Tesla On FSD Handles Notoriously Twisty Road With No Intervention

Tail of the Dragon, with its 318 bends in just 11 miles, is widely regarded as one of America’s twistiest and most challenging roads.

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Dec 15, 2021 at 8:34am ET

Add InsideEVs as a preferred source in Google

Comment

We’ve seen Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite fail at guiding the car through New York’s cutthroat traffic, but we’ve also seen it do extremely well less busy places with better, more easy to understand roads. FSD predictably does best out of town, where it just needs to follow one road to the destination, which is why we have high hopes it will do well on one of America’s most notoriously twisty roads.

Keen drives from the United States know of a very twisty road called Tail of the Dragon (also simply known as The Dragon), a mountain pass that takes you from North Carolina into Tennessee, although you will have to negotiate its 318 turns to complete it. Even though it’s quite a small stretch of road, just 11 miles (18 km) long, it is a hotspot for driving and motorcycling enthusiasts that come from out of state just to drive on it.

What do you think?

View

Comments

So how do you think a Tesla Model 3 running Full Self-Driving Beta will fare on this road? Well, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, it should do well here and if you watch the entire one-hour uncut video uploaded by CGP Grey (embedded right above), you’ll see it actually required no driver intervention at all.

It had no problem driving up, then down the road and the YouTuber never had to make any corrections of any sort or take control of the vehicle at any point. The Tesla was running FSD Beta 10.6 and it looks just as impressive as older versions of the software on similar roads with no traffic and just one lane going each way.