Can a Tesla drive itself through a CRAZY Blizzard!?

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]Oh, okay. Okay, we got to take over, folks. And it's just blasting snow up into the air like that might have been a a ditch hit situation. So, I'm taking over here cuz this is about to get really sketchy. Uh-oh.

[00:00:13]It is early April here in Canada. But in a few hours, we are getting a humongous blizzard out here in the prairies. The highways are wide open. So, when a blizzard or snowstorm hits, it's not just bad driving. It's the kind of conditions that will easily pull you into the ditch. So, tonight I'm going to test out my Tesla's full self-driving system to see if it can handle it on the highway. So, this evening after dark, once the blizzard's been raging for numerous hours, I'm taking my 2024 Tesla Model 3 longrange all-wheel drive. It's the Highland Refresh, straight onto the highway to see if it can handle the extreme winter blizzard here. And to make things a little more interesting, I'm going to pick up my brother-in-law, Adam, to come for the ride. If FSD works perfectly, this changes everything. And if it doesn't, then we're going to find out the hard way.

[00:00:55]Come with me, Adam, and let's just see what we're dealing with here tonight.

[00:00:59]So, you know, it's a little bit little bit screwy out here. Little bit of snow.

[00:01:05]Should have left the car running to be honest. We got some snow going on out here. So, we're going to rip it in full self drive here at night on the highway and see how it goes. I'm going to turn it on here just so that we don't let her get frosted up. All right, so to get the best chance of this going well, I am going to wipe off all the cameras just to at least give the car that heads up.

[00:01:20]Uh, yeah, looks like she's melting there. So that'll be no problem to get that. Headlights will give a quick wipe before we go.

[00:01:28]All the cameras just to really give as good of a chance of, you know, maintaining some highway speed. Flooding my dang shoes here. Um, look at this camera back here, too. Get a shot of that. It's just completely plastered in snow. We're going to wipe that clean.

[00:01:43]See how long that lasts. Sure, it won't last too long with how we're going to be giving her, but good enough. And one more over here, I guess. But yeah, like this was all melted a day ago and now we're just standing in tons of snow. But yeah, I think it's time to rock and roll. Yeah, let's go out for a rip, dude. We're going to be leaving the rural town of Oller here and we're going to head to Newon Log. We're here in a driveway. I'm going to just press start self-driving and see what it does. So immediately it threw it in reverse and it's backing us out. So so far so good.

[00:02:13]What's it going to do next? I'm already pretty interested, but I'm mostly nervous for with the highway. It's hesitating while backing out here. And if you can see the road ahead of us, it's just completely snowed over. So, and it says take over immediately. So, we got to take over right aways. Okay, no problem. I'll give it a bit of a head start cuz as you guys can see at the camera, this is just literally nothingness. Um, but yeah, I'm going to throw it back in self drive as soon as it'll let me. Okay, let us go in self-drive again. So, let's see what we got here. Only drove a couple feet.

[00:02:47]Okay, it keeps on crapping out. This is a bust.

[00:02:54]All right, folks. So, the highway's right up over there, and I am going to quickly go out there and clean the cameras to give us the best shot at least getting somewhere on this trip.

[00:03:01]So, I'll be right back. Well, let's keep that trip going here. Um, it's a little bit not amazing looking, but if I just throw it in full self drive from the spot where I'm pulled over, it's an even tougher start. So, it knows we're going left, but we're way far on the right here. So, I'm not really crazy about the start. It's very hesitant to start going. I'm not sure why.

[00:03:21]I wonder if it's something to do with that car, but yeah, we're way too far right here. I might do anything yet. I'm nervous. Okay, no, we're good. There's no cars coming to the right. You can pan to the right there on the highway. So, highway looks pretty screwy there. But yeah, this is what we're dealing with then. I mean, so far it did get us on the highway, so that's a decent start. And okay, we were on the rumble strips briefly there, but now we're not. So, yeah. I mean, this is going pretty okay.

[00:03:54]Oh, there's a dead deer on the highway.

[00:03:55]Nice.

