It's a commercial name for a Level 3 autonomous function on Tesla cars ("the car’s systems perform the entire dynamic driving task (DDT) within the area that it is designed to do so. The human driver is only expected to be responsible for the DDT-fallback when the car essentially “asks” the driver to take over if something goes wrong or the car is about to leave the zone where it is able to operate." [1]), considering that the "area" is not strictly defined, and could be any road with sufficient visual cues for the car to assume where a viable lane could be.
In terms of sensors, it relies exclusively on optical cameras, as opposed to other autonomy projects that use LiDAR and/or radar and/or ultrasounds as well as cameras.
People have been paying thousands of dollars to subscribe to FSD for many years now, even when the only autonomous interventions in the car were strict Level 2 autonomy. Contributing factors for this seemingly irrational investment could be that the Level 2 features worked great (except for phantom braking and other arguably dangerous mistakes), and the backhanded marketing that would place FSD as a Level 5 autonomy feature.
It's a commercial name for a Level 3 autonomous function on Tesla cars ("the car’s systems perform the entire dynamic driving task (DDT) within the area that it is designed to do so. The human driver is only expected to be responsible for the DDT-fallback when the car essentially “asks” the driver to take over if something goes wrong or the car is about to leave the zone where it is able to operate." [1]), considering that the "area" is not strictly defined, and could be any road with sufficient visual cues for the car to assume where a viable lane could be.
In terms of sensors, it relies exclusively on optical cameras, as opposed to other autonomy projects that use LiDAR and/or radar and/or ultrasounds as well as cameras.
People have been paying thousands of dollars to subscribe to FSD for many years now, even when the only autonomous interventions in the car were strict Level 2 autonomy. Contributing factors for this seemingly irrational investment could be that the Level 2 features worked great (except for phantom braking and other arguably dangerous mistakes), and the backhanded marketing that would place FSD as a Level 5 autonomy feature.
[1] https://level5auto.com/what-is-level-3-autonomous-driving/