Teslas are good. Self-driving sucks.

Dec 11th 2025

I've always really liked electric cars. Ever since I gave a presentation in high school about how good EVs are, I've thought they were a great idea. It just makes sense to me that with a relatively small amount of electricity, you can move a whole car and use it as a daily commuter. The low pollution is a major benefit too.

Even if you account for the embodied carbon of manufacturing an EV and its battery, and even if not all of the electricity used to charge it comes from renewable resources (in Vancouver it's like 90%+), I still think the benefits outweigh the downsides. The economies of scale in electricity production, even from non-renewable sources, improve efficiency. And EV batteries last a very long time if they're charged, discharged, stored, and operated properly.

When electric cars first came out, a lot of people argued that because some electricity comes from coal, EVs were just a form of “virtue signaling.” But gasoline cars are actually very inefficient. Some as low as 15%, maybe up to 30-35% in good cases. Meanwhile, even coal power plants can produce electricity at 40-45% efficiency. (Coal isn't a great comparison because of non CO2 byproducts, but whatever) So even using non-renewables, and accounting for losses in charging and electricity transport, electric cars can still make sense.

Battery lifespan is another strong point. If you operate an EV between something like 45% and 65% state of charge, you can get several hundred thousand miles before seeing real issues with the powertrain. For most people, that fully covers their daily commute. And concerns about charging are often overstated: if you have a normal 15-amp wall outlet at home, you can simply plug in your car, and likely wake up with enough range.

As a primary car, EVs are quite practical. Tesla deserves credit for building the Supercharger network and designing batteries that can charge very quickly. I'm not a Tesla fanatic, but I think it was brave of them to push these ideas so early, before the technology was fully figured out. When I worked there as an intern in 2019, I saw the inside culture, and there was genuine innovation going on.

However, there's a line between ambitious, forward-looking ideas and unrealistic promises. And I think Elon Musk (billionaire Nazi) often crosses that line. Tesla, especially in the area of self-driving, has overpromised and underdelivered. Not just in the current state of the product but in the overall feasibility of the approach. Their AI models, like most machine-learning systems: LLMs, vision models, control systems, are trained once in a data center. They don't do online learning. They aren't updated every second you drive. So if a scenario isn't well represented in the training data, the system can struggle to choose the correct behavior.

I tested Autopilot, adaptive cruise control, and Full Self-Driving in my new car (Model 3 SR+, 2020). In rain and other adverse weather, the higher-level systems really struggled to the point of being unsafe. Twice, the car suddenly braked very hard in the middle of an intersection. Another time, it almost sideswiped a vehicle because it attempted a lane change at the wrong time and place. I suspect this happened because the cameras had raindrops on them, reducing visibility. Either the car couldn't detect the other vehicles, or it detected them but responded in a way that was clearly wrong.

These models don't have the ability to improvise. If you replaced the onboard computer with a human controlling the car remotely, and that human saw that a camera was blocked, they would adjust their behavior. Maybe they wouldn't attempt a lane change toward the obscured side, or drive straight for a bit to "scan" the environment before performing the lane change. That kind of improvisation makes the car safer, but today's models cannot do that.

And I think that's ultimately what people expect from autonomous systems: some ability to improvise and handle unusual situations, whether we're talking about a chatbot or a self-driving car. Right now, that expectation isn't being met.