Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.

I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.

Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.

Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.

I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.

I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.

I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.

Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.

I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.

It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.

They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.

That’s lane keep/lane assist; not lane centering. It’s supposed to bounce between the edges of the lane. (I guess, not supposed to, but that’s what it does as opposed to actually tracking some position in the lane).

The auto industry as a whole did a massive disservice not clearly differentiating “lane keep”/“lane assist” v/s “lane centering”. They are hugely different and trying to use lane keep to stay centered is really dangerous.

Same model car with different trim levels/packages would have lane keep or lane centering making it really confusing to consumers what they had and what safe usage would be.

By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberDrive or something else that isn't glaringly inaccurate.

Previously you got the Corolla feature set included with your vehicle purchase, Enhanced Autopilot for a fee which was a step above that, and then FSD subscription which was a step-up again.

Now Tesla has downgraded the base experience to include no Steering Assist at all, and no longer offers Enhanced Autopilot. So you get two choices: No Steering Assist or FSD.

People had a feature for free, now they don’t, because Tesla wants money.

“But it’s better…” only if you pay. If you don’t, still gone.

What else matters?

I see nothing wrong with them offering a cheap(er) FSD option. I object to them removing existing features to force adoption.

There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.

Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.

That explains things.

That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...

In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.

In other words: you will own nothing and like it.

Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?

I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.

As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumble strip excursions that would not have happened in the LKAS-equipped car. And for the asleep guy in the parent post, it may have made the difference between still being alive and dead in head-on collision or rollover.

If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.

But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.

With a car on lane keeping / cruise control you could slow down in front of it all the way to a stop and it will gladly stop behind you.

No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.

Maybe the average cop has better driving skills than I'm giving them credit for, but...I doubt it...

I miss having a dumb cruise control.

IMO adaptive crude control that works down to 0MPH is still the sweet spot.

Second, I have a 2025 Model 3, and even with the latest v14.2.2 FSD I had an intervention rate of roughly every ten miles in Washington DC/VA suburbs. I shudder to think what it would do if I didn't pay attention, so I don't think it's an improvement over me driving myself.

- Is it unsupervised?

- Has legal liability shifted as a result of the system being the driver?

Because I feel like the answer needs to be "yes" for this claim to be accurate. If the answer isn't "yes," then you're still meant to be fully engaged with driving and are liable for any accidents that occur.

I believe you, but occasionally it will try to kill you.

Screw the subscriptions. I don't care how much the shareholders want them.

Although even if the devices stop getting updates, that makes them on par with most built in car software and lane assist stuff which never gets updated in the car's life anyway.

The specs are pretty good but then you don’t really own it, you get limitations on what you can use it for, you get rent seeking and walled gardens everywhere. Even if you’re paying you get ads and get tracked. Updates make products worse more often than not.

What are you excited about? AI slop?

Tesla cannot take anything away that was on the Monroney sticker. This includes AP.

'In a post on X.com, Musk said Tesla "started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car. Congrats to the Tesla AI team!"'

He really did mean "in the car". The safety supervisor is still there, just in another car [1], so it's not technically a lie, silly us!

[1]: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....

> "Full Self-Driving" costs $8,000. BYD includes its version for free on a $9,300 car.

These are unrelated things. Tesla's comparative offering (at the time this article was written) was also included for free.

What you're describing sounds like the former system, while the latter one is what should be compared to Tesla's "autopilot" or "FSD" or whatever the fuck. It works very well on both my cars and is a game changer for longer drives.

I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild, especially since what you're getting isn't the "full self driving" we were promised. You still have to be fully engaged with what the car is doing and ready to take over in a fraction of a second.

Seems like Subaru lane assist is considerably better than when it first came out in 2013 or so. I was able to experience it back then and it could have pinballed, certainly wasn't as steady and capable as it is more than ten years of development later.

Well then, this isn't the car for you. For many other people the safety features are important. I wouldn't mind if every car had a camera that made sure the driver was paying attention and didn't fall asleep.

Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.

Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.

Except they do.

Which is why there's FDA certification and regulation and the Lifepak 15s I used as a paramedic cost around $40,000.

Mercedes was also willing to put their money where their mouth was and accept liability for vehicle software issues. (Cue here the Tesla stans talking about "how limited" that was. Almost perhaps as if it was for a good reason and not "if it compiles, ship it").

The next step will be remote monitors with the ability to drive if needed. That will be identical to Waymo I now.

Then the next step is nobody watching.

Progress is fantastic, it means more choices for consumers, lower prices, better tech.

Waymo expanded highway operations at the end of last year

https://apnews.com/article/waymo-autonomous-driverless-cars-...