brought a ghost car (driver passed out) to a stop by driving up in front of it, making bumper contact and then braking both to a stop. Not recommended! But can be done even without adaptive cruise control.
It's important to make sure we have all the context before making a judgement like this. My rule of thumb is that if I think something is obviously stupid, I'm probably missing something.
Older systems including the older versions of Blue Cruise may not go around you, but you also don’t know if they even have radar cruise control enabled.
If it’s a simple enough system maybe it would just keep going the same speed no matter what until it hit you.
No, it's literally that. It's super dangerous and the practice of performing it in any but very unusual situations is, to put it mildly, hard to justify on any actual public safety grounds. To the extent the maneuver is a "safe" version of making a car crash, it's (relatively) safe for the cop causing the crash.
A certain segment of the public, plus cops themselves (having significant overlap with that segment), love it though, because they enjoy seeing non-compliance met with life-endangering levels of force and can't understand why any of us wouldn't enjoy it unless we want more crime or something.
So a bunch of suspects who weren't, car chase aside, any imminent danger to anyone, and their possibly-unwilling passengers, end up dead or life-alteringly injured... and so do plenty of people who had nothing to do with any of it. Often over what was originally just e.g. property crime.
I would rather a cop risk a runner's life every time than let him continue to flee at speed recklessly for miles on end, usually culminating in crashing into an innocent person or their property. That's not even a question for me. Or would you rather just let criminals run away if they manage to enter a vehicle?
It takes two to tango, and the cop can stop the life-threatening chase at any time, without causing a wreck.
Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, as satisfying as they might feel.
Well, I'd rather they just get pitted. If someone is at the point of fleeing from police in a high speed chase, I want them removed from society, because nobody well adjusted and beneficial does that. Whether that's by arrest or by accidental death, I really don't mind either way. The alternative also emboldens criminals to flee as a first resort and to plan around that possibility.
Fortunately in USA we have many state jurisdictions to choose from so we can each live under the sort of laws that suit us best!
This would be precisely the divide I mentioned above. One is focused on whole-picture outcomes, the other is focused on making sure “bad guys” have a bad time (regardless of how that fits into the larger picture). Folks on either side of this divide tend to think the other is actually, factually nuts.
You are ignoring the big picture outcome of the resultant culture that develops in a society in which criminals can easily flee and not be chased. Culture shifts for the worse in an environment that is less likely to catch, arrest, or prosecute criminals. Trust and norms erode.
The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.
High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.
At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
I broadly agree that both are important, but I think the difference lies in the level to which the person feels about the two scenarios you post. Some people are far more upset about the former than the latter (and also consider what happens if you modulate it by the crime committed).
(And of course it's not a strict either/or as well: you can have a rules of engagement for such things. e.g. in the UK the police are not blanket banned from pursuing a fleeing vehicle, but they need to have had appropriate training and do so only in particular circumstances)
I have a 2014 car that's connectable but no driver assistance; I had a 2017 (delivered mid 2016) with lane keeping and emergency braking which seemed pretty new and exciting, and it's connectable, all I would need to do is pay a big annual fee and also setup a 3g CDMA network. Couldn't do much with either if it's connected; I pulled the 3g modem from the 2014 when it was convenient cause I was worried it was using power while off.
Not that lane keeping needs a connection, just that I'm surprised they put it on a car without a modem.
To my knowledge it is completely offline. The fanciest version of it (Honda Civic) has wifi and will connect to your house wifi when in range (and also do wireless Android Auto) but mine doesn't have it. This one has no cloud features and if there's a SIM card lurking deeply in there somehwere, it certainly isn't going to facilitate reaching down to monitor me in the car (the hardware isn't there, aside from the microphone for bluetooth) or change features on me.
I won't claim to know for certain but want to point out that if there's a SIM card in the head unit then it can upload anything it can see on the CAN bus which is literally every sensor in the vehicle. I guess the only thing likely to be missing is a cockpit video feed.
Even if it doesn't offer the user an option to connect AFAIK approximately all vehicles from the past 15 years or so are part of the internet of shit. They send telemetry back to the manufacturer.
My 2016 Corolla has zero advertised connectivity features. It could secretly be sending data somehow, but far as I've been able to tell there's no modem.
I have a Subaru with driver's assistance. Basically you input speed and distance from the vehicle ahead, and the car turns, accelerates, and brakes. It disengages quite often, in particular when the lanes are not clearly marked.
I used it a couple of times, but then I stopped; for me, as a driver/passenger, it has very little value. Yes, maybe I can lower my attention from 100% to 95%, but it does not make much difference: I need to keep my hands on the wheel, it disengages at random (for me) times.
Yeah I don't get Tesla's move here. Lane Keep Assist has been a standard feature in most new cars, EV or not, starting around ~2019ish. IIRC, the EU now has regulations mandating lane keep assist in all new vehicles sold.
Heck, a cheap base model Maza 3 I rented had lane keep assist.
Tesla only stands to lose by gatekeeping what's now a basic feature behind a paywall.
It checks out with all the other awful software changes they're making like whatever "curvature assist" is that randomly brakes where it doesn't need to, or when it gets confused about what road I'm on while on the freeway and suddenly drops my 75mph cruise control to 55mph and slams the brakes.
IMO; you should try the product. The car basically drives me everywhere with no interventions, including on errands around SF. Just plug in where via the Google Maps view.
I’ve been paying the monthly for a while. Very worth it to me.
“basically” is doing some heavy lifting here as they aren’t good enough to let you ignore the road without taking serious risks. So you’re stuck in the drivers seat paying attention to traffic, but you get to mostly avoid turning the steering wheel, yay what an awesome improvement definitely worth 8k or 100$/month
IMO adaptive crude control that works down to 0MPH is still the sweet spot.
Also standard equipment now (in my mid-level Honda Civic). However once gone to zero, it won't roll again until you nudge the throttle pedal. Also, just like lane keeping it "needs supervision". Once someone braked hard up ahead to do an almost-missed left turnoff, and I let the adaptive cruise control do what it does. And it missed it and I had to brake manually, fairly hard too!
But for driving in slow traffic with no passing lane for the next half hour (Highway 7 between Perth and Marmora, for Ontarians) it's a godsend. Just let it handle it and chill.
First, you're talking about a different product, FSD vs Autopilot.
Second, I have a 2025 Model 3, and even with the latest v14.2.2 FSD I had an intervention rate of roughly every ten miles in Washington DC/VA suburbs. I shudder to think what it would do if I didn't pay attention, so I don't think it's an improvement over me driving myself.
How does lane-keeping assist drive you everywhere, or plug in to Google Maps? That doesn't make any sense to me. Are you talking about a separate feature or something?
- Has legal liability shifted as a result of the system being the driver?
Because I feel like the answer needs to be "yes" for this claim to be accurate. If the answer isn't "yes," then you're still meant to be fully engaged with driving and are liable for any accidents that occur.
It could be a better product, but that doesn't mean it's a better purchase if you care about the morals of the companies and leaders you do business with
I rented one of these in the form of a Hyundai Sonata, and their lane follow is amazing. Included in the cost of the car, does radar cruise and all the rest. Free for the life of the car.
They're offering 50% off the subscription to people who used to have Enhanced Autopilot [1]. As I predicted when the CEO's compensation plan had a part tied to FSD subscriptions, they are going to push more people onto it by bundling more features and cutting the price.
Reminds me of when an ISP offered me a discount if I would agree to sign up with their partnered TV service. I agreed on the condition that I didn't have to rent a box. But you can't use the service without a box ... ? Who cares, I got a discount.
Pressing the lane assistant button on a Mercedes steering wheel and getting a “you’ll need to activate your subscription first” message really drove up my blood pressure.
In this case, they bought and currently own the sensors and hardware that the ML model is stored on. Moreover, the software runs locally.
It's a silly example, but you can think of it as buying a house and the ceiling lights requiring a subscription to turn on.
As an aside, I wonder how long this can keep up before it begins affecting laws around theft and property damage if the person operating, storing, insuring, and maintaining the physical objects don't contractually own them. Is Mercedes a victim if the LKAS camera gets damaged or stolen, rather than you?
I mean they surely knew this before they bought their car and bought it anyway. So I don't get the complaint
Are you sure they bought the ML Models?
The Hardware is inside because it's required for the emergency lane keeping, but I wouldn't be surprised if the OEMs would have a deal with the supplier where they are paid more if this feature gets enabled
CDs were around $16 in 2000, which is equivalent to around $30 today, which is around 2.3 times what a Spotify premium subscription costs for one person.
Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.
I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.
Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.
My Comma 4 arrives today, and I think it will be great (using it with my Lightning, not my Model 3), but I think it is just a temporary solution that is effectively a dead man walking. The latest cars are not usable with a Comma and likely will never be, with manufacturers locking down the CANBUS with encryption.
Literal anticompetitive behavior in the name of safety. The more of them that move to subscription services the better the chance the scheme gets legally challenged I figure.
As a company yeah they probably won't survive in the long term. But since the software is open source forks like SunnyPilot should remain updated for existing owners and such. People will likely even make DIY comma hardware devices too if the company stops selling them.
Although even if the devices stop getting updates, that makes them on par with most built in car software and lane assist stuff which never gets updated in the car's life anyway.
My car from late 2005 to early 2025, a 2006 Honda CR-V, only has regular old control. That's now my backup car and my main car is 2025 Hyundai Kona EV with adaptive cruise control.
I too thought it would be nice on long drives, but really it hasn't made that much difference. Like everyone I speed on the freeway, but not as much as everyone else, so it rarely has to actually adapt. :-)
The place I've found it makes a huge difference is stop and go or near stop and go traffic. You can't set it to a speed below 20 mph, but if the car it is following goes below that it keeps working all the way down to 0 mph. (You don't have to be going 20 mph to set it. You can set it if you are going above something like 3 or 4 mph, or if you are stopped and there is a stopped car ahead of and it thinks you are on a street. It just sets the speed to 20 mph when you set it under those circumstances).
If the car ahead starts moving again within a few seconds it will automatically follow. If longer it will beep once when the car ahead starts moving and show a message about the lead car leaving. Tapping the accelerator or flicking the cruise control speed adjust switch on the steering wheel will resume following.
Not all adaptive cruise control systems work all the way down to 0 mph. Some cut off well above that. Some only work down to 0 mph on higher trims.
Making sure I get one that does is now on my "must have" requirements for any future car.
I genuinely don't understand what role lane centering serves if you really do keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. It doesn't steer the car if you're steering the car yourself, not when I drove cars that had it. What am I missing?
The only point of cruise control is to take your foot off the peddle and to zone out and stop paying attention to how fast you're going. This is already Not Great to have in cars, but adding the same to the steering wheel, making drivers feel emboldened to look away, is probably a big part of the reason so many cars on the road today seem like they're being driven by deranged psychopaths; the drivers are actually tuned out doing other shit!
Sorry but the LAST thing I want is people being able to YOLO code onto their cars to drive on public roads.
That was my original main complaint with Tesla and why I distrusted them so much before Elon publicly lost the plot.
Even with Autopilot it was clear to me they were far more willing to force the risks of their systems on all other drivers on the road then the legacy auto makers who were much more cautious about testing things extremely thoroughly first. All those early videos of people climbing in the backs of their cars while they were driving down the highway? To me that was proof they couldn’t be trusted with public safety.
I'm bored with most of the new flashy products, but that just leads to me tinkering more with things I already have or fun new open source projects. It's somewhat a hobby of mine to maximize the potential of old hardware with better software.
Not the person you’re responding to but yes, pretty much all of modern tech is awful.
