Tesla Employees Leaked Their Thoughts About FSD. They Weren't Pretty

It's hard to trust what Tesla says about "Full Self-Driving" (FSD). CEO Elon Musk has been promising that it would shortly become fully autonomous for nearly a decade now. Since then, fatal crashes have occured, hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit judgments have been paid out, and countless leases have begun and ended with the promise still unfulfilled. And thanks to Reuters, this week we got a closer look at just how far away true autonomy seems.

The story quotes a slew of former Tesla employees who worked on labeling training data for the company's autonomy efforts. Seven of them say they wouldn't trust the software to drive them, with one saying he wouldn't get in a car piloted by FSD "if you fucking paid me."

Tesla's current FSD (Supervised) system is very impressive, but far from a fully autonomous system.

Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs

It's a damning report, one that explains the big and small ways Tesla has allegedly massaged the narrative around FSD, casting it as safe using incomplete or incomparable data, even when better, albeit less flattering data was available. I highly recommend reading the full story. Then, to hear what it means to me and Tim, listen to our latest episode of the Plugged-In Podcast embedded above or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the episode, Tim also talks about his experience seeing the Ferrari Luce in person. I know there's been plenty of dunking and discourse on this topic, but I found it helpful to hear Tim's perspective considering he actually sat in the thing. Most notably, if someone is telling you that this thing is a simulacra of a Nissan Leaf, they're going to be surprised when they see it in person.

In better news for the average EV owner, though, we also talk about some serious improvements to America's fast-charging network. From Rivian and Electrify America to Walmart, there's a consistent push to make charging better for everyone.

Rivian announced this week that it now has over 1,000 DC fast chargers spread over 148 Rivian Adventure Network charging stations.

Photo by: InsideEVs

It's also a helpful reminder to me that public sentiment usually lags behind the reality on the ground. Friends who only review EVs occasionally or follow the car market without personal EV experience also complain to me about how unreliable the fast-charging network is. It always confuses me, because as an EV owner with only level 1 charging at home via an inconsistent street parking spot, I've spent plenty of time at fast chargers. And in the past two years, I can't remember ever going to a charger with more than one broken stall. At this point, I no longer look at reviews or worry about reliability as long as I'm going to a station from a charging network I've heard of.

Part of this is the California bubble I live in. But even darting around the Midwest on visits back home to see family, I've stopped at plenty of stations with no real headaches. If I absolutely can't afford to have an unreliable or filled-up station, I'll just go to a Tesla Supercharger, as most of them accept most EVs. The only large charging issue I've had in the past two years of owning and testing EVs throughout the country was a 24-hour period where the nationwide CrowdStrike outage made it impossible to charge my Ioniq 5 XRT tester at a Supercharger.

Charging has gotten a lot less stressful now that just about every EV can access Tesla Superchargers.

Photo by: BMW

Issues like the ones I've described—one dispenser once a year, a payment issue on the day of a major web outage—are the kind of things that you'd experience at gas stations, too. And as payment systems get refined and chargers get built out, it seems like they're quickly becoming as reliable as gas stations. Because 86% of all charging happens at home—compared to roughly 0% of all gasoline fill-ups—we don't need as many chargers as we have stations.

The point is, the problem may not be solved yet. But we're getting a lot closer. Even in a year where it feels like the EV industry is going backward in major, public ways, there's still steady progress in quiet, invisible ones.

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.