[00:03:58]Uh-oh.

[00:03:59]What is it doing? It's taking us into the shoulder. I'm ready to take over.

[00:04:04]This is rowdy, though, folks. Oh my goodness. This is getting a little sketchy, folks. We hit the rumble strips. We are splitting the rumble strips into the shoulder right now. You can see that line on the highway. That is the shoulder. Hopefully you can see it.

[00:04:17]The highway is kind of good here, but it's driving in the dang shoulder. Like look at the screen even. You can see it's splitting the line even on the screen, which is something Uhoh. Okay.

[00:04:25]Which is something I've never seen. This is something I've never seen this before. There's an actually pretty good lane right over there. This might get sketchy here with this intersection. Oh my goodness, dude. This thing needs to move over. We're about to be full on in the shoulder.

[00:04:40]Holy crap. Okay, folks. I'm taking over here cuz this is about to get really sketchy. So, that was a takeover. That might have been a a ditch hit situation.

[00:04:48]Okay, I'm going to throw it back in self-drive now with the screen. Okay, now it's chilling out, but we were picking up some serious speed there. We were about to rip it straight into the ditch, I think. Definitely a sketchy night, but you can see we're in self drive. It's a 110 zone highway. It actually caught that, too. So, you can see the 110 there. And that's in kilome/h, of course. And it's accelerating slowly. There's a drift coming up. And okay, we didn't get sucked in there. That's good. Yeah, this is not great for a double lane divided highway, obviously. Um, it's getting a little sketchier here. And Oh, yeah.

[00:05:18]This is getting This is getting a little worse. Visibility is not great. Yeah, obviously I'm still hands off, but Oh.

[00:05:25]Oh. Oh, jeez. Not again. Oh, it's driving in the shoulder again, folks.

[00:05:29]Oh, I don't like this. We're just cranking through drifts now. Oh jeez.

[00:05:35]Oh, you guys probably can't even I wish you guys could feel what's going on here. We're in a bit of a paint shaker right now.

[00:05:41]I'm going to signal left so the car knows I want to move left, but I'm not doing anything. Oh, it canceled my signal.

[00:05:48]Okay, folks. I'm going to manually move over again because I don't want to be in the shoulder. So, two times I've had to move over. There's cars with hazards on over there. They're freaking out.

[00:05:57]They're not going any faster than me.

[00:05:58]Okay, I'm back in self drive. I don't like when it goes in the shoulder and drives through like just whipping ditches like that, but or I guess whipping drifts like that. Ambulance there. Hopefully he's not busy tonight.

[00:06:11]I have with me here in the passenger seat and yeah, I mean it's it's just uh Oh, we're getting c camera warnings here. So yeah, apparently there's going to be delays on the highway at 11:27 p.m. at night here. So yeah, we'll see what that's all about. Hopefully nothing too rowdy, but I'll pass the camera back. I just threw it up into Mad Max mode, so I don't think that's going to make a difference. I was just in hurry mode, but yeah, it's, you know, the car is at some sort of software cap of speed based on based on condition here. So, yeah, I mean, this is pretty tame now.

[00:06:44]It It's kind of stopped going in the shoulder, which is which is great because if I didn't take over uh Oh, >> oh, not again. Oh no. Oh jeez, folks.

[00:06:55]We're in the rumble strips.

[00:06:57]Oh jeez. Now we're just completely trailblazing through drifts in the snow.

[00:07:01]And there's perfectly good road right there. Oh jeez. Okay, I'm not I'm ready to take over because there's an intersection here. And this might get this might get rowdy. Holy smokes. We're just whipping snow out the side, folks. I don't like I don't love what's going on here. We're whipping snow when Ionic Adam shows out the side of the right window there. Aim it out the right window again. It's just blasting snow up into the air. Like that's a little bit sketchy. I'm I I like look at this.

