Gary Zhou 
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta has been released for a few months, and the community of Beta testers who have access to the feature have published plenty of content. When checking the FSD feature, one owner took his Model 3 to the extreme by allowing it to attempt a notorious roundabout located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has been labeled as one of the state’s most difficult to navigate.
The roundabout in question is located at State and Ellsworth in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, according to Dirty Tesla, who posted several videos of his Model 3. It is clear that the roadway has been daunting for many drivers after further analysis of the famously difficult roundabout, so a test with Tesla’s FSD Beta will be quite the hurdle to conquer.
In an article from September 2020, the Ann Arbor Observer named the roundabout as one that drivers hate. The local newspaper announced that the roundabout opened in 2013 and was built in hopes of reducing the amount of time it takes during rush hour to drive through the intersection. Before the construction of the roundabout, Observer writer James Leonard said in the paper, “It could take twenty minutes to get through the intersection.” The intersection was responsible for 149 collisions in the five years prior to the roundabout’s first appearance. But the solution to minimize traffic time and prevent collisions did not go according to plan. In the five years after the creation of the roundabout, there were 650 injuries.
“We as engineers thought we are getting such great results with single-lane roundabouts when it came to crash statistics and capacity analysis that we just thought automatically it was going to translate over into the multilane roundabouts,” Washtenaw County Road Commission engineer Mark McCulloch said about the roundabout. “That’s just not the case. None of us, me included or the design engineers, had any idea [that] people were going to have complications with it.”
For Tesla’s limited release of the Full Self-Driving suite, the roundabout was clearly going to be a major challenge. It is relatively new and timid, and it is still learning. CEO Elon Musk told FSD users that it is predicted that new features will act slowly before more trust and confidence is gained. Drivers are expected at all times to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention to their environment.
A fair job was definitely done by the FSD-equipped Model 3. During the numerous trials around the roundabout, Dirty Tesla interfered several times. Nevertheless it managed to go through the daunting stretch of roadway twice, with only minor adjustments.
Watch the video below to see Dirty Tesla’s Model 3 navigate the roundabout located at State and Ellsworth.
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