Yesterday I received the notification that there was an update for the Model Y. I had been anticipating this update – it’s the “holiday” update that Tesla pushes out with some fun features like in-cabin camera viewing. I quickly got the process started and let it go until this morning.

As I was sitting on the couch having coffee with the Tesla app open, trying to see if I could get the in-cabin camera to appear, I realized that the FSD driving score feature in the app wasn’t there anymore. Huh? Could it be – did I really get approved into the FSD beta?

I hopped up and went to the car to see what the update was, and lo and behold it was the FSD beta build 10.69.3.3! Christmas came early, I had only signed up to be in the beta over Thanksgiving when Elon tweeted out that they were opening it up to everybody, and because we don’t drive much our score was hovering around 86, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

I changed into warmer clothes and decided to try out FSD by going to our nearest Starbucks for some coffee – it’s barely a mile away from us. The only problem was that it was downpouring here, so when trying to engage FSD a notification displayed that it could not be enabled due to the weather conditions. Oh well.

A few hours later and the rain had stopped, so I hopped back into the car and set the destination to the library near us. I set off and engaged FSD and the car started driving itself. There is an unprotected left turn onto a busy road, but the rest of the drive was on neighborhood streets.

I let the car do it’s thing – especially with the unprotected left turn – and it worked quite well. It’s interesting to see the car ease out at intersections to detect traffic, and then proceed. The whole way to the library went flawlessly.

Once at the library, I put in a destination to the local park, which was very close, and had the car drive there. There’s several speed bumps in the park, and the car seems to not detect those.

From the park I set the destination to home, which involved a right hand turn onto the same busy road but at a light this time. Approaching the light it was red, but after stopping and then proceeding to ease out, it performed the right turn with no issue.

Going into this I had an idea of what the beta would be like from the various videos and posts I had watched and read online, but I had to say I’m pleasantly surprised at how capable it went with this test drive. I’m looking forward to getting more miles under the belt with this feature.