The specs are pretty good but then you don’t really own it, you get limitations on what you can use it for, you get rent seeking and walled gardens everywhere. Even if you’re paying you get ads and get tracked. Updates make products worse more often than not.
A little credit please?! I don't use AI anything. I code my stuff the old fashioned way with nested if/else statements that make you cry trying to follow along. And damn the coworker that interrupts your debugging asking if you got their email or not.
and nothing. it's a comment on how everything is closed tech by the platforms, not a knock on being bored with that fact. i fully agree and do not participate on those platforms.
I work hard to keep subscriptions out of my life. I will do everything in my power to not have a subscription as part of any car I own. The problem is it is likely out of my hands. I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b. I will have to pay astronomical prices on a worse experience for the privilege of having my data sold and the opportunity to pay them monthly. I want to scream when I see things like this but to who? I wonder how hard it is to electrify a 20yo car....
> I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b
I daily a 30 year old car. There exists a sweet spot of reliability, safety, and comfort (probably the early-mid 2000s) that in theory, you should never have to buy a vehicle outside of, newer or older. There will always be clean old cars in good shape you can buy, you don't need a new vehicle.
Unless you can't buy gasoline anymore. But that's still quite a long ways away imo.
luckily I don't drive much. The one car is just falling apart and is ridiculously expensive to maintain (don't buy a used Mercedes, ever). The other is just not fun to be in but at least it gets reasonable gas mileage. I really want an electric vehicle, especially the way things are going right now, but buying anything built in the last 10 years is just depressing at best and electric vehicle life is much lower on average than ICE lifespan due to battery life. Ah well. Maybe this will push me to an electric scooter for all the in-town travel and I will only need a 'real car' once a month or so.
There are still current-model cars that are effectively subscription-free and/or where you can pull the fuse for the telematics/connectivity and everything else still functions as expected.
I would gladly pay $99/month if this was honest FSD. I started tracking my time consistently since end of December and in the past 2 weeks I spend 23 hours driving. That's already only $4/hour.
I haven't been keeping up with the progress in this space. Last I heard, Benz introduced some sort of self driving feature AND accepted full liability for it (whereas Tesla does not). How does Benz's self driving compare to Teslas?
Mercedes' feature has been sunset. It only ever worked in good weather on a limited set of motorways, below a certain speed, and with a guide vehicle in front of it l.
There are unsupervised HW4 Tesla robotaxis in Austin open to public use as of yesterday. Lemonade Insurance announced an FSD plan where the price is half the market rate while using FSD. So unless there are specific regulatory barriers for personal vehicles unsupervised should be available for their latest gen personal cars sometime this year.
That’s basically what SAE L3 and above levels of autonomy mean. The manufacturer takes full responsibility of the driving while the function is active.
I drove Mercedes and BMW L3 offering. Both had a really restricted ODD (Operational Design Domain) for it to be of much use outside high traffic situations on an Autobahn. It was restricted to good weather and speeds of around 60km/h. Basic all conditions under which their set of sensors and CPUs would work optimally.
But that was 2021 technology. L4 level of autonomy will be in the market during the next 4/5 years, no doubt. And that will be a game changer for anyone driving any significant amount of time. Sleeping, reading, watching a movie or just working on the laptop will be possible. And the manufacturer will take full responsibility of the driving while the functions are active.
We've had FSD trial for 4 months in the middle of last year. I work from home so I can't really justify $100 a month. However, we did take a few trips (about 60 miles in each direction) to see family through downtown LA.
I was honestly stunned by how far the tech has come. It basically drove us door to door without a single intervention.
I talked to about 3 people about this that have personal experience with Tesla autopilot and that's been the feedback. So where's the gap? What's the problem?
I don't think there is a problem per se. There are probably still edge cases out there that I didn't experience. But overall, I think the tech is ready to roll.
I've tried the various flavors of self-driving in my Tesla over the past several years, and essentially it came down to a three-strikes rule for me - after the third time that car jerkily exited the self-driving mode on it own (the third time being in a slight bend on the highway at night) and spiked my heart rate to must have been an all-time high as I manually corrected in time to avoid disaster.. I said "nope, this is a decent electric car but I'm driving it myself from now on."
Waymo on the other hand, I trust it with my life on a weekly basis and have never had cause for concern (fingers crossed I didn't just jinx it).
Three strikes is a lot of leniency to give to a machine that is carrying you and loved ones down the road at 70mph. The minute I saw a single instance of unexpected steering, braking, or accelerating behavior out of a car that is not damaged, I'd be returning it under warranty.
Do BYD and other Chinese EVs have this insane subscription scheme for basic features on their cars, or is that only a feature of North American/European manufacturers?
Once BYD is the most popular car, they will complain that it's probably because of the Chinese government manipulating the people. But the truth is that I would happily buy a BYD car knowing that it's a good product, with no goddamn subscriptions.
Lane keep is autopilot which is going away (for new cars). FSD doesn't have basic lane keep. The real question will be what happens to "legacy" cars with autopilot.
Its being reported elsewhere that future new teslas will not have basic autopilot (the name Tesla use for the standard lane keep assist they offer) at all, the only way to get any form of lane keep assist will be to subscribe to FSD. The wording in the ars article linked here does a terrible job of explaining the change. Existing Teslas which already have basic Autopilot will still continue to have the feature.
New Teslas will now only have "Traffic Aware Cruise Control" as standard without lane assist, i.e. keeps pace with traffic and can stop/start, but user still has to provide steering input.
Isn’t lane keeping pretty standard for most new cars?
It’s like an upside down freemium model - try out our basic self driving product, which is (now) the worst in the market, so you’ll convert to the premium FSD offering.
I don't see this mentioned in the configurator for a new model 3 on the tesla site right now. Under "Driver Assistance" it describes "Traffic-aware cruise control" only. Under "Active Safety" it includes "Lane Departure Avoidance" which is separate from the "Autosteer" feature described under the "Autopilot" section. It's possible they will choose to fold autosteer into the lane departure avoidance but there's been no announcement of that.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_il/GUID-ADA05DF...
Under the new 2026 pricing structure, Autosteer has been removed. *New vehicles will now only ship with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control*. Buyers who want the vehicle to steer itself on highways must now pay for the software that was once standard.
Autopilot / FSD was a mess. Autopilot is very old tech and people confusing "self driving" with it, which it's not. We'll see how many pony up for FSD, but I think the play is to force people to try it.
They handed people free trials before, which is using the carrot and not the stick. Around where I live, with HW3, the last trial made it clear that it was just not worth it at all, as there's key areas around my house where intervention was mandatory.
I've been using Autopilot for years, but recently subscribed to FSD for a long weekend roadtrip. It changed my mind on the value of FSD.
While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.
Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.
I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.
I agree. The current price is 7/8 years of ownership, which can't be transferred. The subscription currently makes a lot more sense. Personally, I think if one buys a Tesla today they should impute the cost of an FSD subscription over the expected lifetime. It's excellent. If that cost is too high, fair enough. Buy a less smart car.
I love FSD, but this is awful. Given that this is almost certainly being done to juice the FSD subscriber count so that Elon hits his 10M sub target, I'd even go as far as to say that this is legally questionable.
Also, this move is beyond stupid IMO. Autopilot is Tesla's ONLY moat now that their Supercharger network is open to everyone. Gating that behind a $99/mo sub is guaranteed to make buyers shop elsewhere, especially now that the EV tax credit is no longer and the OEMs (and our O&G friendly admin) are rallying around EREVs.
FSD makes sense as a subscription as it's something that gets updated all of the time. Subscriptions to things built into the car like heated seats seems like a way to scam money out of people.
I agree; but Autopilot unlike FSD hasn't been updated in several years.
It doesn't contain maps or context of the roads, it is just Auto-Steer + Lane-Change + Full-Range Cruise Control under one brand-umbrella. Mostly useful on the Motorways/Freeways, and commonly found in competitor's vehicles.
It was at some points; I believed it was priced between $2K-4K depending on the point in time and either offered post-purchased or only during ordering, again, depending on which time-period.
My Garmin receives updates and I don't have to pay a subscription for that. Hell I don't even need updates if it does what it should. Often the updates are there to fix bugs because the software was sold before being ready.
The funny part is that the Tesla doesn't have a basic dumb cruise control. It only has "traffic-aware" cruise control which uses the cameras and doesn't use the new FSD code so it has lots of glitches and phantom braking and decides for itself what speed to use. My wife just wants to set the speed and have the car go that speed.
Do any cars with assisted cruise control have the ability to step down to dumb cruise control? (I know my car doesn't - the lower trims have dumb cruise control, and you lose that in favour of assisted if you bump up to a higher trim.)
Does anybody actually find Autopilot to be more than a novelty? Having to look ahead like a robot and keep your hands on the wheel is exactly how you drive without it. It feels like placing trust in the system and accepting risk without any tangible benefit.
Is this a precursor to Tesla offering autopilot in vehicles from other manufacturers? Sure, other manufactuers would have to adopt the hardware and integrate with the autopilot interface, but self-driving is inevitable and Tesla autopilot is the best.
To be fair, you can say that about a lot of features/manufacturers. e.g. Why does Toyota lock remote start via app when others have it subscription free?
What will be the next step? ignition? wipers? opening passenger doors? charging for functionality that several manufacturers offer for past several years sounds like desperation to get any revenue.
Article is unclear but if this is saying you can't even get basic ADAS w/out $99/mo that is a pretty big deal, especially if it's applied to existing cars.
Basic stay-in-line and start/stop following in traffic has become pretty standard for almost a decade at this point and paywalling it now would be outrageous. I have a 2017 car that does this.
According to other articles adaptive cruise control (which works down to 0 mph in stop and go traffic) is being kept standard. It is just the rest of Autopilot that is moving to a subscription.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not aware of any regulation requiring ADAS. Even automatic emergency breaking is not yet required for a few more years.
It is in the EU but in the US ADAS won't be mandated until 2029. It would tank your IIHS rating though and all major mfgs have met a voluntary pledge to have >95% light duty vehicles ship with autobraking by 2023: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/automakers-fulfill-autobrak...
Tesla's autopilot was so clumsy that I stopped using it and forgot about it years ago. I like the adaptive cruise control though, it is more transparent and decidedly more of a benefit, except for its phantom braking moments. Autopilot's requirement that your hands be on the wheel (and do nothing) is a strain over time, definitely boring, and a terrible interface. I don't understand why people would pay for such an awkward feature. The monthlong demos of Full Self Driving I tried were even more awkward. The need to keep your hands on the wheel required a different but nearly equivalent cognitive load to actual steering, when using it in residential and city traffic. The crucial difference is that "the car was driving me" rather than "I was driving the car". Tesla can't convince everyone that their driver assist technology warrants product status; take away driver autonomy and make them pay for it seems like a failure to me. It won't be a product until you can sit in the back, close your eyes and safely arrive at your destination. Good luck getting to that level of quality with this business model. Tesla should be giving the tech away to its car owners and collecting as much data as they can, right? I have points to spare for the astroturf Muskovites to downvote my honest (but embarrassed) customer perspective.
I drive one on Dutch roads, and a lot of the back roads (60km/h) are one lane with dotted lines on the side like here: [1]
If you turn on TACC, it will constantly whine that you're hugging the side of 'your lane'. But it's one lane for both directions, you're supposed to hug your side!
In my SAAB I used cruise control anywhere I expected to maintain speed for any amount of time. In the Y I don't bother on this type of road because it bitches at me constantly and sometimes even jerks me to the middle of the lane. That's never happened with oncoming traffic but I'm not risking it.
well, years ago is a long time in tech. the latest videos I've seen show people not having to touch the wheel any more, and it apparently drives fairly long complex routes with no intervention.
