Tesla Full Self Driving Mode: From Driving to Riding

 

If you are a regular reader of this column, you know that I always try to include one or more immediately actionable business takeaways. This time, it’s different. It’s just a story.

In fact, it’s a story that will likely be more interesting in the future. As with Dua Lipa’s current album, it’s Future Nostalgia. It’s a story about when the first members of the “general public” got full self-driving software for their vehicles … and evolved from driving to riding.

My journey started way back on April 7, 2016, when I put down a $1,000 deposit on an imaginary Tesla Model 3. When this model started shipping in the summer of 2017, I still wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger. Or in 2018, 2019, 2020 … Finally, in July 2021, I decided to buy.

The Tesla buying experience is unlike any other car purchase. While it happened at a Tesla “gallery,” the entire operation took place on my iPhone 12.

When I say, “entire operation,” I mean the entire purchase operation. I ordered the car, selected the options and even applied for financing, entirely on my phone. Moments later as I was walking out of the so-called gallery, I got the notification of loan approval. I took delivery at 5:00 PM on August 2, 2021, an appointment also scheduled via iPhone.

Fast forward to 9/25/2021: Tesla pushed software release 2021.32.25 over the air and another aspect of Elon’s genius was revealed. He created a game to recruit volunteer (aka free) QA testers for Tesla’s not quite correctly named Full Self-Driving software. Read on.

The game requires a 100% surrender of privacy, at least while in your Tesla. Those of us who chose to play opted into monitoring of our driving on five key dimensions, along with audio and video recording of us in our vehicles (along with eight external cameras and who knows what else). Based on six billion cumulative miles of data from earlier Tesla drivers, the company figured out that it could calculate a reliable “predicted collision frequency”. The five variables included hard braking, aggressive turning, unsafe following, forward collision warnings and forced autopilot disengagements. To fail on this last factor requires taking your hands off the wheel for at least 10 seconds and ignoring prompts to reengage. You’d have to be willful or otherwise very seriously distracted. These five variables were combined at different weights (forced autopilot disengagement being a near mortal sin) and scaled to a resulting “safety score” of 0 to 100.

The game had just one rule: Achieve a perfect 100 score (or technically, because of rounding, at least 99.5) and you could be among the first people in the world to experience full self-driving software.

Tesla did not indicate whether or how countless other variables might factor into selection. More than 200 of us Tesla drivers sacrificed what little privacy we had left by posting additional data on a shared Google Sheet. This included everything from exact vehicle model to date of purchase, to vision vs. radar equipped, to FSD purchase vs. subscription, to monitored miles driven, to unrounded safety score which had to be calculated manually using an exceptionally complex formula involving raising five different numbers to extremely precise exponentials having six decimal places. We were working collaboratively to understand selection criteria.

In the end, the only thing that seems to have mattered was covering at least 100 monitored miles and maintaining a 99.5+ safety rating. Of all the dimensions affecting the safety score, I found following distance to be the hardest. If I engaged Tesla’s adaptive cruise control at the maximum following distance, I was penalized for following too closely, LOL. Heaven forbid that someone cut in front of me or that I must merge into tight traffic. In fact, after my first 26 miles of granny-like driving, I was already down to a 99 score. Unbelievable.

So, I went to work on my enhancing my safety score. For four consecutive mornings in early October, I got up before rush hour, drove exceptionally carefully for 3 miles to reach I-79 and headed north, away from Pittsburgh in very light traffic. 30 miles later, I exited at mile marker 105 and returned to home. The trickiest part of the entire drive was at the turnaround exit itself. If you’ve been there, you know it’s a weirdly short exit that immediately makes an incredibly tighter 180 degree turn. Try doing that without hard braking or aggressive turning. Pity the fool exiting at 70 mph. Safety score = 50! I had to make sure that no one was anywhere close behind me and slow down to a seriously unsafe highway speed well before the exit.

On the other end of the drive home, coming through Cranberry Twp. and even into my own neighborhood, pity the pedestrian who might step in front of me. Like I said, I get penalized for hard braking and aggressive turning, not for taking out a pedestrian.

By October 10th, 444 miles later, my safety score was showing (on my iPhone, of course) as a perfect 100. With an unrounded score of 99.824, I even had a little margin for error. If it’s a pedestrian I know, maybe I will brake hard or turn aggressively.

The next morning, on October 11, 2021, at 1:45 AM EDT, Tesla selected about 1,000 of us, everybody with a perfect 100 safety score and over 100 miles of monitored driving, to receive FSD software. The upgrade took me about 30 minutes when I discovered it later that morning.

