Words: Richard Edwards
Published 2 July 2026
Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) v14.3.3 has arrived in New Zealand, and we were first to try it on Auckland’s trickiest roads. It is impressively capable, occasionally brilliant, and still tripped up by two very Kiwi problems.
Nine months after Full Self-Driving (Supervised) first arrived in New Zealand, Tesla has delivered its biggest update to the system yet. Version 14.3.3 began rolling out to New Zealand and Australian vehicles on 19 June as part of software update 2026.16.6, moving local cars off the v13 software they launched with in September last year.
The headline change is speed of thought. Tesla says it has rewritten the system’s AI compiler and runtime from the ground up, delivering a 20 per cent faster reaction time. In practice, the car commits to decisions earlier and more confidently, particularly at intersections.
The update also brings a wider spread of driving personalities. Joining the existing Chill, Standard and Hurry profiles is a new Sloth mode, which drives at lower speeds with more conservative lane selection. Notably, the Mad Max profile offered in the United States is not included in the local release. The profiles now have a stronger influence on how the car behaves, and the right scroll wheel adjusts them on the move.
Arrival is smarter too. The car now asks how you want a journey to end, with options including Carpark, Indoor Carpark, Street, Driveway and Pull Over, and it remembers your preference for each destination. A single touch on the new Start Self-Driving button begins a journey, and a new counter tracks the distance travelled without a driver intervention, along with your longest streak. Tesla also claims enhanced responses to emergency vehicles, school buses and drivers who violate right of way, plus improved detection of animals.
FSD (Supervised) remains available only by subscription, at $159 per month, and only on Hardware 4 vehicles such as the current Model Y and updated Model 3. Owners of older Hardware 3 cars remain in limbo, with Tesla saying a lighter version of v14 is in development.
The test
To find out whether the update lives up to the billing, we loaded a challenging Auckland route: Parnell into the central city, up High Street’s narrow canyon of pedestrians and planter boxes, out to Mt Eden village, then a supercharger stop and a run to Tesla’s own premises. Group EV editor Gavin Shoebridge rode along.
The system’s confidence is immediately apparent. At a blind T-junction that requires a cautious creep from a human driver, the car eased forward and committed cleanly, helped by cameras mounted further forward than the driver’s eyes. On The Strand it handled a tight turn across traffic without hesitation. Pedestrians, scooters and roadworks on High Street were negotiated smoothly, including a reverse parallel park against the street’s notoriously high kerbs.
The parking party trick is genuinely new territory. Asked to finish a journey in Mt Eden’s village car park, the car drove in, hunted for a space and slotted itself in unassisted. It repeated the feat at journey’s end, choosing the correct entrance to Tesla’s car park, one that flummoxed the v13 software when we first tested it.
Most striking is how natural it all feels. “I forgot that you’re not driving,” Shoebridge says, mid-conversation, several kilometres into the run. He likens the experience to Waymo’s robotaxis in the United States, with the caveat that here the human remains legally responsible at all times. The driver monitoring also feels better calibrated, less inclined to nag over a glance at the screen, and happier with sunglasses.
Where it stumbled
The system is not flawless, and its failures share a common thread: maps. Approaching a road closure the car had no knowledge of, FSD showed no sign of slowing or replanning, and we intervened well before the cones. The vision system that reads pedestrians and scooters so fluently does not yet read a road closed sign, and the mapping data had not caught up. It is a gap the mainstream navigation players have largely closed; Google Maps or Apple Maps, fed by live traffic data, would have been onto the closure quickly.
The same weakness surfaced at the Epsom supercharger, where the charger’s location is mapped incorrectly and the car simply refused to navigate the final metres to a stall we could see through the windscreen. A later test at the Sylvia Park superchargers went better, with the car finding its way to a stall unassisted, though it took a couple of laps of a lower floor of the parking building before it worked out how to get up there. On Mt Eden Road, faded markings saw the car briefly select a bus lane before correcting.
There is also a question of speed discipline. In Hurry mode the car sat at an indicated 52km/h in a 50km/h zone, a buffer that relies on the typically conservative calibration of Tesla speedos. An adjustable offset lets owners rein that in.
One advertised feature is missing entirely. Smart Summon, which lets the car drive itself to you across a car park, does not appear in the local release notes and was not functional on our car.
Verdict
Version 14.3.3 is a substantial step. The added confidence, the arrival options and the self-parking move the system from clever cruise aid towards something that genuinely drives you places, and its failures were failures of mapping rather than of driving. But those failures are exactly why the word Supervised remains doing heavy lifting. On New Zealand roads, with New Zealand roadworks and New Zealand map data, the human in the driver’s seat is still very much part of the system.
