I had no idea that self driving cars are banned in Europe.

Anyway, apparently Tesla is trying to change that

"Besides lane keeping features, and a few autonomous shuttles with safety drivers, it's completely forbidden.

Most companies play the game and just keep their business around PoCs and experiments.

Recently, they got approval for FSD tests in Europe.

Here is a test of it, PLUS a side-by-side comparison between FSD 14 (current) in Paris and FSD 12 that the user tried n New York City (you'll see the Meatpacking district)"

 

I think FSD was just approved in the Netherlands.

 

Full self driving functionality without hands on the wheel is not banned, rather they are not approved by default. Previous autopilot and similar systems that require your hands on or they warn every 20 seconds are allowed.

Right now, Tesla FSD Supervised got approval in Netherlands, which might go Europe-wide in next 2 months.
Prior to that, new iX3 has highway supervised driving approved (so no hands on the wheel) and they expect to add city functionality by autumn, also no hands on wheel.

I guess difference is between systems Supervised - hands on wheel, and Supervised - eyes only.

 

are you really serious or is it just lack of moderation?
- There have been massive updates to FSD and it got approval in Netherlands after 18 months testing (very strict).
- Waymo just introduced Gen 6 system, is moving to more than 3500 cars in fleet this year and added a bunch of cities:
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/ro-on...-waymo-driver/
- Uber committed 10 billion in robotaxi projects:
https://www.reuters.com/business/ube...ys-2026-04-15/


I tested Waymo 13 months ago in Phoenix and it became out groups preferred way of taxying around. Tested FSD here in Europe 6 months ago and it worked great in packed city.

Now, if your point of success is something unrealistic and unachievable, then who cares, you dont really care about technology, just want to troll.

 

His posts are dismissing clear evidence and relying more on opinion than data—especially when there are measurable improvements in systems like Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) over the past few years. It comes across less as a technical argument and more as a fixed viewpoint that isn’t engaging with observable progress.

 

you are determined to say that because it's not completely perfect, it must be trash and has never and will never improve. expecting perfection is obviously ludicrous (human drivers are anything but) but your 'facts' are provably wrong.

putting your loathing and ridicule of fsd, tesla, and musk aside, what about waymo? are you also writing them off as worthless? they're live in several cities and that's only going to expand. again, have their been problems? SURE. nothing is perfect.

ok, well many do, and find it more relaxing and less tiring than regular driving.

guess you don't use traction control, anti-lock braking, lane assist, adaptive cruise, etc. thaaaat would make you a luddite. MOST drivers REALLY appreciate these features.

again, google, tesla and others, already have cars driving with NO human input. you're fixated on fsd, ignoring even bigger things.

if you think voice output and recognition hasn't improved since 2008, you're wrong. are all systems equally capable? no. perhaps your accent is very hard to understand even for humans, lol. however, i suggest you try talking to grok. it's incredible. try it out. i'm an immigrant too.

your statements are RIDDLED with CONFIRMATION BIAS (seeing and pointing to only what supports your opinions).

aside, i was VERY skeptical about fsd. i first tried it in a friend's cybertruck probably 2 years ago, downtown fort lauderdale where there was dense dense traffic, detours, construction, parked cars everywhere, and i was completely amazed how it handled it all. it has only gotten MASSIVELY BETTER since then. again, you're expecting perfection so you will always think it's bad, a gimmick, etc.

i really think you should go for a new model y test drive and try fsd. sitting in some 5+ year old tesla uber car is not the same.

if you're not willing to have a more open mind, then i think you're done here in this thread.

 

I am not expecting perfection, I am expecting "full self driving" and "autonomous" to deliver what the terms imply, unconditionally. And once again, I am not saying it is trash, it is an impressive tech from the research point of view, but absolutely useless in real world application. Driving is not a difficult task, I've been doing it for 28 years and never been in an accident that was my fault, except for one time I crashed my bike on the track. I don't see a point of having to babysit a self driving system that required my full attention to be able to intervene at a split second, I'd rather just do the task myself. Furthermore, I find it hazardous when others use it, because they get complacent and stop paying attention, putting everyone else on the road in danger.

You must remember we had a huge thread on it, my first post in it was in January 2017 and after that the thread turned into a complete Jihad. We've gone through all these arguments and then some, and all of them are still actual 10 years after. We're all on record making certain predictions - for instance you've said kids born in 2017 won't have to learn to drive, meanwhile there are still cases of Tesla's infamous phantom braking, and according to google amount of driving schools in the US has been increasing at 4.2% per year.

https://www.clublexus.com/forums/car...hicles-20.html

So while the technology can improve, at the rate it is improving it will never match average human driver. If you take me for example, 28 years of driving/riding, lets say 2 drives per day on average amounts to 20,440 drives - with only one crash I am at 99.9951%. And quite a bit of my driving was through terrible conditions that would completely stall any current self driving system.


