The Ultimate Stress Test: FSD 12.4.2 in Downtown Chicago 👀 

Best 12.4.2 video yet. Really like the camera angle, and great editing.

Maybe it's because I live in the Chicago suburbs, but I found this drive captivating. Thank you for a preview of what the rest of us will experience when 12.4.2 arrives to our cars.

Best FSD video so far. I might have watched 100s of hours of FSD videos so far from other famous RU-vidrs.

I use FSD 99 percent of the time. I love it. I only manual drive when I want to go fast and have fun. I have crossed mountains, been through many cities. Sure there has been a few awkward moments, but overall it’s amazing. I am especially impressed during rain storms at night in cities. I can barely see, and the FSD usually does perfect. It’s so fun to be a part of history in the making.

That's the most complicated FSD driving I've seen so far. FSD unsupervised is so near and yet so far .

Very good video indeed. Calm, collected, fair

Thank you for these videos. I live in busy suburbs and got FSD 12.3 during the free trial. While it was technologically impressive, it just drove too awkward for higher traffic situations. Braking too early, and not keeping up with traffic when they do go was my main frustrations. Standard AP is better at that than FSD. It was only comfortable when it was late at night and I didn't feel like I was being a nuisance holding up traffic. I keep watching your videos with each release waiting for that version good enough to subscribe to. I really do want it, and I really appreciate you making these videos for us.

Humans: compared against “did I die?” FSD: compared against perfection. There’s definitely room for improvement, and always will be, but I regularly do 30+ mile drives across the suburbs, highway, and downtown without interventions (and only feel like a clown once or twice). I just wish it would pull out of my garage on its own and if there was an open parking spot at the destination it would automatically park there. In due time though.

“Felt bad” for the homeless guy. FYI. If you did that living in Austin, you could be rich when you left your house and homeless yourself if you gave a dollar to each homeless person on the corner. There is someone on EVERY single corner.

I liked your video a lot. I agree that the interventions were both related to map issues and neither one was a safety issue where the car would have hit a pedestrian or got into an accident.

Best FSD video period, the angles, the speeding up time enough, the kight and camera on the break, etc etc... damn!

Great production. Love seeing a drive thru an area I know well. A couple of comments - 1) stopping that far back at an intersection would drive me crazy 2) getting confused with upper/lower Michigan and Wacker will be “exciting” for Robotaxis 3) while great that it doesn’t run red lights, a matter of time before it gets creamed by a driver following behind. Improved? Yes. Ready for prime time? I’d estimate another year.

Nice drive. I am from Switzerland have a model XP90D (2016) and a model 3P (2019). As soon as FSD is available here I will trade in my old P90D and buy a new one with HW4 and will use FSD. Can’t wait….

17:11 the bus visualised as a huge limo. Gosh 😂😂😂 thats huge

I’ve said that when Tesla start doing robo taxi, Owners should be required to put a sign on top of car like a pizza delivery driver. This lets people know the car is driving itself and will act accordingly. Like you said with big camera on top, most people will have more patience knowing… when a human is behind the wheel it’s not as important to have but True FSD I think it would help integration

Wow. What a video! You’re certainly the best. Nothing out there should be more educational for Tesla FSD AI Team to watch! I have had exactly the same intervention with 12.3.6 in front of the Aon Center. It’s obvious that the car is confused with a lower deck/different traffic layer (maps related) Also have experienced your 2nd intervention in Chicago north shore suburbs: car stops in an intersection without showing a blue line in visualizations. Thanks for your dedication!

Great video and commentary! Thank you.

Thanks for the FSD coverage.

Your best video by far. Your efforts definitely shine through and does not go unnoticed. Subscribed!

#1 video to see what FSD 12.4.2 can do in real test with a beautful , wonderfull narrator #TechGeekTesla🔥🔥🔥🔥♥

Thanks for the work you are doing!

Nice drive!! Thanks for the drive in Des Plaines. Well done... Go FSD 12.4.x

Brilliant! Fruego!🔥🙏💯

Outstanding evaluation. Don’t think I’ve seen you before, but I am definitely subscribed now.

Great video!!! ❤

Great video. Excellent camera views and commentary. 👍

Very nice. Thank you!

