It’s still somewhat better driver assistance. Like I said, it was advertised to be something it’s not. My car has the lidar, and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s much better at driving assist now without the lidar than it was with the lidar. That may be due to other improvements, but the point stands.

When you use the “FSD” mode, you free up a ton of your attention. You don’t have to concentrate on staying in the lane. Lots of cars have lane assist now, and it’s definitely the number one feature on the Tesla, as well. You don’t have to focus as much on speed. You rarely have to think about navigation. It does the lane changes for you, and it does the turning for you. You can glance at the display, and it very reliably shows you where all of the cars are near you.

You get to reclaim all of that attention and with that, you can be better aware of what other cars are doing. I was already a very safe driver, the sort who focused on defensive driving, before I got FSD, and FSD has only made my drive even safer. My biggest complaint is that it makes some really stupid lane change decisions, which I can simply cancel. Of course, that’s after it has turned on the signal, which feels embarrassing, although probably nobody else cares. It also has some issues when there are multiple turn lanes. It likes to choose the stupidest turn lane every time.

You use the car. You learn the quirks of the current software, and then you correct when it does something wrong. That’s it. It’s game changing. It’s not as game changing as true FSD, but it’s huge. It doesn’t matter if it only uses cameras. We drive with only our eyes. Could it be better if they also used lidar? Probably, although AI famously can have worse results sometimes with more inputs. But it’s the other things that are more important.