Oh yes, we have another new series to start the new year, and it’s bringing in the new Tesla Model Y!
Over the years, we’ve tested our fair share of Tesla vehicles. Picking up a new, updated Tesla Model Y Juniper wouldn’t seem like charting much new ground, if you look at it on its face. Sure, Tesla tweaked the front and rear end, but otherwise it would be a case of “been there, done that”. But there’s more to the story than that, and that’s what we’re going to mainly explore in this new video series. Tesla has been refining its tech over the past few years, too, and the headline feature these days is Full Self-Driving — and we’re keen to try it out.
Not just in a vacuum or a week-long test, either. In this new series, dubbed “Hands-Free 2000” (and we’ll get to that name in a second), Roman charts out our method to really put Tesla’s FSD technology and claims through their paces. We leased this brand-new 2026 Tesla Model Y, so we have plenty of time to get into the minutia about actually using and living with FSD day-to-day.
Over the coming weeks, the team’s first port of call will be the Hands-Free 2000. Over several weeks and 2,000 miles of driving, the goal is to work out how much Tesla’s most popular SUV can actually drive itself, without our human intervention. Is it really possible to cover all that distance, to where the automaker’s name for the technology is actually appropriate? Or…is it going to be a complete and utter disaster?
In its own blerb, the Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is currently available in North America as well as some other global markets. “Tesla uses billions of miles of anonymous real-world driving data to train Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to take care of the most stressful parts of daily driving while helping make the roads safer for you and others. When enabled, your vehicle will drive you almost anywhere with your active supervision, requiring minimal intervention”, the company says.
And over the coming weeks, the key words “almost anywhere” and “minimal intervention” will be the main focus. That’s all coming to TFLEV over the next few Monday mornings, but for now, Roman goes into more detail about actually picking up the Tesla and what the customer experience is like. In short…it had its frustrating points.