Love the editing

Really great video John. Your efforts are greatly appreciated. Enjoy your 4th with your family and get some rest!

I appreciate how you have the patience to let it do its thing and only take over when required. Chicago is certainly one of those challenging cities to learn for a human, let alone a robot. Thanks for the post-recording voiceover, it's nice to have a review with collected thoughts.

Great vid, thanks for your effort.

Great vid! Thanks

Very Well Done!

Great video. Keep it up!

Awesome camera work! Clearest I've seen. i really like the rear view. Can't wait till I get upgraded.

Excellent work.

What a fantastic channel. One more subscriber. Cheers!

Awesome video!

Best fsd content on youtubes

Awesome editing and effects and and and. Good job. Subscribed.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥♥♥♥#TechGeekTesla wow wow wow ...i was completly immersed in your naration, live as it happens.

Awesome video. I like that you fast forward though many non-eventful moments

拍摄的太好了，感谢！

Thank you! Exactly how we should test FSD. As if we are in the back seat and the only reason you’re in the driver seat is to avoid and accident. If I was in the car in a robotaxi I might have not loved it but would have probably been on a phone and wouldn’t mind it at all….

Excellent video and commentary - thanks so much! For me your videos double as a nice sightseeing trip through Chicago, a city I love flying to! (And it always reminds me of the 1999s video game "Midtown Madness") 😆

Thank you for your work. I've also watched so many hours of other FSD videos and your approach seems to be the best on RU-vid. Also what we all need is FSD driving in such cities as Chicago and not in some remote areas. Also I loved your videos where you introduce FSD to strangers. I think this kind of format can go big on RU-vid (and I'd grown a few channels with over 1M followers) . So keep it up and it will pay off for sure!

Thanks fora great video

Seems helpful to have some kind of signage when fading, especially for us neophytes. Thanks, nice video!

Thanks. Great video because it spent most of the time on critical situations.

Great camera work

I appreciate all the hard work you put into this. I'm like you in that I don't normally have the patience to wait for FSD to finally figure things out. Sometimes I let it go to see how it behaves, but most times when I'm trying to "get somewhere" I just take over and force the car to do what I think it should be doing.

your edits and clips are great hahah!

This is very impressive. I live downtown and drive in most of these areas regularly.

It's so interesting seeing FSD running in areas with poor map data. I took my M3LR to the suburbs of Atlanta last year and was shocked by how poor the experience was compared to my daily use of FSD in the San Fernando Valley. I couldn't figure out what was different until I checked google maps and realized that even 3 lane wide roads were marked as single lanes when I zoomed in all the way.

Great camera angles, great editing, calm commentary, great route through chicago. I would like to see the same route on the next versions. The interventions were a little bit strange from FSD. I hope that this to much hesitation in some situations would be fixed in the coming updates. I pressed the subscription button 🙂

#TechGeekTesla #Chicago is where a real test for fsd could be proven.I follow several channels on fsd but this is absolute fire🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥♥♥♥♥

Thanks for upload! 6:07 screen/camera configuration is really good, very clear.

Awesome!

Great editing

这个测试不错，足够多的人流车流，nice

I like the simulated Tesla Semi view 😊 earned sub

All nighter ! Legend

Great video! Great camera setup and great video layout! You did a really good job on this video. Thank you! Nice to see the same streets again! Best memories driving there with V12! Ate Min. 25, right turn, the car drove exactly when the lights turned yellow, but why, no idea.

Very impressed by the quality of video and ... FSD performance ! Both top notch

NOTICE the kid at EXACTLY the (20-minute) mark waving at you with both hands on the RIGHT as you cross the bridge/river. 👀👍

Your videos are among my favorites for FSD updates. Well done. I agree about the map errors. I have 2 places it consistently gets in the wrong lane for an upcoming turn.

Work hard, get hard!

This is the perfect way to test it. Good job!

This version got incremental improvements. Then it's getting there. Competitive advantage is created by experience like this. On maps, it is a critical issue. Maybe FSD should add a logic that whenever map is confusing, it would automatically avoid it by rerouting.

really good drive! it needs to be able to do forward planning from vision only being able to override bad map data.