[00:07:30]We're choosing to do that when there's a pretty good driving lane right there, folks. For the third time, you want to film me taking over and straightening this out. So, I'm going to manually Yeah, it disengaged. And now we're in what I would call pretty good. And I'm actually going to drive manually here for a sec. So, I'm going to speed this up just to show you guys. I'll go 90 because I feel like this is kind of the top of a pretty safe speed. And yeah, I feel totally safe going 90. So, I'm going to throw in self drive in Mad Max mode right now. Going 90. And okay, it's maintaining mid80s, slowly going down, but it didn't hit the brakes. It's fairly confident. However, the road is getting worse here, too. And I saw it felt like moving right. But this is actually getting way worse, folks.

[00:08:19]There's no road visible anymore. And we're on the highway. If it moves too far right, I am going to take over cuz that's 76. That might that might suck us into the ditch. So I don't need that. Oh jeez. Okay. Oh, it actually dodged those. Okay, that was those were going to be a little bit substantial. I think Ionic Adam was getting nervous there.

[00:08:39]It seems to like going 74 here. I mean, I can think of a lot of people who would do less than 74 in conditions like this.

[00:08:44]like as a viewer, um I guess I can't see what the camera sees right now, but it looks looks pretty screwed to me. And yeah, if you've never driven on this road, like you would probably you would be very nervous. You would be cautious on this. But yeah, 74 is pretty respectable, I'd say, for a self-driving system to be in conditions like this. I know my wife for sure would not be going 73 right now. She'd probably be pulled over and calling me, but maybe she'd be trying this. But yeah, like if you aim at the road again, like this is I honestly I don't even know what part of the road we're on here. We're just on some sort of part of the highway now. It's kind of figured it out. Like we've been driving for four or five minutes here just on this highway. And you know, we slowed down a tiny bit, but like overall Oh, action. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh jeez.

[00:09:35]Oh. Okay. Okay. We got to take over, folks. That was sketchy, though. I'm glad it did that. We could have got sucked in super hard into the ditch there. Okay, there are some more sketchy spots. Oh, we got a turn coming up, folks. But I was going to say obviously if if you're a senior citizen relying on this to kind of get home, I mean that take over the middle of the highway would probably terrify someone who's not not comfortable driving in conditions like this. So, at least here in the prairie part of Canada here in Saskatchewan, it's not ready yet anyway.

[00:10:00]That that I can say for sure. But it's more of a fun gimmick right now. And on a beautiful summer day, it's it's flawless. like you've seen in previous videos, you've seen in my videos, you see in all kinds of videos out there that it's flawless. But yeah, um we got a turn coming up here. So, Adam, let's get filming on the highway here and let's see how it handles turning off this highway. So, there we go. New on log right there. Big old sign. Crazy German name. And yeah, let's see how it handles turning. So, there's no one behind us thankfully, so it cars sweet time here. Uh but yeah, so the turnoff is up there.

[00:10:31]and see if it even can figure out where the road is cuz honestly this for a camera based system. I don't expect much here, but this is and this is a really son of a gun of a road as you can see on the map here. I mean, it curves. It has some curves right at the start. And yeah, as we can see, it's kind of gathering. And on the screen here, too, it's kind of figuring out, drawing out where it thinks the road is. So, we're definitely really far right. We're almost in in the rhubarb here. Oh jeez.

[00:11:03]Okay. Well, I mean, this is pretty good. I think you got to admit for a camerabased self-drive system, that was pretty okay.

[00:11:12]And we're still going here. So, yeah. I mean, there's absolutely no road here. It's It's just multiple inches worth of snow. And self-driving. I don't even know where exactly it's going, actually. Um, you can even see you got an alert here. FSD may be degraded. One or more side cameras are oluded. It says oluded. So yeah. Um obviously blizzard conditions.

[00:11:36]It's deciding to turn left. So let's see if it can handle a left turn now. It sure sure couldn't back back where we started.

[00:11:43]>> I got confidence here. Stopping at the stop sign and stopping down as Oh balls. It can't handle these. Like this is the easiest thing gets had all night. Right folks, halfway point here. So, let's get out and see the condition of the car. I'm going to bring a rag with me, too, cuz I mean, if you look at the cameras here on screen, that's the reverse camera, completely toast. That's the right camera, completely toast. Left is okay.

