‘Full Self-Driving’ clips show owners of Teslas fighting for control, and experts see deep flaws

SAN FRANCISCO — In one video, a Tesla tries to drive down some light-rail tracks. In another, a Tesla fails to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. And at one point, the most advanced driver-assistance product available to consumers appears to slam into a bike lane bollard at 11 mph.

Each of these moments — captured on video by a Tesla owner and posted online — reveals a fundamental weakness in Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” technology, according to a panel of experts assembled by The Washington Post and asked to examine the videos. These are problems with no easy fix, the experts said, where patching one issue might introduce new complications, or where the nearly infinite array of possible real-life scenarios is simply too much for Tesla’s algorithms to master …
In early February 2022, Tesla was forced to issue software updates to almost 54,000 of its cars that feature the company’s signature FSD program due to the cars’ propensity to not completely stop at stop signs. An increasing number of videos posted by Tesla drivers of their self-driving cars going haywire, though, seem to show that the issues with FSD go far beyond rolling stops …