Tesla FSD Got Worse, Not Better.

I drive a 2020 Model 3. Old Intel screen, Hardware 3, basically the flip phone of Teslas at this point. The one modern thing it had left was FSD. I sit in Toronto traffic Monday to Friday and the car does the stop-and-go crawl for me. That was the whole value proposition, and it was worth paying for every month. Easy call.

Then the 14.1 Lite build dropped.

The car started driving worse. Not a little worse. Phantom braking out of nowhere on a clear road. Hesitating at intersections like it forgot what it was doing. Lane changes where the car starts the move and then rethinks its life choices halfway through. I went from chilling in traffic to hovering over the pedal like a student driver on exam day. On a 2020 Hardware 3 car like mine (I broke down the whole HW3 situation here), every new build is already a gamble. This one lost.

That’s the exact opposite of what I’m paying for. So I cancelled.

October 20 update: the newest build just proved me right

Last night I checked the newest build, 14.3 Lite. It still does it. At a light, my car kept swerving toward the right lane with no message on the screen and no warning, just signal right and drift for the curb like it was yielding to an emergency vehicle that wasn’t there.

Other owners are reporting the same thing. Flickering LED headlights behind you look like flashing emergency lights to the camera, so the car decides to get out of the way. It invents the emergency, then reacts to it perfectly.

This is a different bug from the phantom braking that made me cancel, and it’s somehow worse. One bad build is a bad month. Two builds in a row finding two different ways to drive badly is a pattern. That subscription button stays off until a build actually earns it.

Here’s the thing nobody talks about with Tesla’s subscription model. The subscription is actually the good version of FSD. You don’t sink thousands into it upfront and then pray the software stays good. When a bad build lands, you just stop paying. No sunk cost guilt, no resale value math, no arguing with yourself about whether the feature is worth it. It either earns its spot on my bill or it’s gone.

And right now, it wasn’t earning it.

Let me be clear: I like FSD. I used it every single day. When it works, rush hour becomes a podcast session. I’m not cancelling because I decided I’m some driving purist now. I’m cancelling because this specific build made my specific car worse, and the subscription gives me the power to say “fix it and I’ll be back.”

That’s the honest math most FSD reviews skip. Everyone reviews FSD like it’s a permanent purchase. For most people it’s a monthly decision, and monthly decisions should be ruthless. Bad month? Cancel. Good month? Resubscribe. Tesla made the cancel button easy, which is maybe the most honest part of the whole product. The car itself still costs me what I pay to run it every month, and that math still works. This line item didn’t.

Will I resubscribe? Probably. The moment they push a build that stops phantom braking, I’m back, because my commute didn’t get any shorter. But I’m done with the idea that you keep paying for software out of habit or hope. That’s how subscriptions quietly turn into taxes. You pay attention for a month, notice the thing got worse, and you pull the plug. Then you wait for them to earn it again.

One thing I noticed when it turned off: the car didn’t get dumber in a dramatic way. Autopilot on the highway still works. Traffic-aware cruise still handles the boring part. FSD was the cherry on top, and right now the cherry is rotten. The sundae is fine without it.

The whole reason a 2020 Model 3 still makes sense for me is that the car itself was cheap to buy and cheap to run. FSD doesn’t get a free pass on that rule just because it’s software. It earns its place every month or it doesn’t get one.

So here’s my rule going forward: the subscription renews when the software earns it. Not before. If you’re paying for FSD right now, ask yourself the same question I did. Is it driving better than last month, or are you just paying out of habit?

If it’s habit, you know where the button is.