There comes a moment in every driver’s life when they realize something profound. For some, it is the day their classic car finally spins its wheels for the last time. For others, it’s the first time they drive a supercar.
But for Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee, the author of this Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) test, that moment came when he closed his eyes behind the wheel in a busy urban setting and trusted the car to keep him safe.
That simple act reveals more than just faith in technology. It shines a spotlight on a broader cultural shift critics have warned about for years — that autonomy could change not just how we drive, but how we feel about driving itself.
A Test Drive on the Edge of Autonomy
Tesla’s FSD has always lived in the grey area between hype and reality.
On paper and in marketing, it promises a future where you can eat breakfast, take a phone call, or even nap while your car handles the road. In reality, the system available today — Tesla FSD (Supervised) — still requires a human driver ready to take over at a moment’s notice. That gap between promise and performance underpins Lee’s firsthand experience.
Driving around Berkeley and Alameda in a 2025 Tesla Model 3 equipped with the latest FSD software, the author says he put the system through a range of environments, from crowded campus streets to highways. And Tesla delivered something impressive.
Here’s a system that can think, navigating pedestrian crossings with caution and threading through traffic with patience. At times it felt like riding with a cautious chauffeur. At other times it felt like an upgrade to the very idea of driver assistance.
But here’s the rub. Despite the system’s apparent competence, there was always a steady reminder that the driver still mattered. When Lee let his eyes close for a moment down University Avenue, a warning barked him back to attention. The car kept going. The driver remained necessary.
That experience sums up the duality that defines this tech right now: tantalizingly close to autonomy, yet just far enough from it that you still can’t check out mentally.
A “Spoiling” Revelation
This brings us to the actual topic for today: What do we actually want? If you’ve been in a Waymo robotaxi or another fully autonomous ride, you’ve probably felt what Lee calls “being a passenger” in the truest sense.
That level of hands-off operation — no supervision, no vigilance — defines full autonomy. And once you know that experience, anything short of it feels like a tease. That, more than anything else, is what spoils users.
A good chunk of the gearheads circles has long warned that advanced driver assistance systems might do more than make driving safer. They might make driving irrelevant. That once we taste the freedom of letting a machine take over the tedium of steering and shifting, the joy of driving could fade. You hear things like, “if you don’t want to drive, get a plane ticket.”
People who loved the feel of the road might find themselves bored behind the wheel, longing to just sit back and let the tech handle it. This experience reflects that shift exactly. Lee didn’t just appreciate what FSD can do. He wanted more. He wanted to be free of the driving task entirely.
Caught Between Two Futures
Some enthusiasts argue that is progress. They see convenience as liberation, tired of the monotony of long highway miles or stop-and-go city traffic. Others worry that when we surrender control to machines, we also surrender something deeper — a connection to the act of driving and the skills that come with it.
Somewhere in that debate lies a truth Tesla’s current FSD demonstrates well: we are caught between two futures. One where drivers remain engaged custodians of a rapidly evolving machine and another where driving as we know it simply becomes a memory.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech is impressive, even delightful in spots. But until it truly reaches unsupervised autonomy, it will tease us, spoil us, and inevitably spark that age-old question: are we evolving past the need to drive, or are we just getting lazy?