Watch this Tesla Model 3 ‘Self-Drive’ into oncoming traffic

The YouTube tester titled the video “Tesla’s Self-Driving Software Is Getting Good” but it’s clearly still super janky

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Another week of Telsa fans playing with the brand’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) Beta, another video of one of the leading EVs making a dangerous and illegal move in a busy city centre. 

It’s not surprising at this point after we’ve witnessed the cars automatically crash into million dollar jets or get completely and fully flummoxed by downtown Toronto’s network of streetcars, but the latest video of a self-driving Model 3 blowing it — plus the way the incident is framed by the driver — signals there may be a mild case of denial currently infecting some Tesla owners. 

Though the video does showcase the FSD Beta program successfully navigating a number of corners and intersections, it is far from proof that the “software is getting good,” as the title suggests. Would “good” software take you the wrong way down a busy one-way street after confusedly signaling both directions? We think not. 

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Check out the video above, recorded in Seattle by pro-Tesla tester Galileo Russell of the YouTube channel HyperChange. The car is holding between the lines pretty well for the first few minutes, changing lanes, and taking corners automatically, but when Russell approaches an intersection with a one-way street, things go from OK to “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” 

As Russell’s Model 3 crawls up to the intersection, which forbids right turns, the car initially has its right turn signal on, then the left, then the right again. Not a good sign. “Oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens here,” Russell says, giggling. Sure enough, the car makes the illegal turn right and forces Russell to take control of the wheel, steering the car out of the way of oncoming traffic and to the side of the road, eventually managing to turn around in the pullout of a parking lot. 

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, and I went the wrong way up a one-way this is not good,” Russell says as the car makes the error. He goes on to call the incident “the worst L” and then “science.”

Science experiments usually take place in a laboratory, though, not on the streets of a near-million-person city. We do, however, agree with the “L” rating.