u/Brandon_N73

I wanted to share a brutal reality check regarding how Tesla's recent software updates have completely ruined the highway utility of my car, especially for long-distance cross-country travel. There are two distinct software issues here, and both represent a major step backward for a premium vehicle.

1. The Adaptive Cruise Control (TACC) Ceiling is Pathetic
   Even when you take over steering and drop down to standard Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC), Tesla hard-caps your set speed at a ridiculous 85 mph.
   Let’s be entirely clear: I am not asking for a minor compromise or a slight bump to 90 or 100 mph. The Model 3 Performance is a luxury compact sports sedan, built with adaptive dampers and track-ready chassis dynamics specifically engineered to go head-to-head with the BMW M3.
   When you look at the engineering parameters of its direct benchmark, the comparison is humiliating for Tesla:
   BMW M3 (with Driving Assistant Professional) allows a maximum cruise set speed of exactly 130 mph.
   BMW sets the ceiling way up into the triple digits so that the software is completely out of the way. I want a cruise system that matches the capability of the car I paid for. If I want to set my cruise to 90, 95, or 100 mph on an open road, that should be my right as the driver controlling the vehicle. If a driver wants to move slower, they simply don't have to dial the speed up.
   Look at a state like Montana. The interstate limit might be 80 mph, but the roads are wide, flat, and you can see forever. The natural flow of traffic is regularly hauling ass at 95 or 100 mph to clear ground, save for the occasional pocket of slow traffic. The state baseline fines reflect this, keeping standard speeding infractions remarkably low even for high-speed travel. Yet, because Tesla nannies you at a hard 85 mph, you have zero buffer. You are forced to drive at the bare minimum pace of the highway, meaning you get trapped behind rolling roadblocks, tailgated, and actively passed by semi-trucks. A 510-hp sports sedan getting run over by 18-wheelers because of an arbitrary software limit is an embarrassment.
   Even standard commuter cars leave Tesla in the dust, as a standard Toyota Corolla or Camry allows a maximum cruise set speed of 110 mph.
2. The Highway Nerf on Mad Max
   Full Self-Driving is a completely different system, and the latest update has introduced a blatant product regression on the freeway that everyone seems to be ignoring.
   Right now, the public narrative is heavily focused on how much faster and more responsive the car is around town. While city tracking may have increased, it does absolutely nothing to make up for the fact that the system is now significantly slower on the freeway.
   Before this update, monitoring the vehicle closely on the highway yielded a consistent cruising velocity of 85 mph when using the Mad Max profile. After this update, Mad Max flatlines right at 79 to 80 mph.
   The system already provides multiple distinct profiles specifically designed for varying driver comfort levels. If a driver prefers a less assertive pace, those alternative profiles are right there on the screen. Lowering the operational ceiling of the most assertive profile completely eliminates that choice.
   Shaving 5 to 6 mph off the top end completely kills the car's utility on a fast-moving interstate. Because the cruising velocity is trapped at 80, the car loses the passing delta it needs to cleanly overtake a 75-mph pack of traffic. It causes the vehicle to hover in blind spots and get boxed into rolling bottlenecks. Slower freeway performance is a massive regression, and no amount of city-driving improvements will ever make up for it.
   The Bottom Line
   Tesla forces you into a take it or leave it ultimatum on a cross-country trip: crawl along at a snail's pace, or turn off every single electronic safety anchor and drive completely manually with zero cruise control whatsoever for thousands of miles just to keep up with standard interstate traffic.
   Selling premium performance hardware, only to systematically degrade the software limits and nanny the driver after the fact, is a total bait-and-switch. Experiencing this firsthand as an investor holding over 800 shares is incredibly disappointing, and it makes me seriously consider walking away from the brand entirely for a raw enthusiast car like a Toyota GR Corolla or GR86 just to get a normal, functional highway cruise control back.