It's good you have the patience to let the car do its thing. It reveals what robotaxi failures and recovery will look like.

thanks for sharing. I believe FSD will be the 1st one to achieve workable autonomy.

Chicago + Tesla = 1 more suscriber

It can handle difficult situations better than routine ones. This Elon mentioned recently. That gives hope that assuming next versions won't regress it improves drastically over 12.5, 12.6, etc. Absolutely excellent camera work and commentary. I would say top 2-3 among FSD channels.

THANK YOU!!! Sooo many Tesla testers wo common courtesy that they laugh it off or do not care! Most likely one of the major reasons why people hate Teslas and key the car! Testers should and must count all of the confusion and honks! Which is why I only test when there's no cars around and disengage ahead of potential problems.

good stuff....

this was honestly so great in every way. idk if i could handle letting it rip like this downtown being behind the wheel. you are a soldier for shouldering all that cringe! you're right though about the map confusing this. take my perspective. i've been to chicago and driven around once in 2020 for a few days. The whole "underground" road structure was completely foreign to me and i had no idea wtf was going on. the gps did nothing to alleviate this (apple maps) and i was almost certainly driving terribly as i missed several turns and my gps re routed frantically not knowing that this was in fact a multi layered situation (as if though FSD can even fathom such a concept or any concept) the way i look at it is : FSD gets directions from maps, FSD is trained to "drive" based on driver training data, MAPS provides "routes" which literally dont exist, FSD tries to achieve said routes only to find itself on some weird road which coexists properly with the maps data (top down) but does not accuratley represent the path given. This all causes FSD, like me, to be confused as hell and just try to deal with existing on the road. The problem here is that i can pull over or just meander while annoyed, FSD has no fucking idea why this road doesnt exist and is trying desperately to follow the map data. This is a phenomenal video. I'm not so sure about how many other cities/locations have roads LITERALLY stacked directly on each other parallel, but this will be an odd problem of matching map data with road depth. FSD doesnt have precise code so i'm curious how they can modify how it interacts with its "maps" data. Certainly it's not a 1 dimension line it follows but more an ebbing flow of a path like a meandering river which corresponds to the literal road and the gps coordinates. great video, i'd still be shit at driving in downtown Chicago but FSD has nothing on me in Nashville >:)... at least until next year :) PS perhaps they should consider applying location based parameters. FSD does so well in California cities. They COULD take something somewhat similar to waymo strategy and have variant parameter clusters which are geographically bound and are layered into the current functional build if applicable based on GPS coordinates. an idea at least. driving one way in one location could be dumb or a problem if done exactly so in another. certainly tesla engineers are or have considered this.

12.4.3 has started coming out! Hope you get it soon

This is really good stuff! Thanks so much!

You: I try to be polite and patient. Also you: I would have honked if I was in that truck..

14:14 That's the first genuine bug/failure I've seen after watching many hours of FSD videos. It really did something that makes no sense. The stop sign was on the other side of the intersection. Perhaps that confused it. Send that straight to the technical team! Regarding other times the car didn't burst into intersections to make turns: "Aggression" meaning playing a bit of chicken with other cars, which city drivers do all the time, perhaps is a good thing not to adopt in FSD. 15:39 Great job FSD. 20:33 The lack of cars moving to right of the median and the right of the median being so much thinner than the left of the median, it thought it was not the right turn route for it to take, and so there was no right turn it could make. 24:55 Does it believe the cobblestone crosswalk is a median that it cannot cross, until it correctly identifies that it is flat? 28:27 I disagree that it did anything wrong. "Creeping" is wrong, because how does it know that the traffic will clear? And a car just shot across that path as well. It made the turn when there was room to turn into. I think this is correct, not like a human, but fine.

This was a really great test drive. Yes, the voice over is almost necessary to get a clear idea of all that is going on. You need FSD stickers on your car, Ha! I am still on V12.3.6. I am sure Tesla uses your video for diagnosing issues. No steering NAG, that's great! Downtown Chicago is definitely a challenge with all the pedestrians and mapping.👍

Omg, you are working so hard. Lots of hours to create content

I've never seen those roads. I only know Chicago from Shameless 😂... Great video!