Waymos have been around for over 10 years, they still operate in geofenced areas, and still rely on remote operators when they screw up at the most basic tasks and the locals want these things banned as they constantly screw up and clog traffic.

Traction control and ABS do not take control from me. I shut off lane assist and the rest of the active safety in my wife's bmw, its too intrusive and nothing but irritating in NYC traffics.


I am not fixated on FSD, or any other single competing tech. I'm simply stating unconditional autonomous driving is never going to happen.


This is prime example of kettle calling the pot black. For a lot Tesla owners it's like a new religion, dare anyone raise any legitimate concerns regarding EVs and FSD, they often respond with a personal attack.

I think you could also benefit from having a more open mind, people have different experiences and view points. Is your definition of "open mind" expecting me sing praises to FSD?

 

I've been very impressed with the waymo rides I've taken in SF. I will be in San Jose in May and will be trying out the robotaxi

 

i have used fsd hundreds of times so i have a lot of experience. i have also been surprised when it occasionally screws up, on recent versions ignoring its own navigation directions for reasons i can’t fathom and going on some weird detour, lol. i know you think it’s not of value unless it’s completely autonomous, but we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.

no. i accept fsd is not of value to you, but you should accept that it is of real value to others even if not completely autonomous and not perfect.

you’ve repeatedly said it hasn’t improved since it was launched and that other tech like voice recognition hasn’t either, but it definitely has. not all systems are equally good of course but i live in tech all the time and see the good, the bad, and the ugly. don’t get me started on microsoft windows, lol … they’ve had nearly 50 years to fix some unbelievably basic stuff and haven’t, and it seems to be getting worse.

 

Makes sense, and it's value is very location dependent. For instance here in NYC, there are too many issues to list that would cause it to disengage, so not much value. Where my daughter lives in Reston VA, it should probably work almost 100% of time, without a glitch.


Well, definitely not since launch, but I feel like the speech recognition has plateaued a while ago, at least in the applications I use. And I am not criticizing the tech, I am just using it as an example to compare with FSD - it's just there are so many variables, it's amazing it's even able to do what it does. For instance, my mom speaks Runglish (a mixture of Russian and English worlds) into the phone when she sends me texts, and what the phone transcribes is complete gibberish, but I can most of the time make it out because I expect a certain context. I haven't seen much difference in speech recognition on the iphone in probably 10 years, doesn't mean they aren't making improvements of course.

With windows, I think they still have code from 3.11, just a couple of years I distinctly remember seeing a pop up modal window straight up out 3.11 somewhere deep in the settings. A bunch of old and bad code that doesn't fully get investigated and fixed, just patched over, and it only gets worse as the code base grows. This is also a concern for self driving system, as their code grows and its harder and harder to find bad code.

 

to me, in a city like nyc, DRIVING in any way has little value (and huge expense/hassle). i'd take subway, taxi, uber, walk, etc.

 

I had a 2026 Model X overnight demo test drive about a month ago (the software is already behind as of today in terms of FSD - so I'm told) and the car made one silly mistake that made absolutely no sense to me. On the approach to an on-ramp for a highway entrance, there was a line of vehicles (at least 10 - cars, trucks etc) waiting in line in the far right lane. I would assume that the FSD algorithm would have been able to calculate that the distance to the on-ramp was short and the lane was full, so signal asap and try to get in line.

No, it waited till the last minute and cut into a small space (I was ready to take over if it was going to cause an accident) right at the end of the lane just before taking the on-ramp and made it. A manevour I would not have done personally. I'm stating this as an example of why its definitely not perfect. Having said that, it handled the rest of the 40 mile drive to Toronto and driving in insane Toronto just fine.

At the risk of beating a dead horse - here are the major milestones of the updates to FSD from Gemini and fact checked in terms of provability by ChatGPT

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) has evolved from a basic highway assist system into a complex, end-to-end neural network. Below is a summarized timeline of the major milestones and the corresponding capabilities of the car during those eras.

The Evolution of Tesla FSD

1. The Foundation: Autopilot & Early FSD (2014 – 2019)

Before FSD was a standalone "Beta," Tesla laid the groundwork through Hardware 1.0 (Mobileye) and eventually Hardware 2.0/3.0 (Tesla’s own chips).

