- A Tesla owner drove a whopping 25,000 miles without disengaging FSD.
- Days later, another driver surpassed 100,000 miles of FSD use.
- Critics worry that chasing FSD streaks could be dangerous.
A Tesla driver has officially clocked a 25,000-mile streak of using the car’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature without intervening. David Moss, who frequently live streams and vlogs his trips on YouTube, crossed the streak this week despite being rear-ended at some point during the streak.
Moss is the first person to publicly show off a 25,000-mile streak—which means that he allowed his car to operate FSD without interruption for the distance equivalent of driving around the entire planet.
A streak begins when a driver navigates to a specific location with FSD enabled. It ends with a manual disengagement, which means taking over while FSD is operating. Once the car arrives at a destination and hands control back to the driver, they can take over without it disrupting the streak.
But this also means giving up some driving freedom in exchange for a celebratory win in Tesla’s gamified FSD environment. Hitting the brakes or taking control of the steering wheel to avoid a pothole while FSD is operating are both just simple ways that a streak can end.
“You can’t get to 25,000 miles or probably even 5,000 without multiple moments of major inconvenience,” wrote one user on X. “The product isn’t there yet for this sort of thing to be common, but it’s profound that it’s even possible at all today.”
Unfortunately, FSD still does some unscrupulous things. For example, one video Moss posted shows the car driving over a massive pothole and then through a do-not-enter sign to park at its destination. Doing this repeatedly can lead to faster wear on the vehicle’s tires and suspension and the latter is plainly illegal.
Tesla said in June that FSD is more than three times safer than human drivers, however, instances like in the clip above is exactly why Tesla’s gamified system draws a bit of heat.
Critics argue that streaks encourage drivers to keep FSD engaged during situations where they would otherwise manually intervene, like the car ignoring a do-not-enter sign or yield to a fire truck stopped in the middle of the road. Instead, some drivers have ignored these minor infractions or found workarounds that allow them to keep their streak alive.
For example, drivers found that one workaround to avoid Tesla’s often-criticized parking is to force the car to pull over or unbuckling the driver’s seatbelt while in motion. Another workaround drivers found is to press the car’s “park” button (which owners report doing at highway speeds) to apply the emergency brake and allow the driver to take control.
That’s not to say this record isn’t impressive. Folks are trusting FSD to be their (supervised) chauffeur—it’s one of Tesla’s biggest selling points, and a huge source of its annual recurring revenue. One owner even surpassed the 100,000-mile mark with FSD engaged for 96% of their drives.
But you have to wonder how long drivers can continue chasing the dopamine rush of these so-called streaks before one of these workarounds end up being genuine safety hazards, not just for themselves, but also for other motorists on the road.
