Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
2026 Tesla steering wheel. July 15, 2026. Fritz Hasler photo.
I remember getting into my new 2019 Tesla six years ago. While basic driving controls were familiar, Tesla’s approach of having many control functions available only on the display screen was somewhat bewildering. There were also numerous new features that no one had thought of for cars previously. We were busy watching YouTube videos on how to operate our new car. Over the next few months, we learned how to operate most features of the car and were generally very pleased with the functionality.
However, the learning never stopped. I paid $6,000 for a permanent subscription of Full Self Driving, which was very limited in 2019. Every month or two the software was updated and we had to learn how to take advantage of the new functionality. By 2023, FSD V12 had become a very capable automatic driving system in many situations. However, in mid 2023 Tesla started putting a more powerful computer and higher performance cameras (“Hardware 4”) in their new cars and FSD was frozen at V12 in the older cars. Tesla continued development of FSD software in its new cars, resulting in FSD V14, which has received rave reviews.