• Oct 2015: Autopilot 7.0 launches, introducing Autosteer and Auto Lane Change.
  
• April 2019: Tesla transitions to "Full Self-Driving" branding with the release of the FSD Computer (Hardware 3.0).
  
  
• Capabilities:
  • Highway Driving: Centering in lanes and adaptive cruise control.
    
  • Navigate on Autopilot: Automatic lane changes and highway interchanges.
    
  • Summon/Smart Summon: The car could drive to you in a parking lot (within line of sight).
    
  • Traffic Light/Stop Sign Control: Car began recognizing and stopping for traffic signals (released 2020).
    
    

2. The Beta Era: City Street Navigation (Oct 2020 – 2022)

Tesla officially launched the "FSD Beta" program to a small group of testers, moving the tech from highways to complex city environments.

• Oct 2020 (v8): First release of FSD Beta for city streets.
  
• July 2021 (v9): The shift to Tesla Vision. Tesla removed Radar from its software stack, relying 100% on cameras.
  
• Oct 2021 (v10): Introduction of "FSD Profiles" (Chill, Average, Assertive) and improved object detection.
  
• Capabilities:
  • City Street Driving: Handling unprotected left turns, roundabouts, and intersections.
    
  • Environment Mapping: The "Mind of Tesla" visualization showed a 360-degree reconstruction of the world.
    
  • Vulnerability: This era relied heavily on "heuristic" code (thousands of lines of C++ written by engineers to tell the car how to behave).
    

3. The Single Stack: FSD v11 (Nov 2022 – 2023)

A massive architectural milestone where Tesla merged the highway and city street software into one unified "stack."

• Nov 2022: v11 begins rolling out to testers.
  
• March 2023: Wide release of v11.3, replacing the legacy highway code with the newer FSD Beta logic.
  
  
• Capabilities:
  • Seamless Transitions: No more "handoff" when moving from a city street to a highway.
    
  • Improved Logic: Better handling of lane blockages, construction zones, and emergency vehicle detection.
    
  • Occupancy Network: High-resolution detection of 3D objects, allowing the car to "see" space even if it doesn't recognize the specific object.
    
    

4. The Neural Network Shift: FSD v12 (March 2024)

This represents the most significant leap in the technology's history, moving to End-to-End Neural Networks.

• March 2024: v12.3 is released. Tesla renames the feature "FSD (Supervised)".
  
• The Change: Instead of engineers writing code for "stop at a red light," the system was trained on millions of video clips of human drivers. The AI now "sees" and "acts" simultaneously.
  
  Capabilities:
  • Human-like Behavior: Smoother braking, natural lane positioning, and better decision-making in "gray area" traffic.
    
  • Curb Avoidance: Significant improvement in steering clear of physical obstacles without explicit programming.
    
  • Actually Smart Summon (***): Re-engineered Summon that is much faster and more reliable.
    
    

5. Hardware 4 & The Future: FSD v14 (Current)

As of early 2026, Tesla has begun optimizing specifically for Hardware 4 (AI4) vehicles.

• Early 2026: v14 begins rollout, leveraging the higher-resolution cameras and increased processing power of HW4.
  
  Capabilities:
  • Zero-Intervention Drives: Significant increase in "Miles per Intervention" (MPI), with many users reporting 100% automatic trips from driveway to parking spot.
    
  • Automated Parking: Upon reaching a destination, the car can now automatically select a spot (roadside or driveway) and park itself without driver input.
    
  • Cyber-Optimized: Full integration for the Cybertruck’s unique steer-by-wire system.
    

Summary Table: Progress at a Glance

Disclaimer: Despite the name "Full Self-Driving," all current versions require a licensed driver to remain attentive and ready to take over at any moment.

 

Excellent post, Hameed. On the zero-intervention drives point, the thing that people misunderstand when they say "but it can't do FSD unsupervised" is that any time you do a drive on FSD and do not have a driver-forced disengagement, the car has behaved, on FSD, exactly as it would if it were not supervised.

 

I use FSD daily for my commute, when I travel, and I've seen the changes just from 2024 to 2026 which are dramatic. It drives safer and better than any human being, sees every angle of the roadway at once, and makes intelligent decisions based on current conditions









It's also very courteous, this morning it let in a guy who needed to get to the right, and it let in a lady making a right turn out a gas station.

Anyone who says it hasn't improved or doesn't drive well, I have to seriously disagree with

 

So my example of it's behavior is exactly what you're saying 👍