V13 vs V12.6: Which FSD Version Actually Works Better?

So what I want to talk about today on the show, or on the episode here, is as usual talking about Tesla and, and what's going on with Tesla and what I just went through with getting this Model 3 serviced and went to a service center in Connecticut. So I'm going to engage my Full Self-Driving for my trip here. So let's go ahead and get started with that, and here we go. So I'm not sure why it's hesitating, but I'm going to, I'm going to touch the gas pedal here and encourage it to get going and see if it gets going. So I'm actually pushing on the gas pedal right now. Not exactly what I wanted to talk about, but it does seem to hesitate on getting started. This is the 12.6.4 Full Self-Driving release. And so I'm about to get on the freeway here, but really what I wanted to talk about was I took the car in for service to, to a service center about an hour from here. And, and I had to get my windshield replaced. I got hit by a rock while I was on the road. Driving a while back and it created this big massive crack in my windshield that started all the way at the top above the mirror, right at the edge of the windshield. And it started to go all the way down right in front of the 3 cameras that are in the windshield here. And it was continuing to go down. So I was worried that it was going to really kind of split the windshield in half at the trajectory that it was going. So I took it in, I scheduled it all through the mobile app, and I'll bring that experience up on the screen here a little bit. I think I screenshotted a couple of the, of the screenshots so you can kind of see what that process is if you haven't taken your car into a Tesla Service Center. But it was a wonderful experience, I have to say, getting it booked through the Tesla app and then getting it scheduled and then just The handholding that Tesla had with the process of managing when the car needed to be there and what I needed to do when I got there was pretty seamless. But what was really special about the experience at the Tesla Center is that, number one, it wasn't crowded and a lot of people. It was actually very sparse. There weren't that many people there, and that was during the time when there was some nervousness about going any kind of Tesla facility because of the dangers of the crazy anti-Tesla people out there that were attacking Tesla kind of demonstration centers and service centers around the country. And just 3 days prior to going to the Tesla Center to take my car in about a week ago, there was a scheduled protest that was scheduled through— and I saw it in the app that they have to schedule these protests. It was basically Tesla Takedown is the, is the website that you can go to and schedule to participate or schedule a protest. So you can actually do both. And I think that there's been a lot of publicity on this that happened, but I went to the Tesla Service Center 2 days after the scheduled protest, and I did not— thankfully, I did not see any remnants or any kind of impact that protest had on that particular service center. So I was happy to see that. I do know that there was some nervousness around going to that even within 2 days. And I think that's the unfortunate consequence of all this fear around Teslas being attacked. And my car was parking in a parking lot and having to turn on the monitoring of the vehicle with all of the cameras and things like that. The Sentry Mode, as they say. And I do know that there's an upgrade to the Sentry Mode coming that will enable the car to play loud music if somebody gets close to your vehicle. So the car has very good surveillance around the car. So we should be able to mostly avoid any kind of attack that may happen to, to the vehicle with this upgrade. Because I do think if they do enable Sentry Mode to have more kind of capability to raise alarm to anyone that gets too close to the vehicle and looks like is maybe going to do something to the vehicle, that may be helpful. And so that is a similar kind of capability that my Ring camera alarm system has at my house, where it will announce, "You are being recorded," or something like that. So I think there's some mitigations that the technology can do to mitigate this kind of domestic terrorist threat on Tesla, which is unfortunate. And Tesla's being attacked as a political tool, and it's not really fair to Tesla owners because a lot of the Tesla owners are actually from both ends of the spectrum, from the Democratic side and the Republican side. So given that those people are being attacked, it's really unfortunate. But anyway, hopefully that will be subsiding as law enforcement kind of gets more involved and is stating that there's going to be stiff penalties for for attacking Tesla facilities or Tesla vehicles, which I think just aligns with the current laws. So I don't think it's unreasonable to think that they're going to— we're going to be able to mitigate this problem and that this attack on Tesla shareholders and businesses, business and that kind of thing, I think is also going to fail to all this attention that's been given to Tesla. And I'm hearing more people speculate about this on YouTube and other places, that Tesla couldn't possibly buy this level of brand awareness. They tend to not need to run advertising. And my comment on that is that's probably because controversy and the linkage of the brand to, to cutting edge and controversial things and things like that is linked to Elon just drives greater awareness for the Tesla brand. But anyway, I wanted to give back to my story about my Tesla service experience. I was there for about 6 or 7 hours, so I dropped the car off in the, in the mid-morning and then picked it up late in the afternoon. And during that time, the service center gave me total free access to take out a Cybertruck. So it was a brand new Foundation Series Cybertruck that had the full 13 version full self-driving installed on it. So I was able to spend the whole day with a Cybertruck, which I had not actually been in or test drove up to that point. So that gave me an opportunity to experience the Cybertruck, which I hadn't had before. And I have to say, I was tremendously impressed by the vehicle. I was able to, like I said, spend about 6 or 7 hours with it, drive all over to some degree and go do some things that I wanted to do while my car was being serviced. And I have to say that the Cybertruck was just like my Model 3 here. I didn't really see, to be quite honest with you, I didn't really see a huge difference in the full self-driving capability between this car and that