A friend with an incandescent hatred of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans in general bought a Tesla Y at the end of 2025 because he wanted to relax with FSD on regular trips from Boston to Manhattan. A base model RWD Tesla Y leased here in Florida, as of December 22, 2025:
With a subsidy from the working class in Maskachusetts:
(It’s a $3,500 subsidy from state taxpayers, but the lease is $3,888 cheaper over 36 months, presumably due to the time value of the $3,500 paid immediately. Note that the low price from Tesla is no longer available. As of right now, the price is up more than $100/month compared to three months ago.)
How’s he enjoying the machine, which has now gone about 4,000 miles, 94% of them on FSD? “I give it an A-,” he said, and compared it to a high-quality aircraft autopilot (he’s a rare example of a private aircraft owner/pilot who is also a loyal Democrat). The only consistent shortcoming that he has identified is that the car doesn’t get in and out of parking lots very well. He hates paying Elon Musk $110 per month ($100 for the FSD subscription plus $10/month for a required communication subscription) because he hates Elon Musk for being Trump-adjacent. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to return to manual driving. The car hasn’t been nearly as reliable as our Hondas. He has had some intermittent computer/camera problems and a rear side window actually cracked due to stress (maybe Boston’s cold weather contributed, but Tesla covered it under warranty).
Another friend in Maskachusetts is a dentist who drives about two hours round-trip every day to her practice (Medicaid is the path to max income for a dentist in MA, but most dentists don’t want to live in a Medicaid-heavy neighborhood). She also got a Tesla Y towards the end of 2025. Queried in March: “Loving fsd. Even did it in the snow.” I respect her opinion more than that of my tech friends because she’s not interested in tech.
Tesla FSD meets South Florida: I got an Uber ride home from the art museum in West Palm Beach to our house in Jupiter, a 20-mile trip. The machine was a 2021 Model 3 with 103,000 miles, owned by the driver since mid-2025. He had it set for “Hurry”. Tesla’s software was cautious when a cyclist appeared from the left and might conceivably have come into our lane. The machine handled the 6-lane local roads reasonably well, but stayed in the left lane longer than a human would have given the impending need to turn right onto a ramp (the human can override this behavior via the turn signal). FSD handled the traffic circles near our house perfectly. It came to hard stops at 4-way intersections in the neighborhood that a human driver would have turned into rolling stops. It got a little confused at the very end and tried to go into an alley next to our house (MacArthur Foundation laid out Abacoa with garages in the back). The Uber driver said that FSD is almost perfect from his point of view except that it doesn’t do well in the rain if it sees puddles. He estimates a 4:1 fatigue ratio of manual vs FSD. (Others I have talked to have said 3:1 or less.)
The car seemed to be in near-new condition despite its age and 100,000+ miles. Not sure the white fake leather seats would survive our kids…
(The puddle issue might be his car having HW3 rather than the current HW4 or the glorious HW5 that we were supposed to have now but won’t until mid-2027. Maybe this Rembrandt “scholar” is what Elon will look like when HW5/“AI5” finally ships?)
From a friend with an old Tesla 3 and a new-ish Cybertruck:
Today I tried the new new new Tesla update that almost no one has. 14.2.2.1. It was flawless [on the Cybertruck]. I forgot to worry about it as if another human was driving.
My response: “We know that it isn’t a cult because each release is “flawless” or “perfect” and then the next release is “more flawless” and “more perfect”. (Even my friends have learned to hate me, in case you were curious.) Tesla Fanboi:
No. I have told you many times FSD sucked and that is why I didn’t buy it. I have owned my Tesla for 6 years and the first time I ever said FSD was kinda good was in October, and I was today years old the first time I said it was really good.
My personal plan was to wait for HW5 or “AI5” before getting a Tesla, but now it seems that I probably won’t live to see the AI5 era. The latest slip:
A friend who lives in Switzerland owns a Model Y. The government there forced Tesla to roll back everyone’s software to 2019 and FSD is strictly illegal almost everywhere in Europe (it’s not hazardous to import tens of millions of humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies, but Tesla’s binary code is a civilization-ending threat). He recently rented a Cybertruck on Turo in Fort Lauderdale ($200+/day; pickup and return to FLL garage). He’s spent 3-4 hours per day on FSD while looking at various places to relocate his family to (he was born in the U.S.). He says There was one “phantom braking” incident on a local street where the system got confused by a shadow and braked moderately hard (he overrode this decision with the accelerator). “It probably wouldn’t have done that if there had been a car in front of me,” he noted. “Overall, it’s a game-changer for South Florida commuting and I’m sure it won’t be long before the last bugs are worked out and the system is approved for fully autonomous Cybercabs.”
In other news, my dream of a self-driving minivan might be arriving at around the same time as Tesla’s AI5 hardware. Mercedes is going to bring a pimped minivan EV, a format popular in China, to the US (Car and Driver). Unlike Tesla, Mercedes has no Nazi history, of course, so it can be purchased with qualms. The German minivan is interesting because Nazi-free Mercedes is working with NVIDIA to compete with Tesla in “full self-driving” (i.e., not self-driving because a human has to be constantly monitoring). Car and Driver tested this in January and it seems promising. Minivan leaders Honda and Toyota, by contrast, aren’t even beginning to think about a Tesla-style system. They would rather lose 100 percent of their customers than sell anything below Level 3 (full autonomy). Here’s the beautiful Mercedes minivan, showing what a luxury car company can do:
Who agrees with me that it needs a larger grille?
I’m confused about the state of FSD. Are people letting it drive while they do other things? Are confident that it now provides an acceptably low chance of driving into a truck?
Mitch: I think people are texting while on FSD. The system watches their eyes to make sure the human is paying attention, but is more lax if the car is stuck in traffic (the default condition for a car in the stuffed-with-humans U.S.; 350 million people trying to share roads built for 200 million).
1 thing about Calif*, everyone hates Elon while everyone puts 1/2 their salary into always having the latest Tesla with a bumper sticker that says “I hate Elon”. Shadows & machine vision still don’t mix. Got to stick to driving at noon on cloudy days.