- Behind me is a Tesla Model Y.
It's not just an electric car.
This Tesla is equipped with full self driving beta.
It's a set of features that Tesla believes will one day
enable the car to drive itself with no one behind the wheel.
Here's how full self driving, or FSD, works.
8 cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors
send data into the car's neural network,
a suite of algorithms that stitch
together a view of the world.
The car's software then uses that information
to decide how to respond.
Tesla began offering FSD beta software to the public
as part of a pilot program in October of 2020.
In January, it said nearly 60,000 Teslas in the US
have the full self driving beta.
Since its release, volunteer beta testers
have published hundreds of videos of the system
in action on YouTube.
The videos show Teslas on FSD
behaving erratically in scenarios
that humans commonly navigate without issue.
Cars turn on to railroad tracks, drive through red lights,
and nearly hit pedestrians.
One video, uploaded on February 4th,
even showed a Tesla in FSD beta colliding
with a bike lane barrier during a right hand turn.
- We hit that.
- Drivers are meticulously documenting
the performance of Tesla's autonomous experiment
and changes made between software versions.
- I built an app on my phone
that I can basically randomize drives
in Murfreesboro or wherever I'm at.
I just add in a bunch of addresses,
and then it randomizes where I'm going next.
- Nice smooth handling of this transition.
It chose a lane and got into it.
- Most of the time, it doesn't take an unprotected left turn.
It's either going to go straight,
or it's gonna take a protected right,
or in some scenarios, if that's the busy way,
you typically have a protected left, not an unprotected left.
So it doesn't really challenge itself if you let it do that,
so you need to put in destinations.
That way, the routing will force it to go to things
that are more challenging.
- The Washington Post asked experts in the field
to conduct frame by frame analysis of YouTube
videos showing full self driving in action.
The Post verified the authenticity
of each of the videos they analyzed.
The experts pointed out how the software has trouble
discerning road signs written in text,
and sometimes it didn't treat pedestrians with proper caution.
- I'm conflicted.
The geek in me loves the idea.
And I worry that some of the things that we're seeing
are actually not gonna get us
to where we need to be with the technology.
- I am taking over.
I'm trying.
- The really weird thing with this,
and I'm not quite sure how representative it is,
it almost looks like the driver is wrestling with the car
for a second or so,
as if the car's trying to be in control
and the driver's trying to be in control.
And you've just got that couple of seconds
where it feels like both the driver
and the car don't have full control of the situation.
Imagine if you had a less experienced driver there
under busier conditions or conditions
where instead of getting around a truck,
there are people in the road.
And that's where some of the potential vulnerabilities
come in that worry me when I see instances like this.
- It gets a lot of false positives,
like on the side of the road,
a mailbox or something will come across as a person.
It's extra careful around people,
so you get a lot of these kind of brake stutters
where you're kind of slowing down, speeding up.
And so if there's somebody behind you,
they don't like that.
- We reached out to Tesla for comment,
but we didn't get a response.
And that's not a surprise.
Tesla's disbanded its PR department in 2020.
CEO Elon Musk has called auto pilot "unequivocally safer."
And the company has repeatedly
defended its technology's safety record, saying,
"Auto pilot is less likely to crash than a human driver."
We rented a Tesla Model Y with full self driving beta
so we could test it ourselves.
My Washington Post colleague Reed Albergotti and I
activated the software for several hours
along the busy streets
and the maze of shopping centers in suburban Sacramento.
In test drives we conducted, our car performed well on long,
straight stretches of road.
But turns were another story, particularly unprotected lefts.
The ride was jerky and at times unpredictable.
And it felt much more like baby sitting than driving.
But for experts and users, videos of rides,
even challenging rides like ours,
reflect how far its software has come
and how far it still has to go.
- It's really important to realize here
that people are driving thousands of miles
with good experiences with FSD beta,
and you can't judge the technology just by the glitches.
And it is an impressive technology.
At the same time, it's those glitches,
it's the edge cases that really matter
when it comes to safety and performance.
- These are real peoples' individual cars.
Like, I have a stake in this.
It's not just my job, it's my livelihood,
it's everything to do with my life is at stake
when I'm driving this car and when I'm operating it.
So I'm operating it as safely as I can.