I’ve spent about 96% of my driving time over the past year on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving.
I’ve written before about an 11-hour trip with my son, after which my Oura ring showed lower stress than a normal day at the office. About Shadow Mode, and how Lemonade prices FSD miles at half the cost of regular ones. A couple of times, FSD may have literally saved me - I posted a clip of the car braking and pulling right seconds before a driver flew past, trying to overtake through a median island.
For me, the question of whether the technology works is basically settled.
What the closest competitor’s numbers show
Recently I looked at GM’s numbers, and they’re a good read on where the closest US competitor stands.
GM’s hands-free system, Super Cruise, has existed since 2017. Today it’s installed on roughly 750,000 vehicles. Users have driven more than a billion miles on it. The supported road network has grown to 600,000 miles.
New buyers get Super Cruise free for three years.
Then the interesting part happens.
Once the free period ends, only 30-40% of users keep paying the $25 a month.
Six or seven people out of ten spent three years driving with a technology that lets you keep your hands off the wheel, and decided it wasn’t worth $25 a month. Nine years after the product first hit the market.
We keep overestimating adoption speed
I think we constantly overestimate how fast people adopt new technology. Especially now, with AI.
Technology can be ready long before people are ready to change their habits. And at that point, the problem stops being an engineering one.
Letting go of the wheel is an act of trust.
The same pattern shows up with AI agents
I see exactly the same thing with AI agents. If an agent does the work and you check every action afterward, there’s barely any time saved. Sometimes there’s even more work than before.
The real payoff starts the moment you’re willing to hand over not just the work, but part of the control.
The bottleneck for the next few years, in cars and in companies, is trust: how fast people become willing to hand over control.