The location is the same - Tesla Rockville location at 1300 Rockville Pike. Parking will still be limited, but hopefully better than before because the end of quarter crush is gone.

The event information and registration link is here (and, look on the submenu on the right, before the event). There will be raffle prizes (including Plaid Member-only ones), and we'll have a Photo Booth setup thanks to Frank Noe.

Catering will be provided by Catering by Zest, same as last year -- salads, ziti, veggie lasagna, tortellini, primavera, cookies, pastries.

The same DJ that powered us through the Holiday Light Show will be at this event, too.

Special and repeated thanks to Total Recon for sponsoring the catering and DJ!

We're still working on trying to get some other fun things going, to watch this space for updates.

We'll be posting updates to this forum as well as sending periodic email updates out, about the December 6 2025 light show event. Subscribe to this topic if you wish to get even more update emails!

Last weekend we did a day trip to Frostburg to visit some friends (and provide tech support). On the way there, FSD 13.2.9 nearly drove us driveway to driveway, the only reason I can’t say that is because their driveway is really weird to access. For all intents and purposes, 13.2.9 drove us there (from Silver Spring) with no interventions. Well, OK, I did have to goose the accelerator because it refused to speed up to the new speed limit on the non-highway roads in Frostburg and highway driving still fails to consistency read speed limit signs and it still ignores the speed limit offsets setting for 50mph roads. Mostly impressed, FSD did what I expected it to do.

On the way home, I had to take over after about 15 minutes. Skidmarks on the highway caused it to slow down and swerve. Not brake-slamming slow down, but enough to annoy the guy behind me (he was following too close anyway, so too bad for him), and it refused to keep the speed limit reasonable after that.

FSD 14.1.4 dropped early Monday morning. My first local drive with it was absolutely horrible, had to disengage within a mile. Things that it got right before, like picking the correct turn lane, it bombed. Swirling leaves caused it to slam the brakes (no one was behind me this time at least). It also wanted to go way too fast, not even on highway roads, in Standard mode.

Today, I had it drive me to a doctor’s appointment, all local roads (no highway). The proposed navigation when I got in the car was .. questionable, so I didn’t turn on FSD until getting past the questionable bit. From there it did the rest nicely, even automatically parked in the parking lot which was a first for me.

ON the way home, it nearly did parking lot to driveway with no interventions, except once again there’s this weird navigation issue that cropped up, where it thinks it has to take a right turn on the road past my driveway to get to my driveway.

But also on the way home, it actually, finally, honored NO TURN ON RED. Granted, there was no UI indication that this is why it didn’t try to take that right turn, but there was a good 30-45 seconds when it could have safely albeit illegally made the turn and it didn’t even try. I’m hopeful they finally read that sign now, but it will take more successful handling of that situation to convince me.

It even stopped at a crosswalk with a waiting pedestrian, which surprised the pedestrian more than it did me.

That whole “choose how to park when you arrive” thing may be neat, but the UI for it doesn’t seem tor early exist in any obvious way. Certainly doesn’t ask you for your preference, you have to go dig for it. I would have liked to see if “back up into garage after door opens” was an option.

The one thing I really dislike about FSD 14, though, is the inability to set the speed limit. You’ve got your five modes - Sloth, Chlll, Standard, Hurry, and Mad Max. Your speed limit is determined “by a number of factors” based on which mode you’re in, but none of those factors seem to be speed limit and speed limit offset. Unless and until we can send speeding tickets to Tesla without any impact to, say, insurance rates or driving records, this to me is unforgivable. I do not trust Tesla to make that decision for me as it’s consistently failed.

Also, it should be noted that I no longer give Tesla the benefit of the doubt on FSD. It’s been way too long for the promised features to appear and they really haven’t yet, and it looks like there isn’t even any promise of level 5 autonomy now. I purchased the perpetual license (and had it transferred) back in 2018 when it was only $2000. I would not pay the current price for it no matter how cool it ends up being. The monthly subscription is one option, but seems to be more of a sales gimmick to try and convince you you really want to buy it (or keep it on subscription, which after a while is better for Tesla).

But, I have to admit, FSD 14 is further progress, once they smooth the edges out.

