While there are those videos showing Tesla driving themselves using Full Self-Driving Beta with hardly any driver intervention, this video is not like that at all. It shows a Tesla Model S Plaid handles itself with FSD engaged in New York and it’s pretty clear the road from beta to final is still very long.
Black Tesla decided to really challenge his Plaid’s autonomous driving by trying pitting it against NY’s chaotic traffic, maze of roadworks and bus lanes. It does pretty well on the drive into the city, even through the Lincoln Tunnel with its narrow lanes, although the driver did have to take over control for the toll booth and subsequent queuing and entry into the tunnel.
It’s in these situations, when two lanes merge into one and drivers seem to be jostling for every square inch, that the Tesla really starts to fluster. It doesn’t do much better when setting off from a set of traffic lights only do see that its lane has turned into a bus lane and it doesn’t know what to do.
Tesla clearly needs to work a lot more on FSD, but this video highlights the chaotic nature of traffic and how difficult it will actually be to make a completely autonomous vehicle that has a well-judged reaction ready for every situation. Self-driving on a stretch of multi-lane highway with good road markings and mostly disciplined drivers is easy; the real challenge will be finding a way to get the neural net to make sense of places like New York.
Bus lane recognition, which the vehicle in the video (running FSD Beta 10.5) didn’t seem to be capable of, can easily be added, given that the vehicle can tell different surfaces apart and most bus lanes are red. Tesla’s head of AI recently gave us a glimpse of the company’s automatic labeling tool that could easily distinguish between road, sidewalk or unpaved areas.
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Source: Black Tesla / YouTube