If you were curious how well Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta handles roads that are covered in snow, well, it’s not great. The vehicle just doesn’t seem particularly sure of where the road is and it either wants to give control back to the driver or it starts wandering off course and off the road.
Iowa Tesla Guy took his new Tesla Model Y on the loop where he previously tested FSD and it did a great job in good weather. However, now that there’s snow on the road, it can no longer be trusted to drive the car.
The reasons behind it failing so badly in these conditions are roads that are not clearly visible, but also varying grip conditions. It’s been shown in the past that low grip conditions do fluster FSD, and in this particular instance, the vehicle not seeing the road clearly must only add to the confusion.
If you also read the comments below the video on YouTube, you will see that more people who say they drive Teslas with FSD say they encountered very similar problems when they tried to get the car to drive itself in the snow. Tesla probably hasn’t tested FSD in the snow all that much, because it could have included some sort of failsafe that would automatically disable self-driving if the car saw snow.
Such a mechanism needs to be implemented, because people may put themselves in danger by using FSD on snow, when the system clearly is not ready to handle it. The vehicle driven in the video was running the latest version of FSD Beta, version 10.8. We also added the video that was posted right before the one with the snow, just to show how the car handled the same roads in better weather - the uploader called it the best drive yet.
More Tesla FSD driving videos
Source: Iowa Tesla Guy / YouTube