one. I'm sure it had different abilities. It just wasn't maybe challenged in a way when I was driving it that exposed those big differences that people are talking about with the vehicle itself, which kind of reset my expectations around what I view around the value of the Full Self-Driving of the 12.6.4, which is pretty much like 95% the same. Now granted, I guess the bigger issue is the 13.0 and the The Hardware 4 gives you likely, and I don't even know this is 100% true yet, but gives you the likely possibility of unsupervised full self-driving, which is what we're— I've talked about many times in this series in my car around that kind of capability. But as far as on day-to-day driving, I didn't really see a big difference between the 12.6.4 and like the 13.3.8 or whatever it was. I can't actually remember what the Cybertruck had in it, but I have to say that the build quality of the Cybertruck, there's a lot of people criticizing the Cybertruck for all sorts of reasons that generally probably are fairly unfounded. Now granted, I think the most recent one was panels possibly can fall off. On the Cybertruck, those kind of stainless steel panels. And I have seen some videos where it shows people pulling off those panels that appear to be glued to the, the kind of frame of the Cybertruck, which was always termed as like a skeleton of sorts, a reinforced steel skeleton that just needed like a skin on it. And that's essentially what it looks like Tesla had to do to be able to attach those sheet metal siding pieces to the vehicle, they probably weren't able to find an efficient way to attach those panels to other metal on the inside. I'm curious to see what they come up with as far as being able to fix that problem in the future versions of the Cybertruck to eliminate this kind of like maybe easily bugged gluing process, which is a maybe a potential weakness for Tesla around their build quality. So I'm not quite sure. I'll be interested to see what they come up with as a solution for those side panels being able to be more firmly attached. And maybe— I don't know how they're going to do that, so we'll have to see. I will be curious to, to see what that is. But I had the Cybertruck for, like I said, for that whole day, and then I took the Cybertruck back to the dealer when they notified me in the app that my car was ready. So the windshield had been replaced. They actually did a replace on an O-ring at the rear of the vehicle. It wasn't specifically clear on what the O-ring was that they, they replaced, so I wasn't exactly sure on that. And so I That's the majority of what they did in the vehicle. I think they also checked my tires. I've had about 24,000 miles on the original tires on this car, and the Tesla dealer told me that I didn't have any problems with the tires. The wear at 24,000 miles was good. I've done a couple of tire rotations on the car, on the Model 3. I'm not talking about the Cybertruck here, but it appears to have done a— the wear and tear of the tires has been good. I don't drive the car a lot. 24,000, 25,000 miles for what's coming up here, I think, is a 3-year-old car. I think as of this month it's 3 years old. I bought it back in March of 2022, so I guess that would make it a 3-year-old vehicle.. But the car seems to have done a nice job of driving while I've been doing this video. I haven't had to intervene or anything like that, but I just thought it was an interesting take over the last couple weeks around the public's reaction to Tesla and what Elon Musk is doing in the government and linking those two things together as a weapon. And so hopefully we will see that subside as we see Tesla stock potentially. It just went up a little bit. Earlier this week again, and it's gone back down a little bit again. So I think we're gonna see probably a fair amount of volatility in the Tesla stock between now and June when they are gonna do the whole Robotaxi release and some— maybe a new announcement about a new lower-priced model or a lower-priced model version of the Model 3 and maybe of the Model Y. I don't know I don't know if there's going to be a completely new car other than the CyberCab that's going to come out in June or in that timeframe, but we'll have to see. But in the meantime, I'm very optimistic on Tesla and its future and the direction that the company is heading down. I know Tesla is in a tough spot being a part of Elon Musk and what he's doing, the Trump administration around, but I'm optimistic on that too. That will potentially be a good thing for the United States around its budget and being able to balance the budget. So I think all of us, or many of us, need to stay focused on making sure that happens. And if, if that isn't— if savings aren't happening in the budget and we don't reach a balanced budget as part of all of the initiatives that we're seeing happen, then I think It's warranted to, to question what's going on there. I do think, and this is my own personal opinion, I do think that there's something relating to upgrading the federal government's technology infrastructure, and it may have something to do with AI. This is just my own personal opinion. It's not just based on who Elon is and what Elon's strengths are. Elon is a very much a strong technologist and really has a good grasp on AI technology and probably systems and how they can be integrated and more efficiently handle data and the flow of data. And him going in and looking at all these different agencies and finding errors and fraud and abuse and all sorts of things in the budgets, that he is diving in at the database level, which could potentially link it up to being able to be more better managed by artificial intelligence as we look to the future. So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing yet. I think time will tell, and they're going to do what they're going to do. So we shall see. But I appreciate you spending time watching my video again and following me as I drive my full self-driving in my Model 3. And And if you're a Tesla owner, I would really encourage you to stay optimistic and stay hopeful and stay supportive of the Tesla brand and the potential that it has to make our world better. So I'm— I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you for watching and subscribing to my channel, and come back here. I publish regular content on the channel, and I'll also push out some shorts about This particular episode too, I think I talked about a lot of important topics with the Tesla brand and the Tesla Full Self-Driving stack. So thank you so much for watching and I appreciate it. I'll see you next time. Thanks.