A University of Queensland research team drove a Tesla Model Y running Full Self-Driving (FSD) across Queensland roads every day for more than 100 days, and did not complete a single trip from start to finish without a human taking over.
Over the study, the team logged more than 500 safety-critical events, moments where the driver had to intervene or the system revealed a clear limitation in how it read the road.
The findings, published in The Conversation and detailed by the University of Queensland, land at a pointed moment. Australia is drafting the rules that will let cars like this one drive themselves on public roads from 2027.
What the car kept getting wrong
The work was led by Professor Zuduo Zheng of UQ’s School of Civil Engineering, with support from the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads. The team has published its records through a project it calls White Box Autonomy, a public archive of moments where autonomous vehicles hit trouble in real conditions.
Zheng’s team stresses the technology is more capable than many assume. For long stretches the Model Y drove smoothly, holding lanes and spacing with a precision hard for a human to match.
The problem was the everyday exceptions. According to The Conversation, most failures were not rare edge cases but ordinary situations a licensed driver handles almost without thinking.
On a small neighbourhood bridge, the car weaved side to side, confused by the road markings. It mishandled time-restricted speed limits in more than 90 per cent of cases, including slowing for school zones outside school hours.
Railway crossings and boom gates caused trouble, in one case prompting emergency braking when the vehicle ahead stopped near the tracks. Australia’s zipper merge rule defeated it repeatedly, with one event where neither the Tesla nor the other car gave way at the merge point.
Complex roundabouts, steep streets crowded with parked cars, and faded markings in poor weather all tripped the system. It also misread e-scooter riders as pedestrians, despite the two behaving very differently on the road.
The gear is already on Australian roads
This is not a lab curiosity. Tesla switched on FSD (Supervised) for eligible cars in Australia and New Zealand on 18 September 2025, making them the first right-hand-drive markets to get the software, as carsales reported.
Since 1 April 2026, FSD (Supervised) has been offered on a subscription-only basis at 149 dollars a month in Australia, per CarExpert. The newest V14.3.3 build reached local cars in June 2026, according to The Driven.
The word supervised is doing heavy lifting. The driver remains legally responsible and must keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. The UQ study is, in effect, a measure of how much supervising is actually required, and the answer is: constantly.
Why it matters for Australia
The stakes are national and immediate. On 21 November 2025, Australia’s transport ministers agreed to allow conditional deployment of automated vehicles from 2027 in selected locations, a milestone tracked by the National Transport Commission.
That framework, including a new Automated Vehicle Safety Law, would shift responsibility for a car’s driving from the human behind the wheel to an Automated Driving System Entity, the company standing behind the software. The UQ log of 500-plus interventions is exactly the kind of evidence regulators will weigh when they decide which systems, and which roads, qualify.
Our analysis: The most useful finding here is not that FSD makes mistakes. It is where they cluster. School zones, zipper merges, boom gates and roundabouts are not exotic; they are the daily fabric of Australian driving, and they are also products of how we build and mark our roads.
Zheng’s team frames the fix as meeting the technology halfway, through clearer and repeated lane markings, consistent intersection design, better surface maintenance and reliable, machine-readable speed-limit information. That reframes autonomous driving as an infrastructure question as much as a software one, and it puts the ball partly in the court of state road agencies, not just Silicon Valley.
There is a sovereignty angle too. FSD was trained overwhelmingly on the wrong side of the road in the United States, and the local quirks it stumbles over, our merge etiquette, our time-based school zones, our e-scooter share, are precisely the ones a foreign training set underweights. Independent, locally funded testing like UQ’s is how Australia keeps its own evidence base rather than importing a vendor’s marketing claims.
The White Box Autonomy archive also hints at an upside. A fleet of instrumented cars that flags potholes, faded lines and broken signs is a rolling audit of the road network. If regulators and road agencies can tap that data, the same vehicles struggling with our infrastructure could help us fix it, well before anyone takes their hands off the wheel for good.
Sources: The Conversation, University of Queensland, National Transport Commission, carsales, CarExpert, The Driven.