There's even Teslas operating as "auto taxis" now in some cities - they drive entirely without anyone even in the driver seat.
I TL;DR the update release notes, and wasn't aware that the wheel holding requirements were gone. I am not convinced yet, as I got a phantom "take control of your vehicle" alert when leaving the driveway a few weeks ago, for no apparent reason (hands on wheel, no visible hazards). They happen every once in a while. My daughter has been thinking of using the Tesla alert sound in one of her trap songs given our familiarity with it.
Musk is a true genius: You were paying first for the hardware and then to conduct training supervision for the AI while taking full responsibility if something goes wrong.
Is the article confused or will there literally be no lane-keeping without the subscription? Because nowadays every car rental place bottom of the barrel Kia has lane-keeping.
Tesla’s “autosteer” is significantly more advanced than the “lane keeping” feature I’ve seen in rental cars, or my own 2023 Jeep. My understanding is that autosteer will actively keep the car centered in the middle of the lane, while the “lane keeping” I’ve experienced will only adjust the steering when you approach the lane edge, which pin balls you back and forth like a drunk driver.
Both my late model Japanese cars have two systems capable of steering the car toward the middle of the lane. One is an always-on (unless disabled) passive safety system that only kicks in when you actually appear to be drifting off the road, and the other is a system that actively tries to keep the car in the middle of the lane. The latter system has to be toggled on and off and is meant to be complementary with adaptive cruise.
What you're describing sounds like the former system, while the latter one is what should be compared to Tesla's "autopilot" or "FSD" or whatever the fuck. It works very well on both my cars and is a game changer for longer drives.
I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild, especially since what you're getting isn't the "full self driving" we were promised. You still have to be fully engaged with what the car is doing and ready to take over in a fraction of a second.
> I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild
The article doesn't mention it but other articles say that their version of adaptive cruise control (Traffic Aware Cruise Control or TACC) that was part of Autopilot is becoming a standard feature.
I have a 2020 Alfa Romeo (interestingly also a Stellantis car like your Jeep), it has "follow the lane" feature. For the edge of the lane, it can either vibrate as a warning or force you off it, I have it set to vibrate.
In mid tier and premium tier cars, lane keeping is generally either implicitly or explicitly lane centering. My Navigator calls it lane keeping but it is centering, and my Audi specifically calls out lane centering.
I went with that example because I had a Kia Sportage from Hertz and it had lane centering (not just the thing that detects you are deviating from the lane). It did want you to touch the steering wheel but that's just cheaper driver monitoring.
Jeep and all the other Stellantis brands have the worst lane assist and worst tech options on the market, and the trim level on any rental is going to be as basic as they can get away with.
That would make modern Subaru from I don't know how many years back, 'autosteer'. My Impreza does not behave in the least like 'pinballing', it behaves like it too can drive down the road, but wants to be holding your hand while doing it. This is on some pretty sketchy roads and road conditions, so it won't keep doing it unless it's identified at least one if not two lines on the road.
Seems like Subaru lane assist is considerably better than when it first came out in 2013 or so. I was able to experience it back then and it could have pinballed, certainly wasn't as steady and capable as it is more than ten years of development later.
Do you have a source for that? I thought all of Tesla's "default" driver assistance was part of Autopilot, which is going away. I haven't seen any mention of decoupling various features from Autopilot (with some remaining free, just without the branding).
GM Super Cruise (and Ford's Blue Cruise) is hands-free, autosteer is not. Ford has an equivalent of autosteer available without a subscription, I would guess GM does too.
I'm glad I got rid of my Teslas, they are always doing their best to make the experience worse. Stage three of enshittification from them. I loved it back when it was stage 1.
The speed is what I like, and the simplicity when I bought it. I hate 10,000 trim options with random prices like BMW and having to argue with a sales guy - just gimme the price!
The latest version of FSD is amazing. We have it on our Plaids (2024 and 2026 models) and I probably only actually "drive" 5% of the time. There's a camera to see if you're paying attention to the road, so no longer any need to keep your hands on the wheel. It'll start from a parking space and go all the way into my house and back into the garage.
Of course, I don't trust it as much as I trust Waymo's system, and I'm very careful when using it in rain or fog...
Cameras wired into an internet connected car is the #1 reason why I will never buy a car like a Tesla.
Anecdotes like yours are often from the point of view of someone in California - sunny, clear weather most of the year. In monsoon rain, fog, snow, or unusual markings on the road, all these systems break down.
> Cameras wired into an internet connected car is the #1 reason why I will never buy a car like a Tesla.
Well then, this isn't the car for you. For many other people the safety features are important. I wouldn't mind if every car had a camera that made sure the driver was paying attention and didn't fall asleep.
That’s completely valid but the problem for me is the fact that you do not control the internet connection in these cars. A camera does not need an internet connection to monitor the driver.
The real question is why buys Teslas now, given that their owner is a proven fascist showing nazi salutes on stage. Do you have to say "sieg heil" to start it too?
They’ve been enshittifying for the better part of a decade. The model 3 launching without rain sensors and taking years to get any where near comparable with cameras comes to mind.
If you have do a lot of driving, $99/mo. seems like a decent price to have the car drive itself, especially if it got to the Waymo point where absolutely no driver attention was needed and you could watch Netflix the whole time. The issue with FSD isn't the price, it's that no matter what Elon and his fanboys say, it doesn't bloody work and Waymo is blowing them out of the water in capability.
This is part of the long con. They promised FSD almost a decade ago and as their competitors eclipse them, it's clear Tesla is a) behind and b) will never catch up.
So instead of admitting they were wrong all along and doing what's necessary to catch up (add LiDAR to their sensor stack), they are going to quietly "pivot" Tesla to a "ai and robotics" company, with the monthly fee they'll continue to bilk anyone who is still enthralled enough to believe them on their FSD grift, but they will run the same scam as they did with FSD (Musk will say "humanoid robots for the home in in 3 years", yet we will still be waiting for them to be useful in the year 2035)
I'm not any kind of Elon fan, but I think it is a little more nuanced than that. FSD is definitely more advanced than any regular competition. It is not as capable as Waymo, that is for sure, but that is not a car you can own.
Apart from the technical limitations of FSD, Elon hasn't thought through the business model. Claiming that Tesla cars will be capable of turning into robotaxis seemed plausible a decade ago before all the negative externalities of Airbnb became widely known.
Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.
Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.
I think I see it more bluntly. Elon knows exactly what his buisiness model is: hype. It has been wildly successful. The cars are okay, but the hype surrounding them is extremely disproportionate.
Their vision-only system will never live up to promises without inventing an AGI-level inference engine. Maintaining an aura that they are capable of doing this is part of the con. A kind of, shangri-la promise of harmonious one-true vision system that to date has not come true despite promises of its impending coming.
No, actually, nobody remote drives a Waymo. If you don't know how Waymo works, you also don't know how far behind is Tesla. There are fundamental obstacles to Tesla ever being a viable robotaxi.
There is never any remote driving involved. That would be dangerous. The current state of Tesla's "remote control" consists of a ghetto V2V hack to move the Killswitch to the chase car. How many years do you think it took to develop the remote decision-support Waymo has got? The second paragraph of the article you linked to explains this:
> Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
I don't see what the issue is. No one is forced to buy a tesla, no pay for the subscription. It seems likely that self-driving features will require ongoing maintenance and updates for the next several years, it's not like it's 0 cost to them to develop and distribute the software.
I'm not a Tesla fan, I will never own a fully self driving car, but I don't have a problem with a company charging money for features that consumers want. There are about a dozen other car manufacturers in the US alone that can sell self driving cars without a subscription if they want to.
> self-driving features will require ongoing maintenance and updates for the next several years
Autopilot is not self-driving, it is lane-centering with traffic aware cruise control. It has not gotten any maintenance or updates in years, as far as we can tell.
Identical functionality is available from many competitors with no subscription. This is a noteworthy decision for Tesla because AP has long been one of their defining features, dropping it is a big step backward just as the market caught up.
Well, the market will decide if dropping it in favor of a subscription-based upgrade is worth it or not. Not sure why anyone would be upset, this all seems perfectly reasonable.
Why is this story at position 261 with 269 points (@6hr)? It's been demoted so much that it's behind a 6hr post about Pistachio's with 1 point (also 6hr old)
It's a tradeoff, too early to say if it's a dumb move.
Side A: Tesla can grow FSD subscription revenue by making FSD + Autopilot completely based on subscription. Lot more people use Autopilot than FSD. In the happy path such users will pay the subscription and that revenue will increase.
Side B: Autopilot (aka lane keeping) is fast becoming default option across manufacturers. Tesla will take a dip in sales if such 'basic' option is no longer available.
The issue is not that “FSD” is $99/mo. The issue is that a feature of $22k cars (lane keeping) is behind the $99/mo paywall.
Basically not enough people were buying the subscription for Elon to get his payout. But someone who just wants auto steering isn’t going to decide they’ll pay $99/mo for that. So this is just going to make people who like that feature not buy a new Tesla when the time comes.
A new Tesla, without subscription, now has worse Steering Assist than a $22K Toyota Corolla.
Back when Autopilot launched, in consumer cars, it was pretty unique. But the market has moved on significantly, and basic Steering Assist/Full-Speed-Range Automatic Cruise Control, are pretty universal features today.
My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds to keep it enabled while I watch for idiots. It has been able to do this since I bought it, and I haven’t paid a dime extra. Car cost 30k.
I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.
I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.
I have a 2023 Crosstrek, my wife has a '21 Ascent. I have the same habit you do - edging away from large trucks slightly - and both of them do the same thing you described to me.
It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Just a note for you or anyone reading who has a recent Subaru and doesn't know already: if you find the centering really bothersome, you should be able to be able to go into the settings on the instrument cluster display (up/down arrows at the lower left behind the wheel, toggle it until you get to the "hold for settings" option), find the Eyesight settings, and turn off lane centering. It will still try to keep you inside the lane markers but won't try to park you right in the center of the lane. In that mode, it's more like the Honda Sensing system I had on my 2016 Civic.
I go back and forth a bit on it but mostly keep it in lane centering mode now - I've gotten used to how it positions the car in the lane, and it lets me focus more on what's going on around me than micromanaging lane position and such.
> It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Same with Hyundai except they call them "Lane Keeping Assist" (LKA) and "Lane Following Assist" (LFA) and I have trouble remembering which one centers you and which one just keeps you from leaving the lane.
To me just based on the names I'd have expected keeping to be the one that actively positions you (it keeps you centered) and following to the one that just reacts when you are going to depart the lane (it keeps you following the lane).
Mostly now I just remember that the one that comes on automatically any time I'm going 40+ mph is the reactive one, and the one that I have to explicitly turn on is the centering one (although both come on automatically on certain highways based on data from the navigation system).
idk whether subaru is exact the same as hyundai but i basically turned lane centering off on my hyundai. when possible i only use radar cruise control, and lane follow. if i want to overtake, turn on my signal and it'll automatically safely increase speed to set cc speed and let the lane follow off. it's pretty seamless.
lane centering is a bit too annoying for me, i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
> i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
Alignments off. Not as bad as it used to be to get it done.
> I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
As a technologist, I like lane-keep assist because it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
> it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
A car shouldn't "keep the turn radius", they normally drive straight by default. The forces acting on the wheels do that automatically.
It doesn't seem like a wrong thing, to me.
> Where do you draw the line?
I think the line is quite obvious between the physical comfort features and the mentally disengaging features.
