There are some people who think they’re smarter than the people who write the software for their Tesla. They even think they’re more alert than their car’s computer. Think again. The statistics show that you have about half as much chance of getting into an accident if you’re in Autopilot than if you aren’t using that feature of your Tesla.
Nobody can pay attention to every nearby car all the time. Nobody can even pay attention to what’s right in front of them all the time. People are human. Cars aren’t. Cars don’t get distracted by billboards, Maseratis, or accidents on the other side of a divided highway. Cars don’t text and drive or phone and drive. People get distracted by those things.
In an effort to prevent Teslas from getting in accidents that are the fault of the Tesla driver, Elon Musk has made autopilot a standard feature. You can use it on any road with clearly painted lines. It won’t make turns for you even when you have the GPS turned on and giving you directions, but it will be watching out for all the other cars nearby. Of course, that works only when you have autopilot turned on by clicking the gear shift lever down twice in a row. If you’re on a road without clearly pained lines, it won’t work, and it will give you an unpleasant sound if you try to use it on a local road without lines.
Lane Changing
On roads with lines, you can use Autopilot as long as you understand its limitations. Use it to change lanes by putting on the turn signal. The car will change lanes for you when it decides that it’s safe to change lanes. Here are the limitations for this. Autopilot won’t speed up past the limit you’ve set in order to change lanes. If there’s a spot in the next lane that you have to speed up for, you need to do that yourself. Sometimes, Autopilot will start to change lanes, but then it will bring you back to your current lane for no apparent reason. That sort of behavior will probably decrease with further software updates.
Uncommanded Actions
Regardless of what Elon Musk says, there are some uncommanded actions that the car makes in Autopilot, and the driver needs to be aware that they might happen. I use Autopilot nearly all the time. After all, that’s why I bought the Tesla instead of one of the less expensive electric cars. So what I’m about to say comes from personal experience,
Phantom braking happens every so often. So far, I haven’t been able to figure out what sets it off, but it happens at times. Make sure your car didn’t brake for a valid reason. If there’s no danger ahead, just press lightly on the gas pedal until the car stabilizes.
Uncommanded acceleration does happen at times. There’s one place near my house where I get uncommanded acceleration nearly every time I pass that way. Just press lightly on the brake, and the problem goes away.
Sharp Turns in the Road
Remember I said that Autopilot won’t make turns for you even when the GPS is telling you to make a turn and you put your turn signal on? Well, it also won’t follow a curve if it’s a very sharp curve. There are some sharp curves near my house where I need to take back control every single time I go on those roads or else my Tesla would hit the guard rail. So if you want to use Autopilot on local roads, you need to be aware of this issue and take control.
Autopilot quits driving
Any time you need to take control of your car, Autopilot quits driving. There will be a two-note sound that you’ll learn to recognize that tells you that you’re the only person driving. Sometimes, that happens even when you didn’t take control. The car may have just lost awareness of the road. Always be aware of that sound because if you ignore it, you may not realize that you’re the one driving until it’s too late.
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Tesla has begun reaching out to customers to replace the high-voltage battery pack seals in Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured between 2021 and 2022. In particular, this impacts vehicles between January 2021 and September 22, 2022.
Tesla is notifying impacted owners through a notification and message in the Tesla app.
Plunger Replacement
The high-voltage battery port plungers intended for internal water leak egress (also known as flood ports) are being replaced with improved parts. The new parts are designed to be more robust against external water ingress due to submersion during flooding or other high-severity water impacts.
Tesla specifically notes that no action is needed from owners at this time - once the parts are available, owners will be notified with a notification from the app to encourage them to schedule a service appointment.
This voluntary recall is likely related to the incident where the fully submerged Model X caught on fire underwater, requiring first responders to wait for the battery to burn out before recovering the vehicle. That incident occurred back in October 2023.
While Submarine Mode is a fun Easter Egg, it doesn’t actually improve your vehicle’s water rating.
