Is Full Self Driving Worth Buying On A Tesla Or is It Unicorn Dust?

Today we're going to be answering the big question, if you're buying a Tesla, is full self-driving FSD worth the money? Now as many of you may know, I've just had to purchase a Tesla Model 3 Performance for a customer for sale, and this car had full self-driving. So today we're going to be going through what full self-driving does, and in my honest opinion, do I think that you should purchase it. Now there's a couple of things it does above standard autopilot. Now if you buy a Tesla Model 3 for example, autopilot, standard autopilot is completely free. You don't pay anything for autopilot. So we're going to be talking about what self-driving adds, what extras you actually get above autopilot, and you know, at the end a summary of should you buy it. So first of all, let's have a look. We've got summon. Now summon allows you to move your car forward and backwards within a given slot, in a car parking slot, so you can pull the car out and in. Now this is nothing new. This is something that Mercedes, BMW and just generalised cars have been able to do for a while. Yes, you have to pay extra for it, but it's not unique to Tesla. It's just basically using the parking sensors on the front and the back to work out if they can carry on going forward or backwards to get out of tight spots. Now this is an absolute bonus, especially for the customer that was buying this car that was disabled. People often don't park very considerate next to disabled drivers in disabled spots and haven't realised that the reason why the spots are bigger is so they can get in and out of the car with more ease. And they park very, very close, so this allows you to pull the car out of the space and easily get in and out. Now you have to have full self-driving to allow this summon. On previous autopilots, on Model S's and X's, you used to get a different level of autopilot. They've messed them around and changed them around a bit, where it used to allow you to do this type of summon just as standard as part of the autopilot package. But Tesla rejigged all the autopilot and full self-driving packages, in my mind, to make full self-driving look like it had more included than it actually did. Instead of just being full of vapourware, to be honest, at the moment it is mainly vapourware. The promise of level 5 autonomy is not any time soon. But let's have a look at what it can actually do. You can actually do advanced summon now. So advanced summon is a little bit more clever, and this is pretty cool. So advanced summon, in fact when Elon first demonstrated it on Model 3 when he was first announcing it, he showed basically that you could pick a place on a map and have the car drive to you. And on the example they used a police officer chasing after the car, trying to put a ticket on the front of it, and the car running away from the police officer. Now it does work in the UK, and the legality of it is you can only use it in private spaces, so private car parks, stuff like that, non-basically stuff where the insurance companies would be angry. Now when I've tested it, it works. You can pick a place on the map and it will drive to it. The only problem is, it only works here in the UK anyway, if you're in Bluetooth range of the car, because it uses the phone's Bluetooth to connect to the car to know that you're in line of sight, safe line of sight. And this meant for me when I was testing it, that I had to be as close as a couple of metres away. So really, it didn't really add any functionality over moving it forward and backwards out of a spot, unless you're in a really tight angled spot car park and you need to physically drive round, turn the wheel out as you came out of the spot. But it didn't really add any massive functionality. I was hoping what it would do is the promise of, I'm sat here in my showroom, my car's parked round the back, I can see the car, I've got a line of sight. It's chucking down with rain and instead of going out getting absolutely soaked, I could press a button on my phone, watch my car drive all the way round from the back of the showroom to here where I'm sat now and getting it, you know, less wet. And that was the whole promise of some of them. I don't know if it's insurance legalities or some other issues, but it doesn't really do what you'd want it to do and whether that will change in the near future or not is just questionable. But it's a cool feature and to be honest, the forward and backwards reverse summon, that should just be included as standard in Autopilot. I don't understand why that needs to be in FSD. Now another feature that you get included as part of full self-driving is automatic parallel parking and normal parking spaces, you know, your normal standard bay parking. So you get auto parking, which is great. You drive past a spot, you put it in reverse and the car will control the steering wheel and park you in a spot. Absolutely great, but shouldn't be part of full self-driving. Again, it should just be included as part of the standard Autopilot. And why, you ask me? Because you can buy a Renault, a French, you know, car, French budget Renault car with this on. It's not an amazing super feature that needs all the full self-driving cameras and computer. No, it just needs the standard ultrasonic sensors that are around the car that every car has to do this. And it's not really that amazing. It's been on cars for years. In fact, I think Mercedes and Ford were the first two car companies to add it onto their cars. Yes, again, they charge you for it, but on this type of car, that shouldn't be the price that they're charging for full self-driving. It's a pretty standard feature. And to be honest, I think Tesla, it used to be part of Autopilot. And I honestly, again, think they've moved it to full self-driving just to make full self-driving look like you're actually paying for something. Now, it's a great feature and I love self-parking cars. Yes, we can all park a car ourselves, but full self-driving, these self-driving parking spot cars that a lot of cars now have, the advantage of it is you don't curb your alloys. Now, the pièce de résistance of full self-driving is, of course, navigate on Autopilot. And this is why I thought, why not add it on? I mean, to have basically put something in your navigation and your car to drive you there. Come on, that is sci-fi, that's amazing. However, it's not as great and as perfect as you'd think. Now, the car that I had, I only had full self-driving navigate on Autopilot for a very, very short period. It took a while to calibrate the cameras because I had to do some various lanes and stuff like that for the cameras to fully calibrate. But when I got it on, navigate on Autopilot and Autopilot is slightly different. However, you have to accept each of these changes by pressing a button on the screen. So, would you like to overtake this car? Yes. Would you like to exit this turning on the motorway, you know, get ready for your exit turn? Yes. And if full self-driving is only a couple of years away and they've almost cracked it, then that's a sell on its own. You don't need to take away gimmicks that used to be part of autopilot and put them on full self-driving. Now, the other system it does are traffic lights. The traffic light system didn't work on the Tesla I picked up until the very, very, very last day that I had to drive the car back from the hand control people that fit hand controls to Tesla.