GP said s/he didn't understand why anyone would want these in-betweens. I gave an explanation as to why.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
The cognitive load is greatly reduced when using these features. Honestly, adaptive cruise control in the city is a godsend. Not having to deal with watching speed . start and stop traffic is also automated for me. Driving on a highway is also great .. You can drive much further without needing a break.
Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed. So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake. The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
To your first point, that's what adaptive cruise control does. It will slow you down to maintain a gap with the car in front of you.
ACC generally has a 3-4 second time interval that it permits between you and the car in front of you. I live in SoCal, so a lot of my driving is on very aggressive routes. The 4-second gap is mechanically safe but it's practically unusable because it creates a void large enough to invite other cars to lane change in front of me. So when that car merges in, the ACC detects a violation of the safe braking distance and decelerates to reestablish the gap. I call it the "cut me off" loop when we're on trips.
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.
Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it. But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly. I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
The base 2020 Forester has adaptive cruise control.
I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.
Have a EX90 I got on a really great deal, we drove it cross-country and it was mind-blowing how little I had to do. If it didn't make you touch the wheel / pay attention we could have basically done the entire trip without incident minus off-ramps.
But there was one thing that was quite bad, similar to yours. While passing a semi I pulled it to the left side and it actually yanked us right so hard and then over-corrected once again. Super scary moment, the only issue of the whole trip, but basically never passed with it on again.
How you like that car? I test drove an early model that was really a pre-release dealer demo. It was a great ride but I also didnt get to do a whole lot with the sales guy next to me and a tight deadline to get back home.
Made me want to invest in Volvo. They fixed most of the software issues, what's left is a shockingly nice experience. Touch screen can be a bit annoying is all, but Google integration and design of the UX in the touchscreen is really good.
My volvo also has a "not perfectly tuned" PID loop. With "autopilot" engaged it keeps weaving constantly left and right inside the lane im in. Have gotten used to keeping a firm-ish pressure on the steering wheel at all times to compensate. But drivers behind me must have thought me drunk before i got the hang of it.
This is lane keep assist not lane centering and dangerous to use as a lane centering feature as it’s not designed to do that hence the ping ponging behavior
Lane keep assist is always enabled, this "copilot" or whatever it's called is an extra feature i can manually enable over the default lane assist. And it will steer and follow the road quite well in most conditions. But sometimes it starts the ping pong behaviour.
Should also be noted that i never take my hands of the wheel. And the volvo is quite fast at beeping at me if it detects that i dont hang onto the wheel.
Don’t most of these systems release the lane-keeping when you turn on the turn signal? Does yours not, or do you not signal until you are trying to exit the lane? (Genuinely asking.)
I’m not trying to exit the lane. I’m hugging the left side of my lane as I drive past a transport truck.
I find managing the system to be more tiring and stressful than just driving to be honest. I do not like when my vehicle behaves in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.
Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.
I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.
I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.
> My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds
I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.
Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.
I have a newer Subaru as my daily driver. The EyeSight system is fine for what it is but it's very limited. The lane keep assist doesn't work on curvy roads. If brakes unnecessarily when the car ahead takes a highway exit. It cuts out completely in heavy precipitation where a human driver can still proceed safely at low speed.
> If brakes unnecessarily when the car ahead takes a highway exit.
Yep. My workaround is basically hanging back or just being prepared to gas it a bit so it doesn't freak out.
I did a road trip across the US 7 years ago and I barely touched the pedals and the wheel on highway drive, it was a 2018 Subaru Outback.
Same with mine from last year. I don't tap the wheel, but I treat it as 'co-driving' or like the car has its own somewhat fussy opinions on where to be. If I zoom up on another car at a stop it's capable of freaking out and braking, it follows other cars at a good safe distance, and the lane keeping feels like you're holding the car's hand as it goes along, and its attention is generally better than yours. Works for me.
I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
I used to have to do semi-regular 8hr interstate drives, and the reduction in cognitive load and mental fatigue as a result of these aids is amazing.
I appreciate that to the extent that I went into a heavy car payment to be able to have these lane-keeping things. I fully expect the assistance will be able to help me undertake longer drives for exactly that reason.
My 18 year old Toyota Vellfire does the same.
Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
> But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
Tesla is a car company. Every car company is a competitor to Tesla.
As a legacy EV manufacturer, Tesla is struggling to compete in the current car market. Tesla's sales have declined for the last two years.
It's why they're having to squeeze fewer customers for more revenue.
Clearly I needed to be more precise: Tesla's vehicle autonomy features have no meaningful competition in the consumer auto space, period. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is flogging some kind of angle, generally a political one. And I say this as someone who despises Musk's politics. But the cars his company makes are way, way, way ahead on this particular feature.
Is that a joke? Tesla's consumer vehicle autonomy features are ahead in some ways but way behind GM and Mercedes-Benz in others. In particular the Mercedes Drive Pilot system is true SAE level 3 where the manufacturer assumes legal liability for vehicle operation. Tesla has nothing like that available to consumers.
Drive Pilot cannot perform a single one of the maneuvers I listed above.
It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.
But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.
And yet Tesla won’t take responsibility for FSD mistakes. I had one and it’s amazing when it works but it did try to kill me a number of times.
GM supercruise is pretty sweet and hands free on my lyriq
And it's just a shame that it's not helping them sell cars and it has never lived up to what Tesla claimed they would deliver?
> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.
I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.
I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.
> It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee
Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.
> FSD is in fact market leading.
The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
> That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.
It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".
> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
I'm not repaying for the same fuel, I am paying for new fuel. I'm not rebuying for the same insurance, I pay for the potential accidents in a time frame. With registration I am paying for the wear I am inflicting on the public roads for a time frame. I expect to own the car and it is staying the same. Paying for it again is called renting.
> and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.
EDIT: Oops, this isn't quite correct anymore — as of two days ago, in a geofenced area of Austin, Tesla has moved the safety person to a follower car: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....
It's a stunt. If they believed it worked, they wouldn't need somebody dedicated to monitoring it for the entire time it's on the road. Having nobody in the car looks cool, but there is nothing different about the car's self driving capability, and the economics are even worse than having the safety driver in the car.
It's no different on a technical level than Waymo using remote operators. Presumably Tesla just hasn't wired that up, or doesn't plan to.
FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.
And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
No it's entirely different on a technical level, because waymos always drive themselves. The human operators don't drive, and in fact can't, they can only make decisions that the car then executes.
Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.
Waymo's operators can absolutely control the vehicles directly. I'm not sure what you're trying to cite here. The only effective difference in architecture here is where, physically, the backup operator sits.
I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.
Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free updates. Now if you are a person dropping 50K on a Tesla, you can likely afford FSD if that’s something important to you. FSD is not comparable to any auto steer I have tried on any car, and I drive a bunch of different rental cars because I travel a lot by road for business. I like the new flexibility of being able to pay for FSD when you are going to use it only, like during a long trip. There’s no point to be on FSD (or autopilot) to run errands in the city.
> Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer.
Funny, I totally read this intro the opposite way of what you went on to argue.
Great customer service?
When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines. I got a Forester because for reason I typed but but aren't really topic relevant, it was far, far nicer and works amazingly. And for years whenever a Teslafriend would tout their lane keeping, I was just, "uhh yeah my base model Subaru does that." "Oh no, no this is better, this does a lot more than just the basic lane keeping you get..." "Nope, that sounds just like my Subaru."
> When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines
That’s lane keep/lane assist; not lane centering. It’s supposed to bounce between the edges of the lane. (I guess, not supposed to, but that’s what it does as opposed to actually tracking some position in the lane).
The auto industry as a whole did a massive disservice not clearly differentiating “lane keep”/“lane assist” v/s “lane centering”. They are hugely different and trying to use lane keep to stay centered is really dangerous.
Same model car with different trim levels/packages would have lane keep or lane centering making it really confusing to consumers what they had and what safe usage would be.
i have a 2020 outback, and I didnt evaluate the lane keeping as part of the purchase decision. But since then i have rented a ton of different cars for work travel, and have realized surbaru has the best system out there, outside of truly premium cars / software cars like tesla. Some of them (chevvy) are outright dangerous. Its surprising because in every other way subaru's electronic / software sucks :)
Chevy Supercruise and hands on lane centering is excellent in my experience.
9 yo Honda and yes, lane keep assist feels more like ruts on a road - it will steer when closer to the lane, but not always, and won't align car with the lane .
To be fair, though, the subscription isn't for "Steering Assist", it's for FSD. You don't subscribe to the feature you have on your Corolla, you subscribe to an autonomous navigation solution.
This is a pretty boneheaded business decision on Tesla's part. But their technology remains clearly superior.
To underscore this: the boneheaded decision Tesla is making is forcing customers to choose between a $99/mo subscription for FSD, and no ACC or lanekeeping assist otherwise. It's like letting people buy a subscription to the iPhone Pro Max 17 or not have any phone at all.
By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberDrive or something else that isn't glaringly inaccurate.
Autopilot is just cruise control/lane keep assist/slow down when the car ahead of you does.
It’s not close to FSD, Tesla wouldn’t call FSD as Auto pilot because auto pilots un the aircraft industry are pretty dumb (the first autopilot was literally a rope tied to the aircraft control stick). FSD used to be the expensive paid add on feature while autopilot was a more reasonably priced upgrade.
Thought the S was for supervised?
It is not. Though I noticed their main marketing page for FSD uses "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)". Not sure if this is new or how new.
I think they will release dumbed down fad thats more akin to autopilot but for like $20 per month.
You should maybe read the article. Tesla is removing Steering Assist from all new vehicles sold, and your options are now either nothing or FSD for $99/month.
Previously you got the Corolla feature set included with your vehicle purchase, Enhanced Autopilot for a fee which was a step above that, and then FSD subscription which was a step-up again.
Now Tesla has downgraded the base experience to include no Steering Assist at all, and no longer offers Enhanced Autopilot. So you get two choices: No Steering Assist or FSD.
They can rename it whatever they want.
People had a feature for free, now they don’t, because Tesla wants money.
“But it’s better…” only if you pay. If you don’t, still gone.
What else matters?
I see nothing wrong with them offering a cheap(er) FSD option. I object to them removing existing features to force adoption.
> People had a feature for free, now they don’t,
No features are being removed from existing cars. The policy is about what they sell on new ones.
For now, the people that had the feature for free, will get to keep it. Presumably, Tesla advertised the lane assist features when they sold the car, so they cannot legally remove them.
Steering Assistance, please
Let's not slaughter the language for the sake of a few letters.
Language is alive. Let's not put it in a cage and cut off the parts that stick out, just because some of us find them aesthetically displeasing.
Oh go speak some German
My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point isn’t actually the gouge but to make that threat move lifetime FSD sales.
1. There's a CA lawsuit against the FSD name, Tesla has to fix it by Feb 14th (the last day FSD is being sold). I wonder if it'll just be a rebrand for the new service. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/news-releases/d...
2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
3. Some consumers were sold that they would get hardware upgrades for FSD. I'm pretty sure Tesla would like to minimize that, and I expect incentives for those people to purchase new vehicle without FSD.
4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.
I honestly don't think they want a lot of people with lifetime FSD, it's disappearing without a lot of news.
> 2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
That explains things.
>2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
10 million FSD subscriptions is a really big number to achieve.
1/12th of that is still US$ 83 billion. Think it's still quite a big incentive to try to juice up the metric.
The subscription model seems to profit off of inertia/inaction/forgetfulness/laziness.
There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.
Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.
Rocket Money is an app designed for millennials to hand over their important banking information to Rocket Mortgage in exchange for "help cancelling subscriptions".
Good context, thank you. I think this changes my view, you’re more likely right.