Service Details
Taking a look at the Service Bulletin (SB-25-16-002), Tesla will be replacing all five flood ports and, if necessary, the breather plugs and flood port doors. Tesla will require you to take your vehicle in for this appointment, which should take approximately 90 minutes for the Model S, and approximately 60 minutes for the Model X. Tesla’s Mobile Rangers won’t be able to complete this activity in your driveway.
The part being replaced is the plug.
Not a Tesla App
Because this is a voluntary recall, Tesla will be offering this as a goodwill service for any owners who have exceeded their Model S or Model X limited battery warranty - so don’t hesitate to take your vehicle in.
Following a period of radio silence from Tesla on FSD updates, Elon Musk has finally hinted that progress is continuing behind the scenes on FSD and that “Several major improvements are incoming.” We’re pretty excited - it has been over 100 days since the last FSD update, and we haven’t heard much since then.
The latest versions of FSD were V13.2.8 for AI4 vehicles and V12.6.2 for HW3 vehicles, both of which were released in January of this year — almost four months ago. While development has been ongoing internally, many have been wondering what the next public release will be. Will it be FSD V13.3, or will we jump straight to FSD V14.
Decoupled Releases & Spring Update
Tesla has now begun pushing Early Access users the 2025 Spring Update without an FSD version change. This means that we can expect the next FSD update to likely be based on the 2025.14 branch.
It’s worth noting that Tesla can add improvements to FSD at any time - and sometimes they do make minor changes without incrementing release numbers - small flag changes in FSD’s software to address how it does a specific task, or what data is uploaded.
With all that said, we expect the Spring Update to begin going out to more of the fleet in the coming days. We’re currently seeing about 58% of the fleet on the Spring Update, and only 30% of the fleet on the older 2025.8 January Update.
Not A Tesla App received information that an upcoming update was set to bring features from other AI4 vehicles to the Cybertruck, including Start FSD from Park, Unpark, Actually Smart Summon, and more. This update was intended to bring it closer to feature parity with the rest of Tesla’s AI4 fleet, but for now, Cybertruck remains the redheaded stepchild of the fleet.
We’re still confident that Tesla is working on this, and the continued delays on the release of an FSD update could point to the Cybertruck and a lack of data continuing to be a pain point for Tesla’s AI team. Cybertruck owners, including the author, have noted that FSD-equipped Cybertrucks continue to upload several hundred gigabytes or more of data per month. This topped out at nearly 1.9 TB of data uploaded in April 2025 for the author.
That’s a massive amount of data - and other users on social media have mentioned much the same for their own Cybertrucks. Tesla needs as much data as possible to tune the FSD models, and given the small fleet size for the Cybertruck, it requires a vast amount of data per user.
“Major Improvements”
While Elon didn’t mention what constitutes these major improvements, we have a lot of expectations besides what we know about the Cybertruck. Learning from the recent and successful FSD launch in China, Tesla is now able to utilize a more generalized model without specific local training data. This could potentially translate into better performance in North America as well, as the 7.7 million miles globally driven on FSD every day are feeding back into Tesla’s data loop.
We’re hopeful that future improvements continue to focus on improving tracking and decision-making, as well as lane handling. FSD users on X continue to point out issues with lane selection and lane keeping in the latest versions of FSD. On the flipside, Tesla has greatly increased the comfort and smoothness of FSD - and V13 is a prime example of that.
While V13.2.8 is also capable of pulling into parking stalls both forwards and in reverse (thanks to one of those flag changes recently), it does an oddly poor job of parking. Tesla’s Vision Autopark, on the other hand, is exceptionally accurate, even with big vehicles like the Cybertruck. It feels like Tesla is working on the parking lot stack to prepare for the upcoming launch of Robotaxi in June.
What About FSD V14
Back in the Q4 2024 Earnings Call, we heard about FSD V14, and just learned a little bit of what will make it unique. In this case, it's auto-regressive transformers that will improve FSD’s already powerful perception system and help it to predict better how other vehicles and road users will behave around it.
That, alongside a larger model and increased context size, will help FSD manage edge cases and make better decisions. The larger model and context size increases are likely another challenge for Tesla, which is already pushing the hardware limits of AI4 with FSD V13.
We did a deep dive into what we know about V14, which you can read here.
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