The ability to avoid potholes while on FSD is “coming soon,” according to an update posted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk over the weekend. It would be great news for Tesla drivers, if we hadn’t heard that exact same thing before.
The process of getting to autonomous driving has been an expectedly long one. Well, expectedly for everyone except Musk.
Over the years, Musk has made many predictions about self-driving that have not come to pass (yes, that’s right, there’s a wikipedia article about them… and it’s quite long).
But beyond the missed deadlines, Tesla has been improving its software.
Back in 2013, when the first of Musk’s predictions was made, Teslas couldn’t drive autonomously at all – the first demo of Autopilot was in 2014 (and I was there, in pre-Electrek form).
Now, the software can navigate most roads pretty well, whether they be highways or surface streets, and can even pull into parking spots when reaching your destination. And it’s doing better than a lot of other manufacturers’ driver-assist solutions out there. Tesla came out on top of a massive Chinese real-world test of driver-assist software last year, but not without making plenty of strange errors.
And, Tesla of course operates its “RobotaxI” service, which has done fully autonomous miles with no driver present in the vehicle, even though that system is very limited so far and not as good as its main competitor, Waymo, and Tesla knows it (but Musk doesn’t).
So we’re seeing progress… but we’re also still seeing plenty of hilariously late promises, and this latest one is yet another example.
Musk says FSD will soon do something he said was coming soon 7 years ago
Sunday night, Musk took to twitter to make another of his typically inflated tech-messiah declarations, talking about what capabilities he thinks AI will have beginning next year. In response, another twitter user said that they’d just like to see their car be able to avoid potholes.
Musk responded “coming soon” – leading to much excitement among Tesla fans, and leading at least one outlet to claim that this announcement was responsible for a ~5% TSLA stock boost today.
Potholes are a persistent problem on American roads, as infrastructure crumbles due to underinvestment by the US government (exacerbated by one Mr. Elon Musk’s quixotic attempt to form a government spending advisory board which just ended up wasting money that could have been spent for the public good). They can cause shorter tire life, cause expensive wheel damage, or even lead to accidents.
And potholes have been a persistent problem for FSD too. While Tesla’s vision-only system ought to be able to spot potholes in the road, as that’s how humans spot them, it has mostly proven incapable of doing so – or at least uninterested in changing lanes or even moving within the lane to avoid them.
So a solution to this problem would be welcome, especially for Tesla drivers in areas that have more potholes. And it is also long overdue… so long overdue that a fix was promised in 2019 and never came.
Does that promise look a lot like another promise?
All the way back in 2019, we at Electrek reported on Tesla’s upcoming ability to avoid potholes on roads.
The story went similarly than as it did today – a concerned fan asked Musk on twitter about avoiding potholes, and Musk said the capability was coming. Here’s how that went:
Perhaps there was no “coming soon,” this time, but one would think that a feature publicly announced 7 years ago might have made its way into the feature set by now. With Tesla claiming that it’s the best company in the world at “physical AI,” and with over ten billion miles of training data, surely it can find the patterns to distinguish potholes and figure out what to do about them. After all, it’s been scanning roads specifically for potholes for years now.
But alas, here we are in 2026, and FSD cannot yet avoid potholes.
This context is important, particularly right now, as later this week Tesla is launching its Cybercab, intended to be a fully autonomous (yet geofenced) robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel. These will be put on the road without a driver, and perhaps also without the ability to avoid common road hazards.
That could lead to problems – because even in Musk’s sky-high prediction yesterday that AI will be superhuman at all digital tasks by “the end of next year,” that may not include physical tasks like figuring out what to do with a bent rim after hitting a pothole at full speed.
Hopefully, for the company’s sake, “soon” in this case means 2 days, instead of 7 years.
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