4. The details are pretty straightforward. Continual passive income is more reliable than the boom bust cycles that is buying cars. The latter requires you finding more and more customers. The former is extracting more money from an assumedly commuted customer.
In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.
In other words: you will own nothing and like it.
> 4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.
Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?
A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.
NB, toe the line.
<https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/to...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line>
The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.
I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.
Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.
> Every person I know wants a subscription, too.
You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.
I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.
> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.
There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
I meant everyone wants to have a recurring income. After all, we have a recurring need to feed and house ourselves.
Sure, but when you buy a spoon, you expect to own the spoon. You don't pay 1$/month/spoon, do you?
That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.
> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.
If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.
Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.
Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.
Just don't think about the long term economic effects of rent-seeking
With all the top heavy population age histograms around the world, the rent seeking is built into all the economies to provide benefits until it becomes too top heavy and revolution occurs.
> Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense.
The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.
People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.
Comma/OpenPilot is actually amazing. One of my cars is a Tesla Model 3 Performance 2025 and I love it, FSD on HW4 is great. Super fast.
I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.
I’m a fan of what Comma is working on, but to say it’s about as good as FSD (!!) would be a big misunderstanding of both products. Comma is L2 assist: basically in a lane it will keep the lane, and if a car stops ahead it will stop. It’s equivalent to Tesla standard Autopilot, but FSD is an L3 bordering on L4 system. It navigates traffic lights, intersections, indicating, merging, etc none of which Comma can do. Still good product though.
My guess is they made FSD subscriptions a requirement for Elon's big compensation package.
10 million active subscriptions. It’s one of the lower targets to meet.
They haven't even sold that many cars yet. I have trouble believing they would come to 10M active subscribers in next two decades.
And like you said other targets are quite something as well
Tesla is going to stop selling FSD outright on Feb 14th. It will be subscription only.
Only in this radically pro-business administration would brazenly anti-consumer behavior like this be acceptable.
Wait a minute. My recent-ish car has LKAS. It recognizes white lines (or possibly curbs too) and if both boundaries of the lane are recongized, will steer for you - for 10 seconds maybe, before it nags you provide some steering input. But in those 10 seconds it's perfectly capable of smoothly steering around bends in the road on its own. And it is a useful safety feature even if only nudging the steering wheel while you're holding it.
So you don't get even that in a Tesla without (now) ponying up $$? Something that's a standard feature in my non cloud connected (or connectable!) "so last century" fossil fuel vehicle?
Was watching OPLive last week. Every week they have a segment called "Triple Play" where they have law enforcement send them videos of crazy chases and other interesting experiences.
This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back and forth between the lane lines because the car had LKAS enabled, effectively keeping the car from driving off the road.
The state trooper followed the car for several miles trying to decide what he should do. He tried several times by running his lights and sirens, honking, etc to no avail. He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop. During the pit, the man suddenly woke up - for obvious reasons.
They later found out he had been working 22 hours straight and then was driving to his GF's house several hours away for the weekend and was just exhausted and fell asleep at the wheel.
I've never actually tested what happens if you ignore the "steering input required" nags from LKAS. Does it truly keep driving at cruise control speed? I assumed it would eventually slow to a stop.
As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumble strip excursions that would not have happened in the LKAS-equipped car. And for the asleep guy in the parent post, it may have made the difference between still being alive and dead in head-on collision or rollover.
A few cars will go as far as to apply the brakes and pull over. I think a lot just end up disengaging the steering and cruise control while beeping loudly at you a lot.
If the weight of your foot was somehow enough to push the pedal though, you could certainly keep going.
My 2021 Toyota corolla will fault out and stop steering for you.
It will disengage after the alarms on Hondas.
Some lane keeping systems purposefully ping-pong between the lines to prevent you from relying on it by making it somewhat annoying.
If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.
But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.
> He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop.
No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.
It's a bit grim, but equally what else are you supposed to do? This car will definitely crash into something pretty soon.
I agree with the recommendation that you yourself replied to: move in front of the vehicle, and gradually slow to a stop, with lights and sirens optional but recommended
I am thrown by the question of "What else should have been done" though, after grandparent made an explicit recommendation
Oof, imagine an airbag going off while slumped over the wheel!
If that's true: What a total idiot in the police car.
With a car on lane keeping / cruise control you could slow down in front of it all the way to a stop and it will gladly stop behind you.
There was a news story here in town a few years back where a private citizen - not cop - brought a ghost car (driver passed out) to a stop by driving up in front of it, making bumper contact and then braking both to a stop. Not recommended! But can be done even without adaptive cruise control.
That might work!
> What a total idiot in the police car.
It's important to make sure we have all the context before making a judgement like this. My rule of thumb is that if I think something is obviously stupid, I'm probably missing something.
Can safely assume that American cops are stupid, especially if they do this.
> With a car on lane keeping / cruise control you could slow down in front of it all the way to a stop and it will gladly stop behind you.
Blue Cruise, and I assume Tesla's FSD as well, will simply change the lane and go around you.
If the guy had a simple LKAS and adaptive cruise control on, then yes, you're right.
Older systems including the older versions of Blue Cruise may not go around you, but you also don’t know if they even have radar cruise control enabled.
If it’s a simple enough system maybe it would just keep going the same speed no matter what until it hit you.
GM supercruise will go around you too I have it
TIL about Precision Immobilization Technique (PIT). Sounds pretty euphemistic for intentionally crashing into someone at highway speeds.
Maybe the average cop has better driving skills than I'm giving them credit for, but...I doubt it...
No, it's literally that. It's super dangerous and the practice of performing it in any but very unusual situations is, to put it mildly, hard to justify on any actual public safety grounds. To the extent the maneuver is a "safe" version of making a car crash, it's (relatively) safe for the cop causing the crash.
A certain segment of the public, plus cops themselves (having significant overlap with that segment), love it though, because they enjoy seeing non-compliance met with life-endangering levels of force and can't understand why any of us wouldn't enjoy it unless we want more crime or something.
So a bunch of suspects who weren't, car chase aside, any imminent danger to anyone, and their possibly-unwilling passengers, end up dead or life-alteringly injured... and so do plenty of people who had nothing to do with any of it. Often over what was originally just e.g. property crime.
I would rather a cop risk a runner's life every time than let him continue to flee at speed recklessly for miles on end, usually culminating in crashing into an innocent person or their property. That's not even a question for me. Or would you rather just let criminals run away if they manage to enter a vehicle?
It takes two to tango, and the cop can stop the life-threatening chase at any time, without causing a wreck.
Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, as satisfying as they might feel.
What is the alternative? I'm not advocating causing shoplifters to crash, but I do like the idea that the police pursue criminals.
You can imagine some kind of built in remote kill switch, but I can't see that being advocated here.
You attempt to ID them and pick them up later, and if you can't, you let them go.
Well, I'd rather they just get pitted. If someone is at the point of fleeing from police in a high speed chase, I want them removed from society, because nobody well adjusted and beneficial does that. Whether that's by arrest or by accidental death, I really don't mind either way. The alternative also emboldens criminals to flee as a first resort and to plan around that possibility.
Fortunately in USA we have many state jurisdictions to choose from so we can each live under the sort of laws that suit us best!
This would be precisely the divide I mentioned above. One is focused on whole-picture outcomes, the other is focused on making sure “bad guys” have a bad time (regardless of how that fits into the larger picture). Folks on either side of this divide tend to think the other is actually, factually nuts.
You are ignoring the big picture outcome of the resultant culture that develops in a society in which criminals can easily flee and not be chased. Culture shifts for the worse in an environment that is less likely to catch, arrest, or prosecute criminals. Trust and norms erode.
The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.
High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.
At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
I broadly agree that both are important, but I think the difference lies in the level to which the person feels about the two scenarios you post. Some people are far more upset about the former than the latter (and also consider what happens if you modulate it by the crime committed).
(And of course it's not a strict either/or as well: you can have a rules of engagement for such things. e.g. in the UK the police are not blanket banned from pursuing a fleeing vehicle, but they need to have had appropriate training and do so only in particular circumstances)
Yeah but a ton of random non criminals die because of these maneuvers as well
You are unfortunately completely correct
Is your car really not connected/connectable?
I have a 2014 car that's connectable but no driver assistance; I had a 2017 (delivered mid 2016) with lane keeping and emergency braking which seemed pretty new and exciting, and it's connectable, all I would need to do is pay a big annual fee and also setup a 3g CDMA network. Couldn't do much with either if it's connected; I pulled the 3g modem from the 2014 when it was convenient cause I was worried it was using power while off.
Not that lane keeping needs a connection, just that I'm surprised they put it on a car without a modem.
2026 CR-V and Civic both have trims with ADAS but no modem: https://mygarage.honda.com/s/hondalink-product-compatibility
To my knowledge it is completely offline. The fanciest version of it (Honda Civic) has wifi and will connect to your house wifi when in range (and also do wireless Android Auto) but mine doesn't have it. This one has no cloud features and if there's a SIM card lurking deeply in there somehwere, it certainly isn't going to facilitate reaching down to monitor me in the car (the hardware isn't there, aside from the microphone for bluetooth) or change features on me.
I won't claim to know for certain but want to point out that if there's a SIM card in the head unit then it can upload anything it can see on the CAN bus which is literally every sensor in the vehicle. I guess the only thing likely to be missing is a cockpit video feed.
Even if it doesn't offer the user an option to connect AFAIK approximately all vehicles from the past 15 years or so are part of the internet of shit. They send telemetry back to the manufacturer.
My 2016 Corolla has zero advertised connectivity features. It could secretly be sending data somehow, but far as I've been able to tell there's no modem.
I have a Subaru with driver's assistance. Basically you input speed and distance from the vehicle ahead, and the car turns, accelerates, and brakes. It disengages quite often, in particular when the lanes are not clearly marked.
I used it a couple of times, but then I stopped; for me, as a driver/passenger, it has very little value. Yes, maybe I can lower my attention from 100% to 95%, but it does not make much difference: I need to keep my hands on the wheel, it disengages at random (for me) times.
True autopilot is very different.
Yeah I don't get Tesla's move here. Lane Keep Assist has been a standard feature in most new cars, EV or not, starting around ~2019ish. IIRC, the EU now has regulations mandating lane keep assist in all new vehicles sold.
Heck, a cheap base model Maza 3 I rented had lane keep assist.
Tesla only stands to lose by gatekeeping what's now a basic feature behind a paywall.
It checks out with all the other awful software changes they're making like whatever "curvature assist" is that randomly brakes where it doesn't need to, or when it gets confused about what road I'm on while on the freeway and suddenly drops my 75mph cruise control to 55mph and slams the brakes.
I miss having a dumb cruise control.
IMO; you should try the product. The car basically drives me everywhere with no interventions, including on errands around SF. Just plug in where via the Google Maps view.
I’ve been paying the monthly for a while. Very worth it to me.
“basically” is doing some heavy lifting here as they aren’t good enough to let you ignore the road without taking serious risks. So you’re stuck in the drivers seat paying attention to traffic, but you get to mostly avoid turning the steering wheel, yay what an awesome improvement definitely worth 8k or 100$/month
IMO adaptive crude control that works down to 0MPH is still the sweet spot.
Also standard equipment now (in my mid-level Honda Civic). However once gone to zero, it won't roll again until you nudge the throttle pedal. Also, just like lane keeping it "needs supervision". Once someone braked hard up ahead to do an almost-missed left turnoff, and I let the adaptive cruise control do what it does. And it missed it and I had to brake manually, fairly hard too!
But for driving in slow traffic with no passing lane for the next half hour (Highway 7 between Perth and Marmora, for Ontarians) it's a godsend. Just let it handle it and chill.
First, you're talking about a different product, FSD vs Autopilot.