As a preamble, I'm still fully of the mind that every service center is fine, but there are certainly going to be examples of less than desirable service. There are many things outside of their and our control, so the important thing is to not expect to be treated like royalty no matter how much you paid for your vehicle, understand humans make mistakes up and down the supply chain, and sometimes folks just have a bad day.

I've been to Owings Mills, Rockville (old location), and Silver Spring and am not going to say avoid any of them. I can certainly say I've been to these locations more than I should, as Tesla still hasn't quite figured out how to get their build quality to where it needs to be, but that's another topic for another day.

My saga with Silver Spring lately has made me consider maybe not using them again, though -- again, this is not recommending everyone not use it, but my personal experience has not been great. No one there's been mean or unprofessional, staff has always been pleasant to work with. But they gotta follow that up with being able to fix my problem.

It's a relatively minor one, but it started after the first flub on their end. Last year, my steering column on my 2024 Model 3 Highland started vibrating when it moved for profile changes in a way that strongly suggested failure was going to happen sooner or later; the service center agreed and went to replace it on a Friday.

(They were also going to reattach the frunk wire that they forgot to do when they installed my HomeLink kit, so, not getting things right has been going almost ever since I picked up my Highland from them end of March 2024...)

Except they were busy (they're always busy) and the assigned guy to do it apparently didn't get to it until late enough in the day that, despite my telling the service staff to not even start if it wasn't going to be done in time because I needed the car, he started and left before completing, leaving my car partially disassembled and without a steering column.

I was not happy that the message I sent did not make it to, or was ignored by, the technician, but I am within walking distance and they said it'd be done Saturday as they were working that morning to help with the overload of work.

Saturday, the app says the car will be ready by noon, so I start walking at 1115 (it's a 45 minute walk). After I had left, they updated the status to say it'll be ready by 6PM on Saturday. Neat trick as they close at noon on Saturday, and weren't there when I got there a bit before noon. Thankfully, one of the sales guys there who was looking into WTF , found a loaner for me.

My car was ready Monday morning, and they were very apologetic. Minor inconvenience to have to take off work to do this (at the time I was an hourly contractor, so if I didn't work, I didn't get paid, but that could easily be made up by working later).

Around that time, and this is my impression as I have no data to back this up, voice commands started to get a little finicky. When I went to send a text, it would get that I wanted to send a text, but when it was time to start listening to what I wanted to send after telling it which number to send it to (still a pet peeve of mine: doesn't the Tesla software know which numbers are tagged as mobile vs. home or work?), it would just stop listening. Music would start playing, but the prompt was there as if it was trying to listen. And once it did that, it would continue doing that until I got out of the car.

Took it back to Silver Spring later, and they agreed with my suggestion that maybe a cable was not attached properly or otherwise damaged in the steering column. They found proof of that and resolved it, but it did not resolve my issue.

Try #2 was roughly a month later, where they went to replace something in the center console. And they did, but it still didn't resolve the issue that they could clearly reproduce by now (I sent them a video and screen shots of the error messages; it was clearly a hardware issue as it survived many firmware updates). I do not blame them for try #2, as that went fine and was a short wait. But it's frustrating that this problem persisted past then.

Try #3 was just this past Friday, where they ordered a new microphone as that was the latest possible culprit. My two to three hour wait turned into dropping it off to be picked up by end of day (with me stressing that end of day thing and not to start if it can't be done in time, again), so my wife gave me a ride home and I had work to do anyway.

Around 4PM, the service manager sent me a message, they ordered the wrong part. I wasn't aware this was even possible, but, apparently it still is.

At least they left the fully assembled vehicle in the parking lot, but I told them the app was still in Service Mode, please fix that. (One of the earlier visits for another new vehicle cosmetic defect in 2024 had the app still displaying service mode but not displaying service mode in the car, so it would not lock, which required them flipping a bit on their end to resolve.)

No response. I got there after my last call of the day and my wife dropping me off around 5:45. Service folks left at 5. I walked with a very unhappy look on my face into the sales area, and one of the guys there happily offered to show me how to take the car out of service mode. I said I knew how to do that, hadn't tried it yet, but the last time it needed someone in the service center to handle it.

Thankfully taking the car out of service mode took the app out, so that was not an issue. And the service manager took my strong suggestion of making the next attempt a mobile visit, scheduling still TBD.