In essence, Elon’s game allowed Tesla to find 1,000 very compliant humans – extremely good rule followers – to become unpaid beta testers. At this point, Tesla revealed the next rule in the game. And I quote: FSD “may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent.”

Talk about truth in advertising. On my first or second ride (yes, it’s now a ride not a drive), my Model 3 approached a traffic circle. With another vehicle already in the circle coming counterclockwise from the left, FSD came to a stop and let it pass, exactly as expected. However, there was a second vehicle following closely behind the first and FSD started to accelerate as if to merge between these two cars. I don’t know whether FSD might have reconsidered its actions and braked because I immediately did so myself having moved just a couple of feet. Do not judge me for being insufficiently curious.

Whenever such an event happens, there’s a special button on the touchscreen to push the data directly to Tesla’s software engineers. And so, I did.

Tesla’s unpaid beta testers no doubt kept the Tesla team quite busy for the next seven days. During that time, Tesla engineers ran more than 31,000 videos (including presumably some of mine) through their AI training system. This allowed them to improve “crossing object velocity estimation by 20% and yaw estimation by 25% by upreving surround video vehicle network with more data.” That seems like exactly what I needed earlier at the traffic circle, especially the yaw estimation thingy.

And then, all of the week’s magic was bundled into a new software release called 2021.36.5.2 (call it x.2 for short). How wonderful!

Except it wasn’t. My next ride of just 6 miles was fine, albeit still a lot like riding with a 15-year-old with a brand new learner’s permit. Then, at the beginning of the next ride, FSD crashed (meaning that the software went offline, not that it literally crashed the vehicle – note to self: we really need a different word for software failure). Other functions predating FSD, including adaptive cruise control, also went down.

At this point, I imagine that Tesla engineering went into 25-hour-a-day mode because it wasn’t just my car. It was virtually every Tesla running FSD. You had to drive them all manually again, the horror!

A day later, we got another version of software called 2021.36.5.3. I don’t know whether this was a fixed x.2 or just a renamed older-but-working x.1. Happily, FSD x.3 was back in action.

Based on the data now showing in our shared spreadsheet, on October 19, 2021, at 10:00 PM PDT, Tesla added its first 99 driver/rider (that’s my new term for someone in the front left seat of a Tesla in FSD mode: driver/rider). The person was from Seattle and reportedly had an unrounded safety score of 99.494. Elon obviously felt bad for them to be so close to glory n‘at.

Did I mention that this game is open only to people who pay $10,000 for tickets? Or to four somewhat smarter people (per our spreadsheet) who are currently paying $199 a month for their shot. Side note to people of all times: The FSD subscription option reveals yet another facet of Elon’s genius. You pay $199 per month for something you may not be allowed to use. Or maybe Tesla doesn’t start billing until you’re enabled. I don’t really know, having purchased outright.

Don’t get the wrong impression from my narrative so far. My opinion on FSD? It is absolutely amazing. It’s a miracle! It’s the second-best human invention I’ve ever experienced. For the curious, I consider the hot shower to be the greatest of all human inventions.

I’ve never (before now) been a “car guy” as you might have deduced earlier if you did the math. Yes, the purchase price of all my previous vehicles added together totaled about $75K. That was for five cars over more than 40 years. No, none of them were brand-new.

I love my Tesla just like I love my Mac and iPhone. I love FSD. I love the fact that there’s an option for lane changing “aggressiveness” called “Mad Max.” I kid you not. There are so many amazing and fun things about a Tesla that it’s not even in the category of other cars. That’s because it’s at least as much software as it is hardware. And software in Elon’s hands is a heck of a lot of fun (watch out hot shower, it’s time to up your game).

As such, I think Elon deserves yet more money, just not from me. So yesterday at 7:45 AM EDT, I drove/rode my Tesla to my friend Pat’s house. He has a Model 3, too but hasn’t opted for FSD yet.

Long story short, we (meaning Elon and I) didn’t exactly make the sale that day. Near the end of the test ride/drive, I mentioned to Pat that we were being watched by the camera. He suggested, “Don’t say anything bad about Elon.” I replied, “Elon is my favorite human being.” Just then, FSD failed to properly negotiate a left-hand turn and then proceeded to drive straight up the highway entrance ramp inexplicably on the shoulder. I pushed the button to upload everything to Tesla’s engineering team.

By now, I’m sure that Elon has a looping GIF of me saying, “Elon is my favorite human being.”        

And I await the next software release!