Second, I have a 2025 Model 3, and even with the latest v14.2.2 FSD I had an intervention rate of roughly every ten miles in Washington DC/VA suburbs. I shudder to think what it would do if I didn't pay attention, so I don't think it's an improvement over me driving myself.
How does lane-keeping assist drive you everywhere, or plug in to Google Maps? That doesn't make any sense to me. Are you talking about a separate feature or something?
I have two questions:
- Is it unsupervised?
- Has legal liability shifted as a result of the system being the driver?
Because I feel like the answer needs to be "yes" for this claim to be accurate. If the answer isn't "yes," then you're still meant to be fully engaged with driving and are liable for any accidents that occur.
It could be a better product, but that doesn't mean it's a better purchase if you care about the morals of the companies and leaders you do business with
> The car basically drives me everywhere with no interventions
I believe you, but occasionally it will try to kill you.
I rented one of these in the form of a Hyundai Sonata, and their lane follow is amazing. Included in the cost of the car, does radar cruise and all the rest. Free for the life of the car.
Time to update https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
this is hilarious :)
They're offering 50% off the subscription to people who used to have Enhanced Autopilot [1]. As I predicted when the CEO's compensation plan had a part tied to FSD subscriptions, they are going to push more people onto it by bundling more features and cutting the price.
[1] https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2014751111803032049
Show me the incentives i'll show you the outcomes.
Reminds me of when an ISP offered me a discount if I would agree to sign up with their partnered TV service. I agreed on the condition that I didn't have to rent a box. But you can't use the service without a box ... ? Who cares, I got a discount.
These sort of shenanigans for even basic lanekeeping makes a very strong case for more open source solutions like comma
Pressing the lane assistant button on a Mercedes steering wheel and getting a “you’ll need to activate your subscription first” message really drove up my blood pressure.
And the EU companies are surprised a lot of people buy Chinese now.
Screw the subscriptions. I don't care how much the shareholders want them.
> Screw the subscriptions. I don't care how much the shareholders want them.
Agreed. The investor requirements of any company mean nothing to me as the consumer.
Woah, which model was this in?
https://www.reddit.com/r/mercedes_benz/comments/1oq9xum/acti...
This is an example of what I am talking about.
You know you can just buy it?
In this case, they bought and currently own the sensors and hardware that the ML model is stored on. Moreover, the software runs locally.
It's a silly example, but you can think of it as buying a house and the ceiling lights requiring a subscription to turn on.
As an aside, I wonder how long this can keep up before it begins affecting laws around theft and property damage if the person operating, storing, insuring, and maintaining the physical objects don't contractually own them. Is Mercedes a victim if the LKAS camera gets damaged or stolen, rather than you?
I mean they surely knew this before they bought their car and bought it anyway. So I don't get the complaint
Are you sure they bought the ML Models?
The Hardware is inside because it's required for the emergency lane keeping, but I wouldn't be surprised if the OEMs would have a deal with the supplier where they are paid more if this feature gets enabled
They already bought the car.
I'm wondering whether it's a generational vision and that the concept of ownership of software with hardware is slowly becoming obsolete.
Every young adult I know uses a subscription for everything I used to buy. Even though they own the device on which they consume it.
Spotify for cd's, Netflix-Disney-Amazon for vhs and dvd's, Udemy-Masterclass for books.
CDs were around $16 in 2000, which is equivalent to around $30 today, which is around 2.3 times what a Spotify premium subscription costs for one person.
Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.
I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.
Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.
Yes, despite knowing that it's not included. It's like hitting yourself and complaining afterwards about it
It’s built in. There is a dedicated button for it. Hard to justify imho.
You're missing the point.
My Comma 4 arrives today, and I think it will be great (using it with my Lightning, not my Model 3), but I think it is just a temporary solution that is effectively a dead man walking. The latest cars are not usable with a Comma and likely will never be, with manufacturers locking down the CANBUS with encryption.
Literal anticompetitive behavior in the name of safety. The more of them that move to subscription services the better the chance the scheme gets legally challenged I figure.
I hope it does. A bit of regulation clarifying that I own my car would be nice, with a requirement than I be given the encryption keys on request.
Comma can be installed on a tesla, I've seen a couple of them already driving around the Bay Area
Comma's days are numbered. Newer cars are encrypting the bus, so that HW like comma can't get the data it needs.
As a company yeah they probably won't survive in the long term. But since the software is open source forks like SunnyPilot should remain updated for existing owners and such. People will likely even make DIY comma hardware devices too if the company stops selling them.
Although even if the devices stop getting updates, that makes them on par with most built in car software and lane assist stuff which never gets updated in the car's life anyway.
Very strong case for keeping your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road and drive the car yourself.
I do. My current car only has regular old cruise control, but it would be nice to have ACC and lane centering for longer drives.d
My car from late 2005 to early 2025, a 2006 Honda CR-V, only has regular old control. That's now my backup car and my main car is 2025 Hyundai Kona EV with adaptive cruise control.
I too thought it would be nice on long drives, but really it hasn't made that much difference. Like everyone I speed on the freeway, but not as much as everyone else, so it rarely has to actually adapt. :-)
The place I've found it makes a huge difference is stop and go or near stop and go traffic. You can't set it to a speed below 20 mph, but if the car it is following goes below that it keeps working all the way down to 0 mph. (You don't have to be going 20 mph to set it. You can set it if you are going above something like 3 or 4 mph, or if you are stopped and there is a stopped car ahead of and it thinks you are on a street. It just sets the speed to 20 mph when you set it under those circumstances).
If the car ahead starts moving again within a few seconds it will automatically follow. If longer it will beep once when the car ahead starts moving and show a message about the lead car leaving. Tapping the accelerator or flicking the cruise control speed adjust switch on the steering wheel will resume following.
Not all adaptive cruise control systems work all the way down to 0 mph. Some cut off well above that. Some only work down to 0 mph on higher trims.
Making sure I get one that does is now on my "must have" requirements for any future car.
I genuinely don't understand what role lane centering serves if you really do keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. It doesn't steer the car if you're steering the car yourself, not when I drove cars that had it. What am I missing?
The only point of cruise control is to take your foot off the peddle and to zone out and stop paying attention to how fast you're going. This is already Not Great to have in cars, but adding the same to the steering wheel, making drivers feel emboldened to look away, is probably a big part of the reason so many cars on the road today seem like they're being driven by deranged psychopaths; the drivers are actually tuned out doing other shit!
And right to repair
Sorry but the LAST thing I want is people being able to YOLO code onto their cars to drive on public roads.
That was my original main complaint with Tesla and why I distrusted them so much before Elon publicly lost the plot.
Even with Autopilot it was clear to me they were far more willing to force the risks of their systems on all other drivers on the road then the legacy auto makers who were much more cautious about testing things extremely thoroughly first. All those early videos of people climbing in the backs of their cars while they were driving down the highway? To me that was proof they couldn’t be trusted with public safety.
it’s a standard feature on all models for many brands today
Just like all subscriptions this kills my interest in it. Tech is only interesting if it isn’t locked in a corporate data center.
you must be really bored with pretty much all the popular tech today then
I'm bored with most of the new flashy products, but that just leads to me tinkering more with things I already have or fun new open source projects. It's somewhat a hobby of mine to maximize the potential of old hardware with better software.
Not the person you’re responding to but yes, pretty much all of modern tech is awful.
The specs are pretty good but then you don’t really own it, you get limitations on what you can use it for, you get rent seeking and walled gardens everywhere. Even if you’re paying you get ads and get tracked. Updates make products worse more often than not.
What are you excited about? AI slop?
> What are you excited about? AI slop?
A little credit please?! I don't use AI anything. I code my stuff the old fashioned way with nested if/else statements that make you cry trying to follow along. And damn the coworker that interrupts your debugging asking if you got their email or not.
https://img.devrant.com/devrant/rant/r_55338_NBSDq.jpg
... and? Nothing wrong with not buying into what's popular.
and nothing. it's a comment on how everything is closed tech by the platforms, not a knock on being bored with that fact. i fully agree and do not participate on those platforms.
I work hard to keep subscriptions out of my life. I will do everything in my power to not have a subscription as part of any car I own. The problem is it is likely out of my hands. I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b. I will have to pay astronomical prices on a worse experience for the privilege of having my data sold and the opportunity to pay them monthly. I want to scream when I see things like this but to who? I wonder how hard it is to electrify a 20yo car....
> I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b
I daily a 30 year old car. There exists a sweet spot of reliability, safety, and comfort (probably the early-mid 2000s) that in theory, you should never have to buy a vehicle outside of, newer or older. There will always be clean old cars in good shape you can buy, you don't need a new vehicle.
Unless you can't buy gasoline anymore. But that's still quite a long ways away imo.
luckily I don't drive much. The one car is just falling apart and is ridiculously expensive to maintain (don't buy a used Mercedes, ever). The other is just not fun to be in but at least it gets reasonable gas mileage. I really want an electric vehicle, especially the way things are going right now, but buying anything built in the last 10 years is just depressing at best and electric vehicle life is much lower on average than ICE lifespan due to battery life. Ah well. Maybe this will push me to an electric scooter for all the in-town travel and I will only need a 'real car' once a month or so.
There are still current-model cars that are effectively subscription-free and/or where you can pull the fuse for the telematics/connectivity and everything else still functions as expected.
I would gladly pay $99/month if this was honest FSD. I started tracking my time consistently since end of December and in the past 2 weeks I spend 23 hours driving. That's already only $4/hour.
I haven't been keeping up with the progress in this space. Last I heard, Benz introduced some sort of self driving feature AND accepted full liability for it (whereas Tesla does not). How does Benz's self driving compare to Teslas?
Mercedes' feature has been sunset. It only ever worked in good weather on a limited set of motorways, below a certain speed, and with a guide vehicle in front of it l.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/12/mercedes-pauses-level-3...
There are unsupervised HW4 Tesla robotaxis in Austin open to public use as of yesterday. Lemonade Insurance announced an FSD plan where the price is half the market rate while using FSD. So unless there are specific regulatory barriers for personal vehicles unsupervised should be available for their latest gen personal cars sometime this year.
Oh, but you see, when Mr. Musk said:
'In a post on X.com, Musk said Tesla "started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car. Congrats to the Tesla AI team!"'
He really did mean "in the car". The safety supervisor is still there, just in another car [1], so it's not technically a lie, silly us!
[1]: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....
are we really to the point of calling someone a liar for something they clearly didn't say and you even quoted?
That’s basically what SAE L3 and above levels of autonomy mean. The manufacturer takes full responsibility of the driving while the function is active.
I drove Mercedes and BMW L3 offering. Both had a really restricted ODD (Operational Design Domain) for it to be of much use outside high traffic situations on an Autobahn. It was restricted to good weather and speeds of around 60km/h. Basic all conditions under which their set of sensors and CPUs would work optimally.
But that was 2021 technology. L4 level of autonomy will be in the market during the next 4/5 years, no doubt. And that will be a game changer for anyone driving any significant amount of time. Sleeping, reading, watching a movie or just working on the laptop will be possible. And the manufacturer will take full responsibility of the driving while the functions are active.
Benz's full self driving is only up to 40mph and only when it has a car to follow in front of you.
When you said this, lemming's all jumping off a cliff came to mind...
And temperatures over 0 degrees Celsius with no rain. I tried it.
We've had FSD trial for 4 months in the middle of last year. I work from home so I can't really justify $100 a month. However, we did take a few trips (about 60 miles in each direction) to see family through downtown LA.
I was honestly stunned by how far the tech has come. It basically drove us door to door without a single intervention.
