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The Tesla comes up to a red light at an intersection in Brooklyn…and keeps going.

“We just went through a red light,” the exasperated driver says.

The driver, who appears in a CNBC video, is one of thousands of  whom Tesla is allowing to try new and unfinished driver assistance features on public roads in the U.S. through a program called Full Self Driving Beta, or FSD Beta.

‘I’m Getting Honked At'”I’m getting honked at,” says the driver, Taylor Ogan, founder and CEO of Snow Bull Capital. “Now it’s going left.”

Tesla has a lot riding on its self-driving program. CEO Elon Musk told analysts last month that full-self-driving feature will become Tesla’s first engine of growth.

“Full-self-driving. So, over time, we think full-self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla. It’s — actually, if you run the numbers on robotaxis, it’s kind of nutty — it’s nutty good from a financial standpoint,” Musk said.

Only Tesla owners who have the company’s premium FSD driver assistance system installed in their cars can join the FSD Beta program.

Owners must then obtain a high driver-safety score, as determined by Tesla software that monitors their driving habits, and maintain it to keep FSD Beta access. No safety certification or professional training is required.

CNN conducted a test of Tesla’s full self-driving beta software in November and there were some tense moments.

“We’ve got a situation in front of us,” Transportation Editor Michael Ballaban says from the driver’s seat. “Whoa!” 

He notes at one point that the car does “seem to need interruption every couple of blocks or so.”

“You also have to be ready to take over at any time,” he said. “I stand at the ready to intervene….nope, nope, we’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”

 ‘Like Teaching a Teenager How to Drive’Ballaban says the self-driving experience is “not truly officially ready for public consumption.”

TheStreet RecommendsINVESTINGNVDANvidia Fourth-Quarter Earnings Live Blog1 hour agoINVESTINGMCDUNPADBEWolfe Research’s List of Companies with Pricing Power8 minutes agoTECHNOLOGYTSLAFGMElectric Vehicle Checkpoint: Was The Super Bowl trying to Sell You an EV?26 minutes ago”Its a little like teaching a teenager how to drive,” he said. “You’re always watching, you’re waiting, you never know when it’s going to try something new. And that’s where the anxiety comes from.”

Ballaban says if the car really was fully self-driving “it would let you take a nap while you were driving along.”

The Washington Post said its panel of experts found that Tesla’s full self driving feature “does not appear to recognize pedestrian walk signs, or anticipate that a stationary pedestrian might venture into the street.”

Tesla did not respond to request for comment as of time of writing.

A number of comments appeared on social media with most of them expressing skepticism about the feature.

“From the video description ‘Tesla’s FSD Beta, which stands for ‘full-self driving’ beta, can best be summarized as a host of new driver assistant features that are not yet debugged,'” one person tweeted. “In other words an accident waiting to happen.”

‘Some People Will Play Dumb for Attention'”That’s such a terrible copout,” another says. “Tesla is charging $12,000 for a system they call “‘full self driving’ then falling back on the ‘it’s a beta’ excuse when it fails. If they’re charging customers for it, it shouldn’t be considered a beta.”

Tesla Daily’s Rob Maurer said that “any customer that has gone through the process of achieving a high safety score, requesting the beta, and acknowledging its limitations absolutely understands that this is currently a driving assistance feature.”

“Some people will play dumb for attention, but 60,000 users have accumulated millions of miles of driving on FSD Beta and there have been no crashes,” he said. “While disengagements are to be expected during this beta phase, I’ve personally had my car drive over 150 miles through a mix of highway and city driving without a single input from me.”

 Maurer noted that automotive accidents kill tens of thousands of people in the United States each year.

“The only solution to that problem is autonomy,” he said. “We should not let those who wish to misrepresent the current performance limitations as safety risks stop us from making progress on such a dire issue.”

Maurer added that “there is absolutely no data to support the idea that FSD Beta is reducing safety on the roads today.”

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