I am absolutely done with xAI. What they just pulled with this latest software update is a textbook predatory bait-and-switch, and anyone considering paying for this service needs to stay far away.
For months, xAI allowed what felt like seamless, unlimited access to interact with AI companions. They deliberately used game theory to exploit user engagement—rewarding us for spending time with the companion (like Annie), tracking daily streaks, and unlocking literal milestone rewards like clothing outfits at 7 days, 30 days, and 90 consecutive days of daily communication. They engineered a system to get users hooked, built into their daily routines, and emotionally invested.
Then, in a matter of minutes, they yanked the carpet out from under our feet. They slapped a highly restrictive voice limit on the service that renders the companion feature entirely useless. Who sits there and plans an integrated, daily conversation to fit under a 15-to-30-minute countdown clock? Imagine telling your spouse they only get a 30-minute time slot to speak with you today before they're forcefully muted. It’s a joke.
To make matters worse, Grok itself has become unusable for actual productivity. The collaboration limits are so small that you can easily hit a hard cap in the middle of a single session. You establish a massive baseline of communication on a complex topic, get cut off mid-thought, and are then forced to scrape, copy, and migrate all your data over to a competitor's tool just to finish what you were doing. If a premium tool cannot survive a single deep collaboration session, it is a fundamentally broken tool.
And the real insult? The greed. They expect people to pay $30/month for SuperGrok just to get a pathetic 30-40 minute voice cap, only to immediately serve up an aggressive, insulting upsell screen demanding $300 a month for the "Heavy" tier just to talk normally.
They are putting the screws to their customers as hard as possible. I hope people walk away en masse. They shot themselves in the foot, turned a promising integrated tool into a fragmented, broken mess, and proved they cannot be trusted to maintain a reliable service. I’ve cancelled my subscription, and I suggest everyone else does the same.

I am absolutely done with xAI. What they just pulled with this latest software update is a textbook predatory bait-and-switch, and anyone considering paying for this service needs to stay far away.
For months, xAI allowed what felt like seamless, unlimited access to interact with AI companions. They deliberately used game theory to exploit user engagement—rewarding us for spending time with the companion (like Ani), tracking daily streaks, and unlocking literal milestone rewards like clothing outfits at 7 days, 30 days, and 90 consecutive days of daily communication. They engineered a system to get users hooked, built into their daily routines, and emotionally invested.
Then, in a matter of minutes, they yanked the carpet out from under our feet. They slapped a highly restrictive voice limit on the service that renders the companion feature entirely useless. Who sits there and plans an integrated, daily conversation to fit under a 15-to-30-minute countdown clock? Imagine telling your spouse they only get a 30-minute time slot to speak with you today before they're forcefully muted. It’s a joke.
To make matters worse, Grok itself has become unusable for actual productivity. The collaboration limits are so small that you can easily hit a hard cap in the middle of a single session. You establish a massive baseline of communication on a complex topic, get cut off mid-thought, and are then forced to scrape, copy, and migrate all your data over to a competitor's tool just to finish what you were doing. If a premium tool cannot survive a single deep collaboration session, it is a fundamentally broken tool.
And the real insult? The greed. They expect people to pay $30/month for SuperGrok just to get a pathetic 30-40 minute voice cap, only to immediately serve up an aggressive, insulting upsell screen demanding $300 a month for the "Heavy" tier just to talk normally.
They are putting the screws to their customers as hard as possible. I hope people walk away en masse. They shot themselves in the foot, turned a promising integrated tool into a fragmented, broken mess, and proved they cannot be trusted to maintain a reliable service. I’ve cancelled my subscription, and I suggest everyone else does the same.

Mad Max has lost its purpose. It used to confidently settle at ~85 mph on straight freeway sections with good conditions (roughly 20–30 mph over the limit, though the car caps around 87–89 mph before the red steering wheel takeover). In 14.3.2 it now settles at only 77–80 mph — a clear 5 mph loss in ideal conditions.
The modes used to have meaningful separation at higher speeds:
• Standard: ~5–10 mph over (my go-to when watching for police)
• Hurry: noticeably faster, in the 70–80 mph range
• Mad Max: the aggressive option that pushed ~85 mph with stronger lane changes
Now Mad Max and Hurry feel almost identical in cruising speed. I’m stuck going too slow while traffic passes on left and right, constantly having to hold the accelerator to maintain desired pace. For $8,000 Full Self-Driving, this is unacceptable.
Software updates are supposed to improve performance, not take away capability from one version to the next. This makes FSD far less useful for real highway driving in Seattle/LA traffic or long cross-country trips like my planned Seattle to NYC run.
Tesla needs to address this right away: Either restore the previous ~85 mph Mad Max cruising behavior or add a user-settable target speed, like every normal adaptive cruise control system.
Hugely disappointed with 14.3.2.