I talked to about 3 people about this that have personal experience with Tesla autopilot and that's been the feedback. So where's the gap? What's the problem?
I don't think there is a problem per se. There are probably still edge cases out there that I didn't experience. But overall, I think the tech is ready to roll.
He said the price will increase as it gets more capable. Funny though, they've lowered the price of FSD over the years...
He lies so consistently, it continues to impress me how effectively he controls TSLA investors.
Stockholm syndroom, they are a captive audience, they already bought the stock.
I've tried the various flavors of self-driving in my Tesla over the past several years, and essentially it came down to a three-strikes rule for me - after the third time that car jerkily exited the self-driving mode on it own (the third time being in a slight bend on the highway at night) and spiked my heart rate to must have been an all-time high as I manually corrected in time to avoid disaster.. I said "nope, this is a decent electric car but I'm driving it myself from now on."
Waymo on the other hand, I trust it with my life on a weekly basis and have never had cause for concern (fingers crossed I didn't just jinx it).
Three strikes is a lot of leniency to give to a machine that is carrying you and loved ones down the road at 70mph. The minute I saw a single instance of unexpected steering, braking, or accelerating behavior out of a car that is not damaged, I'd be returning it under warranty.
Do BYD and other Chinese EVs have this insane subscription scheme for basic features on their cars, or is that only a feature of North American/European manufacturers?
Once BYD is the most popular car, they will complain that it's probably because of the Chinese government manipulating the people. But the truth is that I would happily buy a BYD car knowing that it's a good product, with no goddamn subscriptions.
It looks to be completely free on most BYD models - as in no one time fee or subscription fee, but just part of the car:
https://insideevs.com/news/750244/byd-smart-driving-cheap/
Wow, I've never seen an article that misleading from the first line!
> "Full Self-Driving" costs $8,000. BYD includes its version for free on a $9,300 car.
These are unrelated things. Tesla's comparative offering (at the time this article was written) was also included for free.
So, what you're saying is that Tesla used to be as good as a $9,300 BYD but is now going to be worse?
No wonder they need to hide behind a tariff wall.
No, and it seems you're intentionally inferring something there.
I am saying that the article is comparing two features that are different and alluding to them being the same to confuse the non-informed reader.
I have no idea what a "tariff wall" is, but I don't believe Tesla or BYD pay a tariff in my country.
I am also curious about this, how does the average person in China feel about subscriptions?
BYD is available in a lot of countries outside China.
Our 2020 Model S came with Autopilot. It was part of the purchase price.
We don't use FSD, we don't use Autopilot either.
But I'll be goddamed if he tries to take away something I paid for.
This is only for new cars sold, as they can't take away features that were included in the advertised price for a car when it was sold.
That's true as long a the law is enforced. Which regulator is going to stop them?
In this case, customers can sue them.
Canadian ones?
Haven’t they done that before?
They can't yet.
$99/mo is for FSD, not just lane keeping.
The article doesn’t explain what happens to simple lane leeping. Surely it should be free like in any other car (like my Volvo).
Lane keep is autopilot which is going away (for new cars). FSD doesn't have basic lane keep. The real question will be what happens to "legacy" cars with autopilot.
> The real question will be what happens to "legacy" cars with autopilot.
Tesla cannot take anything away that was on the Monroney sticker. This includes AP.
Lane keeping is a default feature for free on all tesla's and this article doesn't say it's going away.
Its being reported elsewhere that future new teslas will not have basic autopilot (the name Tesla use for the standard lane keep assist they offer) at all, the only way to get any form of lane keep assist will be to subscribe to FSD. The wording in the ars article linked here does a terrible job of explaining the change. Existing Teslas which already have basic Autopilot will still continue to have the feature.
New Teslas will now only have "Traffic Aware Cruise Control" as standard without lane assist, i.e. keeps pace with traffic and can stop/start, but user still has to provide steering input.
Isn’t lane keeping pretty standard for most new cars?
It’s like an upside down freemium model - try out our basic self driving product, which is (now) the worst in the market, so you’ll convert to the premium FSD offering.
It’s autopilot and yes on current models. New models will not get it. That’ll be FSD only.
I don't see this mentioned in the configurator for a new model 3 on the tesla site right now. Under "Driver Assistance" it describes "Traffic-aware cruise control" only. Under "Active Safety" it includes "Lane Departure Avoidance" which is separate from the "Autosteer" feature described under the "Autopilot" section. It's possible they will choose to fold autosteer into the lane departure avoidance but there's been no announcement of that. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_il/GUID-ADA05DF...
It does
Under the new 2026 pricing structure, Autosteer has been removed. *New vehicles will now only ship with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control*. Buyers who want the vehicle to steer itself on highways must now pay for the software that was once standard.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/tesla-cuts-standard-autopilot...
Autopilot / FSD was a mess. Autopilot is very old tech and people confusing "self driving" with it, which it's not. We'll see how many pony up for FSD, but I think the play is to force people to try it.
They handed people free trials before, which is using the carrot and not the stick. Around where I live, with HW3, the last trial made it clear that it was just not worth it at all, as there's key areas around my house where intervention was mandatory.
I've been using Autopilot for years, but recently subscribed to FSD for a long weekend roadtrip. It changed my mind on the value of FSD.
While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.
Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.
I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.
I agree. The current price is 7/8 years of ownership, which can't be transferred. The subscription currently makes a lot more sense. Personally, I think if one buys a Tesla today they should impute the cost of an FSD subscription over the expected lifetime. It's excellent. If that cost is too high, fair enough. Buy a less smart car.
I'm 41 and I've never been comfortable with even cruise control, when I drive I DRIVE.
I can't shake the feeling of trusting an already complex machine to yet another layer of complexity through software.
---
The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
— Scotty, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
I love FSD, but this is awful. Given that this is almost certainly being done to juice the FSD subscriber count so that Elon hits his 10M sub target, I'd even go as far as to say that this is legally questionable.
Also, this move is beyond stupid IMO. Autopilot is Tesla's ONLY moat now that their Supercharger network is open to everyone. Gating that behind a $99/mo sub is guaranteed to make buyers shop elsewhere, especially now that the EV tax credit is no longer and the OEMs (and our O&G friendly admin) are rallying around EREVs.
How much does braking cost ?
$0.00000008 per Newton of deceleration force applied to the vehicle.
Pressing the brake pedal and maintaining a stationary position is billed at a rate of $0.003 per second of immobility.
Energy dissipation during the braking event costs an additional $0.00001 per Joule of heat generated.
Depends on your social credit score.
The American social credit score is just called credit score.
FSD makes sense as a subscription as it's something that gets updated all of the time. Subscriptions to things built into the car like heated seats seems like a way to scam money out of people.
I agree; but Autopilot unlike FSD hasn't been updated in several years.
It doesn't contain maps or context of the roads, it is just Auto-Steer + Lane-Change + Full-Range Cruise Control under one brand-umbrella. Mostly useful on the Motorways/Freeways, and commonly found in competitor's vehicles.
If you have the basic "Free" Autopilot was it possible to upgrade it in the app to Enhanced Autopilot to get the lane change feature?
It was at some points; I believed it was priced between $2K-4K depending on the point in time and either offered post-purchased or only during ordering, again, depending on which time-period.
My Garmin receives updates and I don't have to pay a subscription for that. Hell I don't even need updates if it does what it should. Often the updates are there to fix bugs because the software was sold before being ready.
Why does FSD need to get updated all the time?
That's awesome. Lane-keeping is mandatory in the EU since 7/2024. They _cannot_ sell a car without it there.
The funny part is that the Tesla doesn't have a basic dumb cruise control. It only has "traffic-aware" cruise control which uses the cameras and doesn't use the new FSD code so it has lots of glitches and phantom braking and decides for itself what speed to use. My wife just wants to set the speed and have the car go that speed.
Do any cars with assisted cruise control have the ability to step down to dumb cruise control? (I know my car doesn't - the lower trims have dumb cruise control, and you lose that in favour of assisted if you bump up to a higher trim.)
Does anybody actually find Autopilot to be more than a novelty? Having to look ahead like a robot and keep your hands on the wheel is exactly how you drive without it. It feels like placing trust in the system and accepting risk without any tangible benefit.
Time for comma to shine?
https://comma.ai/
Is this a precursor to Tesla offering autopilot in vehicles from other manufacturers? Sure, other manufactuers would have to adopt the hardware and integrate with the autopilot interface, but self-driving is inevitable and Tesla autopilot is the best.
Why would Tesla lock adaptive cruise control when others have it subscription free?
To be fair, you can say that about a lot of features/manufacturers. e.g. Why does Toyota lock remote start via app when others have it subscription free?
What will be the next step? ignition? wipers? opening passenger doors? charging for functionality that several manufacturers offer for past several years sounds like desperation to get any revenue.
As long as people buy them, they have no reason not to do it. What I can't understand is why people buy those cars in the first place.
Article is unclear but if this is saying you can't even get basic ADAS w/out $99/mo that is a pretty big deal, especially if it's applied to existing cars.
Basic stay-in-line and start/stop following in traffic has become pretty standard for almost a decade at this point and paywalling it now would be outrageous. I have a 2017 car that does this.
According to other articles adaptive cruise control (which works down to 0 mph in stop and go traffic) is being kept standard. It is just the rest of Autopilot that is moving to a subscription.
Basic ADAS is government-mandated. Even shitbox Toyotas with traditional ignition keys have it for free.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not aware of any regulation requiring ADAS. Even automatic emergency breaking is not yet required for a few more years.
It is in the EU but in the US ADAS won't be mandated until 2029. It would tank your IIHS rating though and all major mfgs have met a voluntary pledge to have >95% light duty vehicles ship with autobraking by 2023: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/automakers-fulfill-autobrak...
Well Teslas now ship without the Lane Keeping. So the Toyota Shitbox has better ADAS (and surely also a better quality)
The basic autopilot is very useful. It would be nice if they offered it as a one-time fee when ordering your car.
Tesla's autopilot was so clumsy that I stopped using it and forgot about it years ago. I like the adaptive cruise control though, it is more transparent and decidedly more of a benefit, except for its phantom braking moments. Autopilot's requirement that your hands be on the wheel (and do nothing) is a strain over time, definitely boring, and a terrible interface. I don't understand why people would pay for such an awkward feature. The monthlong demos of Full Self Driving I tried were even more awkward. The need to keep your hands on the wheel required a different but nearly equivalent cognitive load to actual steering, when using it in residential and city traffic. The crucial difference is that "the car was driving me" rather than "I was driving the car". Tesla can't convince everyone that their driver assist technology warrants product status; take away driver autonomy and make them pay for it seems like a failure to me. It won't be a product until you can sit in the back, close your eyes and safely arrive at your destination. Good luck getting to that level of quality with this business model. Tesla should be giving the tech away to its car owners and collecting as much data as they can, right? I have points to spare for the astroturf Muskovites to downvote my honest (but embarrassed) customer perspective.
I drive one on Dutch roads, and a lot of the back roads (60km/h) are one lane with dotted lines on the side like here: [1]
If you turn on TACC, it will constantly whine that you're hugging the side of 'your lane'. But it's one lane for both directions, you're supposed to hug your side!
In my SAAB I used cruise control anywhere I expected to maintain speed for any amount of time. In the Y I don't bother on this type of road because it bitches at me constantly and sometimes even jerks me to the middle of the lane. That's never happened with oncoming traffic but I'm not risking it.
[1]https://shorturl.at/jSQhP (shortened, Maps links are huge)
well, years ago is a long time in tech. the latest videos I've seen show people not having to touch the wheel any more, and it apparently drives fairly long complex routes with no intervention.
