Rob Greenlee tests Tesla's FSD v12.5.2.1 in a Connecticut parking lot and finds it repeatedly fails to navigate, locate spaces, and even drives toward oncoming traffic. The freeway performance is solid, but parking lot behavior is a step backward from earlier versions.
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Come back for another episode of Behind the Wheel and just wanted to give a little video demonstration of the new FSD update, uh, 12.5.2.1, and I'm, I'm going to show you how it works in a parking lot. So supposedly this update is, is supposed to be a big improvement on being able to navigate parking lots and, and those kind of things. So I was going to try and demonstrate that. So I'm about to initiate Full Self-Driving here, and it will take me over to a grocery store parking lot. So let's get going. It's a little slow to get started, and it's trying to figure it out, and it's trying to go— that's probably the opposite way I would probably go, and it ran into a problem here. So I'm going to have to interject here. Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of people talking about this version of the software kind of having some issues. So let me get it straightened out again and we can kind of get going again here. So let's try it here. So it's going to go the correct way. It was like it couldn't figure out which way to go back there, so this is a little bit of a parking lot type situation. So I'm not impressed at this point with the full self-driving. I'm in a Model 3 and not quite sure why it's very indecisive. The obvious path is to go right, so I'm not sure why it deviated to the left because the grocery store is off to the right. Very simple intersection, and it should go right across the street and try and find a place to park. So I just drove on the freeway and it seemed to do a pretty good job on the freeway. Oh, and if I didn't say, this is a 2022 Model 3 Long Range, and so I've got about 21,000 miles on this car. And your destination is on the left. Okay, it's on my left, but I'm hoping that it will find a place to park, but I'm not as confident that it is going to do that. So I'm not quite sure what the upgrade really was around driving in a parking lot. So we shall see. I'm, I'm trying to find out. So very indecisive in its decisions here, and it's just driving straight into— and it's going behind the grocery store. So I'm not quite sure why it's going behind the grocery store. And it says the autopilot navigation is complete, so we're kind of, you know, 500 feet meandering around the store right now, and I'm not exactly sure why it didn't go to the front of the store and try and find a place to park. And I, I do kind of wonder if it's because of the detail on the, the maps, because I look on the screen, it's not very detailed in its understanding of its surroundings, and but it does appear to have decent kind of view of the, of the actual, you know, kind of space around the grocery store. So it's going back out in the street again and trying to come out at the grocery store again here instead of— okay, let's see what it's going to do here. Kind of not very decisive, it doesn't quite know what to do here. So let's— oh, oh, it got itself in a situation where a car was coming up next to it. Yeah, I'm not quite sure what's going on here with it. Okay, we're— we pulled all the way around the building again and to come back to the front of the grocery store again. So it's going to turn back into the grocery store, and let's see if it does something different this time. It's going to turn right. This is kind of where we just went, and let's see if it takes a different path this time. It doesn't seem to identify any parking spaces. Now your destination is on the left. There's a car pulling out and it didn't— it kept going even though the car was there. It's not looking for a place to park. Now I could be assuming that it was supposed to do that and it just isn't, so it's kind of taking the same course it took before. So I'm not seeing a big improvement in the parking lot navigation here as opposed to the last version that I I believe it is the 12 dot, was it 4 dot 6? It's going around the building again and was about to turn right into an oncoming car. So I had to take over. So I'm going to have to back up here and get myself out of this mess. Let me see, I think I still have to initiate the parking process to find a place to park. So what I'll do is I'll go up here and see if I can find a place to park. So let's see here if it'll try and find a place to park. Let's see. Okay, we're going at it again here. And so I was really looking forward to this update, so it would hopefully find a place to park, but I think I have to take it out of— now your destination is on the left— the full self-driving. See, and the parking spaces appear, so this would be where I have to hit the park button. So if you haven't used this software, that's how it works. You— it'll identify, but I have to take it out of the Full Self-Driving mode, and this kind of goes into the auto park capability. And then you just press start up here, and it'll pull forward, and then it will navigate a, a back-in sequence here to actually park, but it always backs in. It doesn't ever go forward in that I've seen. So it seems to have done a, done a nice job with that. So that's complete. So when it pulls out it has to— it doesn't have to back up to pull out, I guess, is kind of why we do that. So anyway, that's what I wanted to share with you today. I appreciate you watching my YouTube channel and watching my Behind the Wheel series. And my name is Rob Greenlee, and thank you for spending some time with me in this video. And I hope you come back and watch all my other videos. I'm a podcaster and do a lot of videos on how to podcast, but I've been a Tesla and electric car owner for many, many years. So, so thank you so much, and we'll have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.
