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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.”
I had the strangest critical disengagement with FSD v14.3.6 last night.
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