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Whether it's kicking rocks in the middle of nowhere in California… |
| Scouring the high plains of Idaho for a construction site with no known address… |
| Or meeting with policymakers and politicians to get a pulse on what's happening in D.C…. |
| Many of my very best investment ideas come from field work. |
| Boots-on-the-ground research. Meeting with industry executives, founders, and dreamers – in-person… |
| In real life (IRL) means a lot to me. |
| My approach to research is the antithesis of Wall Street… |
| No conflicts of interest, completely objective, and backed by decades of real-world experiences. |
| Not sitting behind a computer in a glass office, working on a spreadsheet. |
| In fact, it was my IRL research approach that compelled me to get my own Tesla… something I had long classified as the world's most successful AI-powered consumer electronics device. |
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| For years, I've been experiencing firsthand each release of Tesla's full self-driving (FSD) software. |
| As I've been writing in The Bleeding Edge for years, it wasn't about the capabilities or faults of each release that mattered. |
| What became most critical to note was the pace of improvement of the software. |
| Understanding that… is what enabled me to make such accurate predictions about Tesla and other players in the industry, like Waymo or Cruise. |
| Here's a photo of me in a Tesla in 2021, testing out a very early version of FSD. |
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| Jeff in a Tesla Model 3, 2021 |
| And here's a photo from 2024, when I tested out the then-current version of FSD on a Cybertruck… |
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| Jeff in a Tesla Cybertruck, 2024 |
| The technology was getting very impressive,very quickly at that time. |
I've been writing about the technology throughout last year, and most recently wrote about version 14 of Tesla's FSD in Get Ready to Ride. |
| I'm serious when I say I no longer drive when I'm in my Tesla. |
| I am driven. |
| But there is one thing that I had done and had been wanting to do for some time… |
| I wanted to put FSD to the full test via a long road trip… in really bad weather… and below freezing temperatures. |
| Initiating… Destination |
| Who in the heck would want to do that? |
| Me, for one. |
| A bit crazy, I know, but it's the best way to research a technology: to see it for myself. |
| So, I took a 1,000-mile-plus road trip from the New York City area all the way to Toronto, Canada – and back. |
| The weather was below freezing the entire time, and there was a massive snowstorm with treacherous road conditions on my way out to Toronto. "Perfect" conditions to test out the AI. |
| I always get a chuckle when I hear the term "range anxiety" when it applies to electric vehicles. |
| It's not like anyone is going to get stuck in the middle of nowhere. |
| There are charging stations everywhere, and Tesla's supercharger network makes it an absolute breeze, which is exactly what I felt in the freezing, windy conditions. |
| Below is a picture of my Tesla and me in the middle of nowhere in New York State – specifically Roscoe, New York, population roughly 500. |
| It was one of my charging stops on my way to Toronto. |
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| When I set my destination for Toronto, I simply told Grok – which is integrated with Tesla's navigation system – the hotel where I would be staying. |
| The software then mapped out the most optimal route for me to get there, using the supercharger network. |
| The way the system works is that it has you arriving at a supercharger around the time you have about 10% battery remaining. |
| Then you charge your Tesla with enough electricity to get to the next charging station – again, with about 10% left in your batteries. |
| I didn't even have to touch the wheel. |
| The Tesla FSD navigates fully autonomously to each supercharger station… and reverses back into the charging stall. |
| All I had to do was get out and plug in. |
| That's it. |
| Recommended Links
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| Deteriorating Conditions |
| As I was driving through New York state, the conditions got progressively worse. |
| It was snowing, windy, and a few degrees below freezing with slippery conditions. Even on a four-lane road, most cars were sticking to just one lane due to the bad conditions. |
| As we can see in the picture below, there was no way to see the double yellow lines or the white lines that define the lanes on a road. |
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| This is the advantage of Tesla's vision-based system. |
| It doesn't need to see the lines on the road to navigate. It can use the tracks of vehicles to determine where the road is. |