But... damn. This is way more frustrating than it needs to be.

The goal was to use FSD everywhere, driveway to parking lots. While the goal wasn't quite met, FSD did pretty good overall. But, it still tried to kill me once.

From around 0800 Friday 3/28 to about 2000 Sunday 3/30, total trip distance was 1,234 miles. And FSD did about 99% of that. There were two major interventions and a handful of smaller ones, mainly because it was really being a bit of a jerk in not letting some folks merge in from a chaotic parking lot exit attempt.

The first major intervention was right at the start of my trip, where there's a dog-leg type intersection that routinely confuses it. This time it saw the right turn facing green lights and thought that also meant it was green for the left turns, despite having pretty clear red lights there. No other car was coming so it tried to go, but nope.

The second was due to a combination of things. The biggest issue is still lane changing. Chill mode tries to hug the right lane and only changes to pass; Hurry hugs the left lane and ... also only changes to pass slower cars in the left lane. Standard is where I spend most of my time, but the logic it uses to decide when to change lanes still eludes me.

Around Blacksburg VA, where a few dozen highways (slight exaggeration) try to merge and lanes disappear willy nilly, it put me in the left lane to pass an 18-wheeler that wasn't going quite fast enough. Said left lane was set to end in 1,500 rapidly disappearing feet and the car wasn't doing much to accelerate. So I goosed it to get past the truck while there was still a lane to get past on, and ... went above 85mph. For those that don't know, this really freaks FSD out and puts you in AutoSteer Jail for the remainder of that drive. Luckily there was a rest area about 10 miles away, which gave me the opportunity to park the car, get out, mumble a few more choice words other than what I put in the bug report, get something to drink, stretch my legs, etc. before re-engaging FSD.

Other than that, gotta say, I was impressed. It handled the "local" roads in Chattanooga just fine, which came in handy a few times. The only times I disengaged were to park the car at its destination, as while it may have tried to do that, it was being way too timid if it was going to actually pick a spot and park.

That one instance I mentioned above ref. chaotic parking lot situation was at the Buc-ee's in Sevierville TN. Having a ~ 5 minute delay to wind your way through the chaos to find the SuperChargers, and a ~15+ minute delay just getting out, defeats the purpose of a quick charge, IMHO. FSD can do better in its merge logic, as it didn't seem to ever want to let someone at a stop-sign intersection in, when you aren't at a stop sign yourself. Given that cars were backed up well past any intersection, politeness was mandatory here. What goes around, comes around, especially in traffic circles.

Someone at the event said they use Chill FSD all the time, so I tried it more on the way home. One thing it seems to do is decide to go about 3mph slower than your set limit, which was a bit annoying. And, for all of the highway driving, there were times where it changed lanes and I had no idea why no matter what mode I was in. Sometimes it would move over to let someone behind you who wanted to go faster than you pass, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it would try to change lanes right back to where it came from after you hit the turn signal to get it to change lanes.

But most of the time it was fine, and it really took most of the stress away from those 9.5 hour drive / 11+ hour total time trips. There were a few times where it handled things better than I would have too, since it sees everything and doesn't get distracted.

Of course, Beltway traffic whe I got home was horrible, and the car did great at handling that... but I was still getting angry.

Hope this helps someone who's considering FSD. Note that I had it from 2018 in my Model 3 when it was only $2000 and went to a 2024 Model 3 Highland last year (almost literally one year ago) only because of the FSD license transfer. Even with the mostly positive experience, I would not pay for a perpetual license. Would have subscribed for a month though, for long trips.

The whole point of the gas tax is that those who use the roads more pay more. But with this new EV tax, someone who barely drives their Tesla is paying the same as someone who drives 30,000 miles a year. It’s completely disconnected from actual road usage.

Meanwhile, Maryland says it wants to encourage EV adoption, yet this tax does the opposite. Why are we being penalized for making the switch to cleaner transportation? If they really wanted fairness, they’d find a way to base the fee on miles driven, not just EV ownership.

We need to push back on this. Has anyone looked into what can be done? Is there an organized effort to fight this? If not, we should start one.

Would love to hear your thoughts, let’s figure out how to take action.