Just got the FSD v12 update for my Model 3.
It’s an incredible improvement. I had it drive me to the supermarket and back and it did extremely well. I intervened a couple of times at the beginning because I wasn’t yet used to how it would behave, but on the way back it needed zero interventions (and it probably didn’t need any interventions to start with; I just wasn’t sure about my comfort level initially).
The steering control in particular is 100x better than v11. Not 100%, 100x. v11 was just all over the place and I never got remotely comfortable with most turns. It’s all very natural now, on par or better than a typical human driver. I never felt that it was doing something unexpected or that it would curb my rims.
Speedbumps: handled perfectly. I have a bunch of them around my place and it slowed to just the right speed, neither too slow nor too fast. And it detected all of them in the dark.
Pedestrian detection was perfect. Had to make a right just as some pedestrians were approaching; it waited for them to cross and took the turn as soon as they were safely through.
Lane changes were all appropriate and felt nicely snappy. v11 is very hesitant when changing lanes, and the whole operation is slow as molasses. When the car needs to change lanes, it does it. The one time it took things a bit slow was exactly when it needed to; a truck was behind me in the target lane, so the car took a bit more time to give it appropriate warning. When no cars were around, it did the lane changes quickly.
Also snappy was taking off at a green light. The light changed and the car took off the way a human would–smoothly but not too slow, either. There were a couple of times where it seemed to hesitate a little, but I wonder if it saw something I didn’t.
The weakest point was the speed control. Totally fine when following another car. But with no one else on the road, for some reason it’s a little variable. We were on a 40 mph road and it would sorta vary between 35 and 40 mph. I’m not the only one that saw this, and it seems to be a regression from the earlier v12 builds, so hopefully they work out the kinks here. Didn’t feel unsafe, but annoying to me and anyone behind.
The car doesn’t park yet, and gets a little confused once it gets to a parking lot. But it navigated out of the lot successfully despite it being unmapped, so it wasn’t terrible. Hopefully it’ll be able to really finish the job in a new release.
Overall, I’m very impressed. No, it’s not L4 yet, let alone L5, but it absolutely feels like the right path, and weirdly, it feels like it nails the hard problems while not always getting the small stuff right. But it’s still early days. And already my car is driving me around with the only input on my side being nudging the wheel to keep the nags at bay.