My Model YL has covered 18,972 km, and I am still running Tesla Autopilot without FSD.
No Full Self-Driving. No Enhanced Autopilot. Just the standard package that came with the car.
This is what you actually get day to day, on software 2026.20.6.1.
The Tesla app is in Japanese here. It reads 18,972 km, software 2026.20.6.1.
The way I drive has not changed much since delivery. Efficiency over the first 10,000 km is in a separate post.
What Tesla Autopilot without FSD actually gives you
Open Controls, then Self-Driving, and there is a section called Self-Driving Features.
It holds two buttons: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, or Autosteer (Beta). This is a choice, not a pair. You are picking which one the right scroll button engages.
Auto Lane Change, where the turn signal alone moves you into the next lane, belongs to Enhanced Autopilot or FSD. Without either of them, the option is not even listed.
Autosteer (Beta) was what I used first
For the first few weeks after delivery I had Autosteer (Beta) enabled.
Turning it on brings up a long disclaimer. Keep your hands on the wheel, stay ready to take over, that sort of thing.
It holds the middle of the lane properly, so on a steady motorway run it really is easier.
Autosteer quits on every lane change
It did not suit the way I drive, though.
Autosteer cancels the moment you change lanes. Any torque on the wheel drops it, which is spelled out in Tesla’s owner’s manual.
Since I have not bought the option that changes lanes for me, every lane change means steering myself. So every lane change kills Autosteer.
On the Model YL it takes the speed control down with it. You do not get to keep cruising with only the steering handed back.
In practice I now press the right button to switch Autosteer off before I move over, because letting it drop on its own is not smooth.
The road I drive most is a busy multi-lane arterial. Overtake, re-engage, pull back in, do the whole thing again. It wore me down.
The screen behaviour around lane changes did get better in an earlier update, which I wrote about in this post.
Why I went back to plain cruise control
So Traffic-Aware Cruise Control is what I leave selected now.
It keeps a set gap to the car ahead at a set speed. Ordinary adaptive cruise control, in other words. Almost every new car sold today has it, so there is nothing novel here.
There is one more reason it stays selected. You cannot swap from Autosteer to cruise control while driving. The choice is made before you set off, so whichever one is selected is what you have for the whole trip.
Autosteer earns its keep on long steady runs instead. Coming home from Kyushu, mostly a single lane during quiet hours, it was clearly the better of the two.
That drive is here.
Summary
- Tesla Autopilot without FSD gives you Traffic-Aware Cruise Control or Autosteer (Beta), one at a time
- Autosteer cancels on every lane change, taking the Model YL speed control with it
- Auto Lane Change on the turn signal sits behind the paid options
- On a road with frequent lane changes, plain cruise control is the more usable of the two
Tesla Autopilot without FSD is not nothing. For flowing along a motorway it does the job.
That said, on a ¥7.49 million (approx. $50,000) car it feels like a waste. Autosteer is right there in the menu, yet what I actually use is the same cruise control every other car has.
The cruise control has one problem of its own, which is the wipers. That got long enough to be its own post.
This article is also available in Japanese.
