this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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A human can drive decades without accidents. I've done that myself. Day and night, rain, snow and fog.
Most autonomous systems are not allowed to be used in any of those conditions!
So there's a long way for FSD to match a competent driver.
So Tesla is definitely not anywhere near "better than a human". Not even under optimal conditions like daylight and no bad weather.
Aside from the interactive voice response, Tesla self-driving would easily pass a road test here. Although I never tried to get it to parallel park and certainly not “parallel park between those two cars”.
The driving part is easy though. What I remember of the driving test was basic skills and confidence, and self-driving has those. Real life driving is a plethora of unexpected stuff and edge cases: that’s where self-driving still needs work but is also not covered in a road test
OK, to be fair the roads in USA are 100 times easier to navigate than in Europe. At least when I compare Californian cities to Copenhagen and other European cities.
But when the Tesla AI can be confused by the above, I'm not so sure it will easily pass a drivers test. Something that is completely obvious to a human, obviously is not to the AI of a Tesla Robo Taxi, that even has extra sensors compared to a normal Tesla.
"Competent driver" is a higher bar than is strictly necessary to make the roads safer. That was my point. It's easy to read a story about a self driving car getting confused at some traffic pattern, but that happens all the time for humans, too.
I don't know how to quantify "not anywhere near" but I agree the industry isn't there yet, and there are some pretty significant challenges to figure out, like inclement weather.
Tesla isn't the only company trying to crack this; don't let Musk being a terrible person blind you to the fact that very smart people are working on this.
This was about a robotaxi, this is Tesla specifically.
There are no other vendors that are equally irresponsible.
I'm not arguing whether Tesla is ahead or behind, I'm only arguing that Tesla is acting with a level of irresponsibility that should have had them fined and controlled on these issues long ago.
I have no doubt that eventually the technology will be good enough, but it's 10 years ago that Musk claimed FSD would be ready next year, and be safer than human drivers, and be able to pick you up and drive you across country, completely without human intervention.
Musk is a liar, I never made that claim about the other companies working on it. But the "good people" at Tesla are still acting irresponsibly, and putting people's lives in danger for profit.
You'll get no disagreement from me that Musk/Tesla is being irresponsible by over stating the capabilities of their vehicles.
But I don't find it interesting to discus Musk and his many character flaws; I was always speaking more generally about the technology itself.
In general the technology is fine, it's all about implementation, and the way Tesla is implementing it is irresponsible and should be illegal.