danny@danielredding.com:~$ cat writing/2026-08-21-Impossible!.txt
Impossible! I was once an IT Helpdesk worker at Oklahoma Christian University’s IT office. While working there the oldest professor in the school came in for assistance with something. Once I had solved his problem I showed him how the first version of Siri works. I activated it and said “take me to Wendy’s” and the phone opened up the maps app and navigated to Wendy’s. His response: “it can’t do that! I KNOW it can’t do that!”. That is a silly sort of interaction but I think it’s relevant here since I expect many people have this reaction about technology and will continue to have this sort of reaction for many years. Below is my current experience using tech that, when describing what it does, it sounds simple and easy but doesn’t really hit home until you try it yourself. So I’m writing this to try and show how this has positively changed my life. My current job requires that I drive a significant amount of time. On any given day I can rack up 4hrs of driving in heavy traffic. Today it was 6 hours of driving with only an hour or so in traffic. Driving long distances doesn’t really bother me too much. Driving in traffic is another matter entirely. The stress of constantly adjusting for other drivers started getting to me after about a year at this job. I wasn’t doing very well. So I went looking for solutions. Possible solutions I looked at: 1. OpenEye driver assistance 2. Adaptive radar cruise control on newer cars 3. More complex driver assistance OpenEye has been on my radar for a while but doesn’t seem like they’ve made very much progress outside of their initial vision based cruise control and lane changing. While cheaper than a new car this is not seamless and very few people in my circles even know what it is. Incidentally when my brother John Mark was hired at my workplace he purchased this and my initial thoughts have been pretty accurate compared to real use. I looked into buying another hybrid Toyota since they are terrifically reliable historically and tend to hold value well. However looking into Toyota Safety Sense showed me that their announced features weren’t very broad and many didn’t even exist at the time I was looking. Other car companies make other systems. Ford, Mercedes, GM - aside from adaptive cruise control these driver assistance features allowed use only on pre-mapped roads and weren’t very cheap. I tend to buy cheap vehicles so paying a lot of money for something that doesn’t function well for my purposes seemed a stretch. About this time a friend of mine showed me her Model 3 and let me do a test drive with what Tesla calls “Full Self Driving” 13.2.9. This is when things shifted for me and I knew the answer was close. While it was parked we put in an address and told the car to drive. It took off down the neighborhood street at night, stopped at several stop signs, signaled and made a right hand turn onto the main road, stopped at a stop light, and turned left to merge onto the highway. All without my input on what to do or where to go. Several weeks went by and I continued my search for anything similar. I couldn’t find anything that anyone was even building that was consumer marketed. (You can’t buy a Waymo, for instance). So I signed up for a test drive at the local Tesla show room for a Model Y. They let you just take them out for a spin and just ask that you bring it back in about 30 min. So off we went with the car driving itself. It was a rather boring test drive because it works almost too well. Jess said “when do we get one?” as soon as we got back to our own car. It took me another month to convince myself that this was the correct car to buy. Like I said, I normally buy cheap, used, vehicles. It's insane the ease of this purchase compared to the purchase of Jess' Toyota which had to be haggled in person and upsold with a bunch of other things. That didn't happen with Tesla. I ordered what I wanted in the app while I was out getting dinner and could see it was available nearby. I picked it up the next day by walking in and the "sales rep" pointing me to the car. I was confused since I thought I'd have to sign or check out with someone but she just said "let me know if there are any problems" I later reported a door misalignment and small scratch on the hood - both of which were fixed without issue. Since that purchase we say about once a week how we are so incredibly grateful for this car for a multitude of reasons. Comfort, simplicity, ease of use, safety, but mostly because it can drive itself. We bought a product that we tested and were sure would help a major pain point for my job and it has certainly done that. But this last month the car has been receiving updates to that system that make it even more functional and even safer. And I think most people don’t know that such a product exists in the way that Tesla Full Self Driving does now. They assume, due to the articles and videos they’ve seen, that Tesla’s wreck all the time, burn randomly, and do other unexpected things that don’t make sense. Those things have certainly happened and are a large part of the reason I didn’t even look at Tesla when I first looked into driver assistance. But FSD v13 changed everything. Version 13 was when Tesla succeeded at making a product that far surpassed everything else around it in terms of actual usefulness. FSD v14 is when I started seeing that Tesla would in fact solve autonomous driving. In the first 5 months of ownership I’ve “driven” nearly 18k miles in my Model Y using FSD v13. I go out to my car, sit in the driver seat, pull out of my driveway and only engage self driving near highways or on simple roads. When I get off the highway I usually disengage FSD and drive to my destination. Since the v14 update I’ve done things a little differently. I get into my car, tell it where to go, IT pulls out of the driveway, drives through town, onto the highway, on the highway through construction zones and then off the highway and through cities and complex intersections until I get to where I’m going and it parks itself. It still doesn't do Costco parking lots or parking structures very well so I usually disengage in those scenarios. But it handles literally anything else. I don’t expect that this actually connects with you in a real way because you’ll assume, like the professor in the story at the beginning of my post, that it CAN’T be done how I’m describing it. That I must be a fanboy or exaggerating or lying. And there’s good reason. Many people that post about Tesla online are fanboys and it can be hard to tell what is real and what is exaggerated. So I invite any of you that question this account to come take a drive with me, or come “drive” it yourself. Better yet, go test drive a Tesla at a showroom near you. There’s no salespeople to deal with - just people that are helpful. You might ask ”why write all this?” Good question. I don’t get anything from this either in money or fame or recognition or something. My purpose is this: that there is a product that has had a significantly positive impact on mine and my wife’s lives and I would never have found it if not for my friend showing me. So here I am, your friend, showing you. :) Much love all. --- I wrote this note late last year and haven't decided how best to post it until now. Since buying my car in May of 2025 I have put over 47k miles on it. 94% of my driving since the release of ~v14 has been on FSD. The important factor is this: that I use the product every single day without question. I have identified a few weaknesses I thought I'd mention. But don't let them fool you. I will never go back to a vehicle that does not have this or a similar feature. More than that I would put my mom or grandmother in one of these instead of having them drive themselves. It is literally safer than most drivers. And since I'm relaxed and alert I can see just how bad most drivers are. Weak areas - Construction zones with flaggers. It'll do it and wouldn't cause an accident or anything but it would confuse people and hesitate at weird moments. I watch it and easily takeover when needed. Construction zones in general aren't a problem. - Complex parking lots and parking garages. It doesn't really have an "eye" for spotting open spaces and tends to drive around too much. In Costco this gets annoying since it's a madhouse anyway. Parking garages are also hard since it doesn't "remember" which way it came in so it'll go off in some random direction unless I take over. Once I point it in the right direction though it gets out just fine. - Potholes. It doesn't really avoid potholes like a human would.