A Tesla owner posted dashcam footage of his car driving straight over a log lying across the road while running Full Self-Driving (FSD) v14.1 Lite, without braking or slowing down.
The clip has more than 800,000 views, and it adds to a growing list of problems we’ve documented with Tesla’s “Lite” version of FSD on older Hardware 3 cars.
In the video, posted by X user @donvarri on August 21, the car is on a wet, foggy rural road with the “Self-Driving” visualization active at 32 mph. A log sits across the lane. The Tesla runs right over it. No braking, no swerve.
“Mine drove over a log in the road it def wouldn’t have stopped,” the owner wrote. He later confirmed the car is a Hardware 3 vehicle running the latest v14.1 Lite build.
The problems with v14 Lite keep stacking up
FSD v14 Lite is a compressed version of the HW4 v14 model, squeezed onto HW3’s memory-constrained AI3 computer, which has 8GB of RAM and roughly one-eighth the bandwidth of the newer hardware. Tesla started rolling it out to Hardware 3 cars in June.
Since then, the reports haven’t been good.
Owners have documented HW3 computers overheating under the extra processing load, triggering an APP_w141_ECU_Thermal_Issue fault above 90°C, with some temperatures hitting 96°C. In several cases the system threw “red hands” and forced a disengagement, and a few computers shut down entirely and needed replacement. On top of that, drivers reported phantom braking, hesitation, and brake stuttering.
Tesla shipped v14.1 Lite partly to address the overheating. This log incident is on that supposedly improved build.
And the bigger issue hasn’t gone anywhere. HW3 simply can’t deliver the unsupervised autonomy Tesla sold, the company has admitted it has no clear plan to get there, and it sold roughly 4 million cars as “full self-driving capable” for as much as $15,000.
The complacency problem, in the driver’s own words
The replies quickly turned into a fight about whose fault it was. Several people told the owner he should have been watching the road and intervened.
His answer is the whole story: “2 things can be true I should have been paying attention but the car definitely should have stopped.”
That’s the trap with a Level 2 system that’s good most of the time. One commenter put the blame squarely on the driver: “No, YOU allowed that to happen for the opportunity to post a video, by failing to properly supervise.” The owner pushed back that he’s no Tesla hater, that he’s driven 70,000 miles, and that it’s the best car he’s ever owned.
But here’s the problem. The better FSD gets at routine driving, the more the driver relaxes. And that’s exactly when it plows over an obstacle a human would have caught from a hundred feet away. The system trains its own supervisor to stop supervising.
Electrek’s Take
Both things are true. He should have been paying attention, and the car should have stopped for a log in the middle of the road at 32 mph. Blaming the driver lets the system off the hook, and blaming the system ignores what supervision is for.
I’ve been on the wrong end of this. Almost a decade ago I had a similar but less severe accident in a Model 3, and it still cost my insurers around $15,000 in suspension and frame repair. Hitting a solid log at 32 mph is a lot more violent than what I went through. I wouldn’t be surprised if this car ends up totaled once someone looks at the underbody.
To think that the driver would have done it on purpose is ridiculous.
The complacency issue is real, but it’s a design problem as much as a driver problem. Tesla keeps pushing more capable software onto hardware it already admitted can’t do the job, and the result is a system smooth enough to lull you and brittle enough to run over a log. HW3 owners paid for autonomy. What are they actually getting?
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