Some context

We bought a Tesla for one reason: FSD.

If all we wanted was an EV, there are other cars I would much rather have. I mean, the Taycan Cross Turismo is just stupidly gorgeous. But that wasn’t the point. We wanted self-driving.

Part of what makes that funny is that I actually love driving. I don’t just mean I like cars. I mean I genuinely enjoy being behind the wheel. Long drives don’t bother me. Road trips don’t bother me. I’ve done enough driving to know what good driving is like, and what bad driving is like. So for FSD to impress me, it has to clear a pretty high bar.

I’ve been around Teslas enough over the last few years to watch FSD go from “interesting demo” to “okay, this is becoming real.” In 2021, it felt like something I would only ever trust on highways. By June 2024, it was getting somewhere, but it still felt more like a gimmick I would show friends than something I actually wanted to use around town. By February 2025, after test-driving the lineup again, I was shocked by how much better it had gotten, especially in city driving. By July 2025, it felt good enough that I actually wanted one for road trips.

As a side note, FSD on the Cybertruck felt noticeably worse than on the rest of the lineup when I tried it in February 2025. At one point it tried to back us toward a shopping cart return. At another it straight up ran a red light on a highway ramp. We joked that that was not the kind of hurry we had in mind when we tested the Hurry mode. So no, this was not some clean sweep across every Tesla.

Why 14.3 feels different

The biggest improvement, by far, is following distance.

That sounds like a boring answer. It is not.

Before 14.3, FSD had this obnoxious habit of tailgating, especially at highway speeds. Mad Max is the profile that most closely matches how I naturally drive, but older versions would still sit way too close to the car ahead at 80 to 85 mph. That didn’t just feel annoying. It made the whole system feel less trustworthy. A lot of the time, supervising it was actually more tiring than just driving myself, unless I was exhausted or there was nobody in front of me.

Tesla currently has five FSD profiles: Sloth, Chill, Standard, Hurry, and Mad Max. They mostly affect how aggressively the car picks speed and changes lanes. But the spacing problem used to show up in all of them. Even in Sloth, FSD would still sit uncomfortably close if traffic ahead was moving at a “normal” highway pace. That isn’t a style preference. It’s just bad driving. Either pass, or stay the hell back.

In 14.3, that finally feels substantially better. The car leaves more room. It’s much less tiring to supervise. And that’s the part people miss if they haven’t used this stuff a lot: the difference between a system that is technically capable and a system that is actually pleasant to live with often comes down to details like this.

On paper, “better following distance” sounds minor. In real life, it changes the entire experience.

Honestly, this one fix alone makes me prefer FSD over most human drivers on the road. At night, probably over me too, and I think pretty highly of myself as a driver.

What’s still annoying

The stop-sign behavior is still too robotic.

I get why Tesla wants to be conservative here. I really do. But doing a full, exaggerated three-second stop at every stop sign does not match how traffic actually flows in the real world. It can confuse other drivers, irritate the person behind you, and create these weird awkward moments that don’t feel any safer.

The good news is that 14.3 finally makes the accelerator-pedal override feel usable. If the car has already stopped and I want it to go, I can now gently press the pedal and have it move forward in a predictable way. Earlier versions technically let you do this too, but they often followed it with an abrupt hard brake that made the whole interaction worse. In 14.3, the override still feels like a workaround, but at least now it behaves like a sane one.

What really needs to go

There is one change in 14.3 that I genuinely do not understand: if you exceed 100 mph at any point during a drive, FSD gets disabled for the rest of that drive.

To be clear, I do not mean FSD refuses to engage above that speed. Obviously it already has a hard limit at 85 mph. I mean that if you go above 100 mph while driving manually, the system seems to punish you afterward, even once you’re back at a speed where it would otherwise be perfectly happy to operate.

I have no idea what this is supposed to accomplish. It doesn’t make the experience feel safer. It just feels arbitrary and annoying.

Sure, someone might say, well, you should never be doing over 100 mph in the first place. Let’s agree to disagree.

If FSD is already taking me up to 85 mph trying to pass a slightly slower truck that’s doing 83 to 86, I feel safer just taking manual control, getting the pass done quickly, and moving on, instead of sitting next to that truck forever. On a car as quick as a Model S Plaid, 85 to 100 is basically a one-second event. That would be even more true in the new Roadster, if Tesla ever ships that damn thing. And yes, I want that car to come out already. Penalizing FSD afterward for that kind of manual intervention just seems dumb.

And before someone says, “Why not just slow down and move right?” Sometimes that is not the best move either, especially if you’ve already committed to the pass and now have someone stacking up behind you. And to be fair, if your overtake is taking 30 seconds, they’re not the impatient asshole for tailgating you. You are.

If you’re going to pass, pass. Don’t sit there pacing another car forever. In the real world, the safest move is often to just complete the maneuver cleanly and move on.

Bottom line

14.3 is not the first version of FSD that impressed me.

It’s the first version that actually changed how I drive.

That difference matters. Plenty of technology demos are impressive for five minutes. Very few become part of your actual life. FSD 14.3 crossed that line for me, and it mostly did so not through some flashy new trick, but by getting better at the boring stuff: spacing, smoothness, predictability, trust.

That’s why this version feels different. It didn’t just get more impressive. It got easier to live with.