Chad Moran
55.6K posts

Chad Moran
@ChadMoran
Adventurer, sky gazer, cat dad, EV enthusiast. If you want someone to agree with everything you say, I'm not him. Opinions are my own.



Why turn off autopilot?



I went to the exact same location of the Cybertruck accident shown in the Fox News video. This is the US-69/59 Eastex Freeway northbound HOV lane at the Y-split near the Eastex Park & Ride exit (approaching from downtown Houston toward Humble). In the Fox News video, the vehicle failed to follow the right curve, going straight into the barrier. Well, I tested it twice today with Tesla FSD engaged the entire time with zero human intervention. And unless you think I am a hologram speaking to you from another dimension now, it worked out really well. Here is the video of me taking the exact same curve twice, with Tesla FSD v14.2.2.5.






Are the people exclaiming the CT driver wasn't paying attention going to pile on this post? Probably not. 💅🏻



















I normally don't bother armchair quarterbacking these situations. But watching the Tesla Stans come into the comments is funny. Elon said Autopilot (FSD?) was disengaged 4s before the impact which if you watch the video looks like it was going way too fast at that point. Am I missing something?




We review cases like this all the time, and our entire career is spent managing and studying data from these vehicles through our platform (when either consented by vehicle owners or in de-identified form). Multiple test drives have been taken within the past 24 hours at this location on both the latest and older FSD lane assist stacks (including older than the one installed in this incident). In both cases, the vehicle traveled at a slower speed (35-49mph) than in the incident (54-68mph at the 4-second prior mark). This implies that the driver was pressing down on the accelerator, forcing the vehicle to accelerate faster than it would normally. This action does not deactivate lane assist/FSD, but the system treats it as a manual override (as it is). Given the speed of travel, the turn ahead and posted speed signs (and that the vehicle was traveling at 3-4x the posted speed), this all supports the narrative that the driver was not paying attention to the road and was potentially driving recklessly. If the vehicle was operating normally and at its own suggested speed, it would have likely handled the corner turn with ease, as has been tested on the same vehicle, as well as other models. All speculative, all an opinion of course.