| One of the nuanced problems that I would have only discovered through field research was that the rear camera could become occluded due to snow/slush buildup from the weather conditions. |
| Below is a picture of what happened throughout my trip out to Toronto with the rear camera, which sits just above the license plate. |
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| It wasn't a big deal. It's just that if the rear camera is completely covered, the Tesla can't reverse into a supercharging stall autonomously. |
| So, every time I stopped to charge, I made sure to clean off the rear camera of any snow/slush buildup. Problem solved. |
| As the weather got worse, I could no longer see the black asphalt of the road or the road surface markings. |
| The roads were all-white, and traction was degraded due to the heavy snow and the fact that many of the roads had not been plowed or salted yet. |
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| Despite the nasty conditions and lack of visibility, Tesla's FSD had no trouble at all autonomously navigating through the terrible conditions. |
| The only thing I did was set the Tesla FSD mode to "Sloth" – to slow it down to a more cautious pace. That's it. Still, I didn't have to touch the wheel. |
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| By the time I made it to the bridge that crosses over to Canada, the conditions were really nasty. |
| It was freezing rain, and the roads were incredibly slick. The reality is, the freezing rain was freezing to my windshield… And despite my below-freezing washer fluid, it wasn't cleaning the windshield. |
| And yet, all I had to do was sit back and let the AI do all the work. |
| It would have been uncomfortable for me to be driving in those conditions. And incredibly, FSD had no trouble at all. |
| Crossing the Border |
| The only time I had to take control of the wheel was at the border crossings. |
| FSD managed the start/stop conditions in the line to the immigration officer, but the FSD is not trained on border crossings and conversations with immigration officers, which makes perfect sense. |
| But the moment I cleared immigration, I turned my FSD back on again, and it took me straight to my hotel. It even parked autonomously, right in front of the front door of the hotel. |
| While I was in Toronto, I never drove. |
| I simply told Grok where I needed to go, pressed "Start Self Driving" on my screen, and that was it. |
| It took me flawlessly to my destination every time, and it found parking no matter where I went. |
| Despite parking areas being covered in snow, without any visibility of parking spots, the vision-based system could visually use existing parked cars to infer where it should park. |
| Even in a crowded parking lot full of snow, it figured out how to drive around to the back of the building, where there was more parking available. |
| And on my return during a stop in Buffalo for a dinner meeting, the car not only found the restaurant, but it even figured out how to turn down a side street and enter underneath a covered parking area to find the restaurant parking. |
| I have to say, I have no idea how the AI figured that one out, other than using reasoning models to determine that parking would be behind the building, given that there was no on-street parking available. It was incredible. |
| Coming Home… |
| My ride back was less eventful than my ride out to Toronto. |
| It was only cold and dark. |
| I was driven from Buffalo back to the East Coast, arriving around 4:30 in the morning. But not having to drive the car made it a lot less stressful. |
| With some coffee and Grok, I was able to do research through in-depth conversations with an AI while being driven back east. It was ironically very productive. |
| All told, I was driven a bit more than 1,200 miles, hands-free, by a fully autonomous AI. |
| I didn't have to touch the wheel at all. |
| From my garage to a parking place at my hotel and back again. It was Level 5, fully autonomous technology. |
| Of course, I knew this was the case, having driven hundreds of miles on much shorter journeys, but it is always good to experience it firsthand. |
| Those fringe cases where Tesla's FSD excelled with freakish accuracy… |
| I have to say, while I know it isn't sentient, it feels sentient. |
| It takes the appropriate action right when I think something like, "I would change lanes here." Or, "I would drive around and look for parking in the back." |
| And as I rounded the corner to pull into home, I couldn't help but think… |
| It's as if my thoughts were manifested magically by the AI, teleporting me stress-free to my desired location. |
| This is something that you must experience to grok. |
| There is no other way. |
| Jeff |
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