Journalist Alarmed When His Tesla Running FSD Tries to Veer Off Highway and Plunge Into a Ditch

A journalist says that his Tesla running Full Self-Driving nearly drove his car off the highway and straight into a ditch.

Fred Lambert, the editor-in-chief of the electric vehicle blog Electrek, described this close call in a harrowing new piece. Had he not intervened, he said, the software’s blunder could’ve been disastrous.

“I was ready to take control, and I did, but it was scary,” Lambert wrote. “My girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat, screamed in fear.”

The incident took place on Sunday while Lambert was driving down Autoroute 55 in Quebec’s Mauricie region. He was running the latest version of FSD, v14.3.6.

His car was cruising at around 68 miles per hour in the right lane. The visibility was clear, there was no traffic, and the lane markers were freshly painted  — “perfect conditions for FSD,” in Lambert’s experience.

Then, as he drove past an exit, the car suddenly activated its turn signal and began to veer towards the shoulder, with “self-driving” still on the screen.

“The problem is that the ramp was already peeling off behind us. It was going to drive us straight into the ditch by turning this late at that speed,” Lambert wrote. “The car decided to put its blinker on and take an exit it had no business taking.”

Lambert, who extensively covers Tesla, is well aware about the pitfalls of self-driving technology. Still, it caught him off guard that FSD would fail in such straightforward driving conditions.

“Based on everything I’ve seen from v14, highway driving at night on an empty road is where the system is at its absolute best.” he said. “I’ve done thousands of kilometres of exactly this without touching anything. Which is why I was confident. And that confidence is the whole trap.”

Contrary to what its name suggests, Tesla’s feature doesn’t fully drive itself. Its full name, it’s worth noting, is Full Self-Driving (Supervised); that parenthetical was added as the automaker came under fire from regulators for potential false advertising. The system requires constant supervision and for a driver to take over at a moment’s notice, cutting against the idea that the software is fully autonomous.

Despite that, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly stated that his cars can, in fact, “drive themselves.” 

If that’s the case, they’re horrendous drivers. FSD-enabled Teslas have kept trying to drive into the path of oncoming trains so often that it sparked an investigation by federal regulators. They’ve also been involved in numerous deadly accidents, including one incident in which it ran over an elderly woman while its cameras appeared to be blinded by sunlight.

But FSD does work most of the time, and that’s part of the problem, Lambert says. In a previous blog, he argued that a “system that works almost perfectly creates a trap — drivers trust it just enough to stop paying attention, but it still fails unpredictably and sometimes critically.”

“I stand by every word, and Sunday night was the demonstration,” he said in his new blog. “A couple thousand miles between critical interventions is genuinely impressive engineering. It’s also exactly the interval that teaches your brain to stop scanning.”

He’s far from alone in his experience. In March, a woman sued Tesla after her self-driving Cybertruck allegedly tried to drive her off the side of a bridge, with footage showing the vehicle accelerating up an overpass ramp at a high speed before slamming into a concrete barrier.

More on Tesla: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

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