Great work! Almost need another stat for interventions for how you would really drive (I.e. when the driver waved you forward). There is no way you wouldn’t disengage in these situations

Great video, like the view from the roof of the car. FSD is getting better and better.

A very good stress test. Chicago Streets are highly unusual.

Great graphics & commentary! Keep it up & thanks for sharing! - watch out Chuck C, Black, Dirty, AI DVR & Whole mars! New guy on the block!

I liked your comments about how many interventions are subjective. The inclination to be polite is strong in most of us, and it is hard to let that go - but I think we should. Pretend someone else is driving and reduce your "ownership" of the drive. As you said, most human drivers sometimes mess up and we allow them to recover.

“If it can drive through Chicago, it can drive through any town.” Mumbai, Barcelona, Palermo, Mexico City and ten thousands of other cities: hold my beer.

I applaud you for the personal sacrifice of ego for the purpose of measuring Ego's progress with each version. As for myself, I figure I do a better service to the cause by intervening and disengaging a little more, perhaps than absolutely necessary, but then, I'm in Alabama, and I doubt there are as many Teslas being trained in all of Alabama than in Chicago, so my focus on training over testing may be good here.

3:07 I started to always stop at yellow lights and would expect a safe AI to do the same. Had an accident trying to beat a yellow but another car was also doing the same. Running yellows is simply unsafe unless you’re so close to the intersection that you couldn’t brake in a safe manner.

I'm glad to see 12.4.2 is getting better, I lived in downtown Chicago for 20 years, from 1999 to 2019, so I know how challenging it can be to drive there, especially during rush hour traffic.

Cool

Can I just say that I appreciate you for what you do. There's no way in hell I'd have this much patience downtown. I don't even like driving downtown in a NON FSD situation. So kudos to you. Some of these situations gave me 2nd hand embarrassment. Especially the 14:17 moment. LOL Wow.

24:55, looks like yellow light made it snap out of it. I've seen it sometimes that when something happens its algorithm kinda resets, like it has a lot of different neural networks for different situations, and when its stuck, and something trigger another algorithm, it just goes.

Great video. They're not quite there yet. Still needs some refinement.

Very nice. Two disengagements, but one was due to faulty map data, and the other was odd, but not a "safety critical disengagement", ie it likely would have correctly rerouted and just been rude/confusing to a driver behind you, which I wouldn't be surprised if a Waymo or other "fully autonomous" care would do as well.

Excellent video. Thanks for all the time and effort. My thought: when FSD makes bad choice we should prompt the correct action using the turn signal and acceleration pedal (and brake if necessary). All driver actions should indicate a need for additional training.

I have a situation like yours where in my suburban area on my way to work I have three lanes at a 4 way intersection. I need to be in the center lane which is straight and left turning lane. I need to go straight but the car was in the right lane which is a right turn only lane. It's been that way forever. It's not a new designation. I took over because that right lane gets pretty congested and I didn't want to block it. If I were traveling that same path at night or after midnight when there's basically no traffic on the road I would test it to see what it's going to do by itself. But during rush hour you don't want to be in people's way. Mind you I'm still on 12.3.6 but that right turn is clearly marked with arrows on the pavement and a right turn only sign. It's still impressive that you put it through its paces in a cluttered city. Chicago, Detroit, California, NY, DC and other areas ids where the real test of the car's capability are put to the test. Suburban driving is good and does pose some challenges but in the down town areas everything is thrown at you. And while it is a whole lot better, especially since I came from 11.4.1 to 12.3.6, it's got some ways to go before I can have complete confidence in it. Regardless of what Elon says or the upcoming Robotaxi day I personally don't believe FSD is anywhere close to being ready for that. I'd say it's 70% to 80% for supervised low intervention driving. And while I'm not authority on it all I just have to be as completely unbiased as I can even tough I own a Tesla and I'm a long time investor. I have a vested interest in seeing it succeed but I have to be honest that for every milestone it reaches there's tones of scenarios it can't or has a hard time handling on the best of days. And also keep in mind that these cars being robotaxis may not be a viable option on days when it's low visibility, raining, at night in various areas or in other weather conditions.