Tesla FSD Beta Put To The Ultimate Test: Driving In A City That’s Lost Power

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YouTuber “Cf Tesla” has shared his experience this week with FSD Beta while navigating a city that lost power. This actually brought up a memory of late August when Hurricane Ida took out the power for all of Southeast Louisiana. New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and many small towns had no power for weeks to months. When it was finally safe for those of us in Baton Rouge to travel, I either rode to the store with friends or in an Uber, and almost all of the traffic lights were out. Louisiana has crazy drivers, so you can imagine the chaos that was happening here.

Importantly, driving in this situation helped to teach Tesla’s neural nets how to operate during disasters, which gives me hope for the future.

In the video, the host uses FSD Beta 10.3.1 to drive 27 miles to his client’s home. The goal is to see how many times his car disengages and how it handles each of those situations. One notable thing that the car did with FSD Beta engaged was smoothly swerve away from people on the side of the road. Another improvement was the car not wanting to move around the car in front of it when it saw the lane next to it moving while at a red light.

It wasn’t until about 3 minutes into the video that he approached a city that had a power outage. He was explaining that he would have to take over since he didn’t think the car would understand the situation. As he was about to take over, the car proved him wrong and handled the situation perfectly.

“The power is out here right now in town, and so this is something that the car is not capable of dealing with right now, so this is something that I’m going to have to manually take over here, because chances are the car’s going to go. Waiting for our turn — oh my gosh! It isn’t! It’s treating it like a stop sign! Holy cow! Look at that, and it handles it perfectly!”

“I am so impressed right now with 10.3. I mean, I’ll just take a minute to say there’s been no brake checks, no pounding the brakes all the way down that road before we did it.”

He explained that he was just driving normally when the car happened upon the traffic lights that weren’t working and handled them flawlessly. He added that there were no stop signs at that intersection, and that the car just saw that the lights were out and waited for its turn. This is what drivers are supposed to do during a traffic light outage — treat it as if it’s a four-way stop.

“There was no stop sign there for it to read to determine that that was a four-way stop. It did that on its own. That is so impressive.”

As he approached the next intersection with traffic lights that weren’t working, he noted that he was planning to take a left but the car wanted to get into the right lane. He wasn’t sure why, but he chose to let it move over. As they went through the intersection, the car did not perform as flawlessly as it did in the first intersection. Instead, it hesitated, so the driver took over and went through the intersection. He quickly drove to the next light for FSD Beta’s third attempt going through a non-working traffic light. It also stopped instead of going when it was his turn to go.

On the fourth try, this was a left turn at a traffic light that wasn’t working and it performed the turn flawlessly. What this driver didn’t do throughout all of this was disengage. He had to press on the accelerator on three out of the five lights that were out but FSD Beta was engaged the entire time.

“This is a beta right now and it did that. So in my opinion, 100% so, so impressed.”


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Johnna Crider

Johnna owns less than one share of $TSLA currently and supports Tesla's mission. She also gardens, collects interesting minerals and can be found on TikTok

Johnna Crider has 1996 posts and counting. See all posts by Johnna Crider