There's even Teslas operating as "auto taxis" now in some cities - they drive entirely without anyone even in the driver seat.
I TL;DR the update release notes, and wasn't aware that the wheel holding requirements were gone. I am not convinced yet, as I got a phantom "take control of your vehicle" alert when leaving the driveway a few weeks ago, for no apparent reason (hands on wheel, no visible hazards). They happen every once in a while. My daughter has been thinking of using the Tesla alert sound in one of her trap songs given our familiarity with it.
I would recommend testing out the latest FSD. It’s made huge forward steps vs what was there before.
Musk is a true genius: You were paying first for the hardware and then to conduct training supervision for the AI while taking full responsibility if something goes wrong.
$8,000 / $99 / month is 6 years 8 months.
How long do people keep their Tesla normally?
Is this an ad for comma.ai? Because it sure reads like one...
$99!
Not worth it for anyone doing less than 100 miles/day.
Is the article confused or will there literally be no lane-keeping without the subscription? Because nowadays every car rental place bottom of the barrel Kia has lane-keeping.
Tesla’s “autosteer” is significantly more advanced than the “lane keeping” feature I’ve seen in rental cars, or my own 2023 Jeep. My understanding is that autosteer will actively keep the car centered in the middle of the lane, while the “lane keeping” I’ve experienced will only adjust the steering when you approach the lane edge, which pin balls you back and forth like a drunk driver.
Both my late model Japanese cars have two systems capable of steering the car toward the middle of the lane. One is an always-on (unless disabled) passive safety system that only kicks in when you actually appear to be drifting off the road, and the other is a system that actively tries to keep the car in the middle of the lane. The latter system has to be toggled on and off and is meant to be complementary with adaptive cruise.
What you're describing sounds like the former system, while the latter one is what should be compared to Tesla's "autopilot" or "FSD" or whatever the fuck. It works very well on both my cars and is a game changer for longer drives.
I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild, especially since what you're getting isn't the "full self driving" we were promised. You still have to be fully engaged with what the car is doing and ready to take over in a fraction of a second.
> I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild
The article doesn't mention it but other articles say that their version of adaptive cruise control (Traffic Aware Cruise Control or TACC) that was part of Autopilot is becoming a standard feature.
I have a 2020 Alfa Romeo (interestingly also a Stellantis car like your Jeep), it has "follow the lane" feature. For the edge of the lane, it can either vibrate as a warning or force you off it, I have it set to vibrate.
In mid tier and premium tier cars, lane keeping is generally either implicitly or explicitly lane centering. My Navigator calls it lane keeping but it is centering, and my Audi specifically calls out lane centering.
That is not universally true. It's lane keeping in my wife's Volvo, and it sucks in exactly the way described up-thread.
My experience with that brand specifically is they should call it "lane oscillating".
I went with that example because I had a Kia Sportage from Hertz and it had lane centering (not just the thing that detects you are deviating from the lane). It did want you to touch the steering wheel but that's just cheaper driver monitoring.
Jeep and all the other Stellantis brands have the worst lane assist and worst tech options on the market, and the trim level on any rental is going to be as basic as they can get away with.
That would make modern Subaru from I don't know how many years back, 'autosteer'. My Impreza does not behave in the least like 'pinballing', it behaves like it too can drive down the road, but wants to be holding your hand while doing it. This is on some pretty sketchy roads and road conditions, so it won't keep doing it unless it's identified at least one if not two lines on the road.
Seems like Subaru lane assist is considerably better than when it first came out in 2013 or so. I was able to experience it back then and it could have pinballed, certainly wasn't as steady and capable as it is more than ten years of development later.
it's click-bait, the lane keeping is free and is not going away
Do you have a source for that? I thought all of Tesla's "default" driver assistance was part of Autopilot, which is going away. I haven't seen any mention of decoupling various features from Autopilot (with some remaining free, just without the branding).
This is similar to GM‘s Super Cruise, which is similar in functionality and also a monthly subscription.
GM Super Cruise (and Ford's Blue Cruise) is hands-free, autosteer is not. Ford has an equivalent of autosteer available without a subscription, I would guess GM does too.
I'm glad I got rid of my Teslas, they are always doing their best to make the experience worse. Stage three of enshittification from them. I loved it back when it was stage 1.
What did you move to?
The speed is what I like, and the simplicity when I bought it. I hate 10,000 trim options with random prices like BMW and having to argue with a sales guy - just gimme the price!
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618435
The latest version of FSD is amazing. We have it on our Plaids (2024 and 2026 models) and I probably only actually "drive" 5% of the time. There's a camera to see if you're paying attention to the road, so no longer any need to keep your hands on the wheel. It'll start from a parking space and go all the way into my house and back into the garage.
Of course, I don't trust it as much as I trust Waymo's system, and I'm very careful when using it in rain or fog...
So you're saying people should just pay for the subscription? Seems like tangential FSD(S)-glazing here.
Cameras wired into an internet connected car is the #1 reason why I will never buy a car like a Tesla.
Anecdotes like yours are often from the point of view of someone in California - sunny, clear weather most of the year. In monsoon rain, fog, snow, or unusual markings on the road, all these systems break down.
> Cameras wired into an internet connected car is the #1 reason why I will never buy a car like a Tesla.
Well then, this isn't the car for you. For many other people the safety features are important. I wouldn't mind if every car had a camera that made sure the driver was paying attention and didn't fall asleep.
That’s completely valid but the problem for me is the fact that you do not control the internet connection in these cars. A camera does not need an internet connection to monitor the driver.
The real question is why buys Teslas now, given that their owner is a proven fascist showing nazi salutes on stage. Do you have to say "sieg heil" to start it too?
good little sheeple.
The people who buy teslas without looking at anything about the person who runs the company behind them?
In light of recent trends, Tesla is signaling supreme confidence in its prospects by already pursuing enshittification.
They’ve been enshittifying for the better part of a decade. The model 3 launching without rain sensors and taking years to get any where near comparable with cameras comes to mind.
It still is not anywhere close with cameras. My guess is that it will not ever get better than it is today.
$99/month plus tax is a pretty fucking steep price for any kind of subscription! Holy cow!
I sign up if I want to do a long road trip and cancel after. Worked great for that.
If you have do a lot of driving, $99/mo. seems like a decent price to have the car drive itself, especially if it got to the Waymo point where absolutely no driver attention was needed and you could watch Netflix the whole time. The issue with FSD isn't the price, it's that no matter what Elon and his fanboys say, it doesn't bloody work and Waymo is blowing them out of the water in capability.
The “if” here is lifting many metric tonnes of assumptions.
This is part of the long con. They promised FSD almost a decade ago and as their competitors eclipse them, it's clear Tesla is a) behind and b) will never catch up.
So instead of admitting they were wrong all along and doing what's necessary to catch up (add LiDAR to their sensor stack), they are going to quietly "pivot" Tesla to a "ai and robotics" company, with the monthly fee they'll continue to bilk anyone who is still enthralled enough to believe them on their FSD grift, but they will run the same scam as they did with FSD (Musk will say "humanoid robots for the home in in 3 years", yet we will still be waiting for them to be useful in the year 2035)
I'm not any kind of Elon fan, but I think it is a little more nuanced than that. FSD is definitely more advanced than any regular competition. It is not as capable as Waymo, that is for sure, but that is not a car you can own.
Apart from the technical limitations of FSD, Elon hasn't thought through the business model. Claiming that Tesla cars will be capable of turning into robotaxis seemed plausible a decade ago before all the negative externalities of Airbnb became widely known.
Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.
Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.
> Elon hasn't thought through the business model
I think I see it more bluntly. Elon knows exactly what his buisiness model is: hype. It has been wildly successful. The cars are okay, but the hype surrounding them is extremely disproportionate.
Their vision-only system will never live up to promises without inventing an AGI-level inference engine. Maintaining an aura that they are capable of doing this is part of the con. A kind of, shangri-la promise of harmonious one-true vision system that to date has not come true despite promises of its impending coming.
Taycan Turbo GT mogs any Plaid cult member.
Somewhat related, there are now robotaxis giving rides to customers in Austin with no driver, and no safety monitor inside at all.
Progress, for sure.
There's no monitor in the car. But there is a chase car with a monitor in it. Technically correct is the best kind isn't it?
Yes, correct.
The next step will be remote monitors with the ability to drive if needed. That will be identical to Waymo I now.
Then the next step is nobody watching.
Progress is fantastic, it means more choices for consumers, lower prices, better tech.
No, actually, nobody remote drives a Waymo. If you don't know how Waymo works, you also don't know how far behind is Tesla. There are fundamental obstacles to Tesla ever being a viable robotaxi.
Waymo have remote humans that can take over control when neeeded. It sounds rare, but it does happen.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response#:~:text=In%20f...
There is never any remote driving involved. That would be dangerous. The current state of Tesla's "remote control" consists of a ghetto V2V hack to move the Killswitch to the chase car. How many years do you think it took to develop the remote decision-support Waymo has got? The second paragraph of the article you linked to explains this:
> Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
Waymo's been in Austin for a while! Seeing them on MOPAC, when I don't think they're supposed to be on the highway, is always charming.
a while for sure, Waymo had cars all over last time I was there ~5 years ago
Waymo expanded highway operations at the end of last year
https://apnews.com/article/waymo-autonomous-driverless-cars-...
I don't see what the issue is. No one is forced to buy a tesla, no pay for the subscription. It seems likely that self-driving features will require ongoing maintenance and updates for the next several years, it's not like it's 0 cost to them to develop and distribute the software.
I'm not a Tesla fan, I will never own a fully self driving car, but I don't have a problem with a company charging money for features that consumers want. There are about a dozen other car manufacturers in the US alone that can sell self driving cars without a subscription if they want to.
> self-driving features will require ongoing maintenance and updates for the next several years
Autopilot is not self-driving, it is lane-centering with traffic aware cruise control. It has not gotten any maintenance or updates in years, as far as we can tell.
Identical functionality is available from many competitors with no subscription. This is a noteworthy decision for Tesla because AP has long been one of their defining features, dropping it is a big step backward just as the market caught up.
Well, the market will decide if dropping it in favor of a subscription-based upgrade is worth it or not. Not sure why anyone would be upset, this all seems perfectly reasonable.
They are taking away a standard feature for most modern cars as a sad way to push more people into their shitty CaaS model.
Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, correct, but that isn't a requirement for newsworthiness.
All Teslas should be banned. This has gone on long enough.
Why is this story at position 261 with 269 points (@6hr)? It's been demoted so much that it's behind a 6hr post about Pistachio's with 1 point (also 6hr old)
This site has become ridiculously biased.
All the Tesla investors and tech bros with stocks in TSLA are not interested in having negative news about their gold-plated goose out in the public.
It's a tradeoff, too early to say if it's a dumb move.
Side A: Tesla can grow FSD subscription revenue by making FSD + Autopilot completely based on subscription. Lot more people use Autopilot than FSD. In the happy path such users will pay the subscription and that revenue will increase.
Side B: Autopilot (aka lane keeping) is fast becoming default option across manufacturers. Tesla will take a dip in sales if such 'basic' option is no longer available.
Whether side A > side B is to be seen.
I'd prefer to evaluate it from the viewpoint of someone outside the Tesla c-suite.
$22k Corolla has it.
Not paying $99/mo for it.
The issue is not that “FSD” is $99/mo. The issue is that a feature of $22k cars (lane keeping) is behind the $99/mo paywall.
Basically not enough people were buying the subscription for Elon to get his payout. But someone who just wants auto steering isn’t going to decide they’ll pay $99/mo for that. So this is just going to make people who like that feature not buy a new Tesla when the time comes.