That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.

FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.

This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."

what do you think it is train drivers do?

I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.

If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization

Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!

It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own driving behavior.

Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.

This is a subject that has been studied quite a bit, as there are a bunch of jobs where people have to monitor for rare emergencies, and react fast if an emergency should arise. Things like pilots on flights with autopilot; lifeguards watching for swimmers in distress; CCTV monitoring; operating airport X-ray machines, and so on.

One such study is "Performance consequences of automation-induced 'complacency'" (Parasuraman, Molloy & Singh, 1993) https://www.pacdeff.com/pdfs/Automation%20Induced%20Complace...

Previous studies had found that a human and a computer performed markedly better than either a human alone or a computer alone - but in those studies failures were quite common, so they didn't give the humans time to get bored or distracted.

When researchers got test subjects to perform a simulated flying task, monitoring a system with 99%+ reliability, they found the humans were proportionally much worse at stepping in than they were on less reliable systems.

Swimming pool lifeguards will often change posts every 15-20 minutes and and get a 10-15 minute break every hour, to keep things interesting enough that they can pay attention. Good luck getting drivers to do that.

It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.

This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.

I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.

A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.

As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.