FSD v13 is amazing

I joined the Tesla bandwagon way back in the AP1 days and initially bought all the promises of autonomy “next year”. Needless to say, over the years I’ve grown highly skeptical of said promises. I got the trial of the much celebrated v12 with my new car and tried it out, and though it was really good, I felt it was still too robotic and that at this pace it would be years before it was smoothed out enough to be comfortable for all but the most devoted early adopter types. Obviously I was skeptical of all the v13 praise I was seeing online, but I decided to try it once it was available.

Well, as the title says, I’m finally convinced. It’s not perfect of course but from what I’ve seen it only messes up when the map data isn’t right. But for pretty much all other driving, it’s damn near flawless. It flows with traffic extremely well, it’s able to assertively fight its way over crowded lanes, handles busy merges with confidence, etc. My only complaint would be overly-eager lane changes to try to overtake that end up not working out, but this is more of a driving style than a driving capability/safety issue.

It also occasionally gets stuck in very tight/narrow streets when cars gridlock each other requiring at least one of the cars to back up to allow the others to fit through, but this really is an extreme edge case, and isn’t a safety concern since at those near-zero speeds the consequences of an accident to life and limb would be quite small.

I know there are already many such posts here but just wanted to add a skeptic’s conversion story.