[00:12:07]Lots of snow flying. You can see the snow just blowing there. So, yeah, still active active snow situation going on here, but yeah, let's jump out and uh have a look at the car.

[00:12:23]Oh, yeah.

[00:12:25]Oh, she's definitely snowy. Oh, balls.

[00:12:30]Pretty freaking cold. Yeah. And definitely back here. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:36]There's snow on the back of this. I can't barely read the plate. There's no plate there.

[00:12:42]All right, folks. Well, let's get back on the highway here and see what we can do. But yeah, looks a little little barren out here. Oh, Mike's. It's probably not even usable. It's probably just blowing. Let's get the heck back in. Oh, well, look at that. The cameras look a lot better now. You can see the snow blowing across. Right on. All right, folks. So, I've navigated us back to Oller now. Yeah, it thinks that we'll get there at 54%. Only 4% used. Not bad.

[00:13:09]Boom. Self-driving. Let's go. So, let's see how this goes. Uh, immediately taking off pretty good.

[00:13:16]Yeah, good enough. I mean, I would be way more on the throttle here personally, but I understand that it's trying to take it easy and be a little bit responsible. Oh boy.

[00:13:25]>> I was going to say it's impressive it went right, but that was a little sketch.

[00:13:29]>> It's trying to follow that rut there in the right, it seems, which I don't mind.

[00:13:33]I don't mind it doing that. It's It's the only context the car has. Seems to think we're riding a middle line. It's It's interesting to see what it thinks a road is when it's drawing this out.

[00:13:44]I don't really know where it gets that from, but it seems to think it's just splitting the high the road right in the middle. But yeah, we're we're trailblazing pretty hard here.

[00:13:53]I think we're close to the ditch, honestly.

[00:13:55]>> Oh, no. There's the ditch. I was going to say >> Oh, boy.

[00:14:01]>> Oh, folks, this is We are far to the right.

[00:14:03]>> That's pretty close.

[00:14:04]>> I'm ready to take over, but >> Oh my gosh. I'm taking over. I think it was going to drive us in the ditch there. I'm not sure. I think it was. I'm going to correct us here and I'm going to turn it back on. So, that was a takeover for a situation where I think we might have been in the rhubarb patch if I didn't do that. We might have been calling We might have been calling Ionic Adam's dad to come and pull us out on that one if I didn't take over. This is going to be something. So, crossing the highway and there is cars coming as you can see if you film to the left there.

[00:14:34]There is some cars coming and cars signaling left. I mean, that's good. It better stop obviously. And yeah, it's stopping. So, see what we're going to get here. Okay. Well, car waited. Car's going. There's another one coming, but it's way far enough that we can go. And yeah, looking ahead, it looks pretty treacherous. Snow's blowing across, but cross the highway pretty confidently. A lot better than that first leg. And it's got to start turning left eventually.

[00:14:58]And oh goodness, there's a lot of snow here. But yeah. Um. Okay. Uh-oh. Okay.

[00:15:04]Oh, that was a sweet correct.

[00:15:06]>> It's going to correct.

[00:15:07]>> Okay, that Wow.

[00:15:08]>> This that was flawless. That was as good as you can do. So yeah, I mean the car is still just cruising at that same 55 kilometers an hour. Not, you know, nothing to write home about, but it's doing it pretty consistently. And so if I speed anything up, it's just because there's nothing to show you guys. We're not going to have any stops here. So I might just speed some stuff up. We got about 7 minutes till we get back to Oler and then I'll show you guys how it gets into town, too. Maybe we can make a couple stop signs without random crazy alerts. But yeah, I'm gonna grab the camera now. So, Ionic Adam, what are you thinking so far?

[00:15:40]>> Honestly, pretty impressive. I was going about 90 on the way back home and it was fine.

[00:15:46]>> And that's in your Ionic 5.

[00:15:47]>> Yeah. I mean, >> yeah, you had to drive by hand, of course. But yeah, >> but to be fair to make sure that nothing bad would ever happen to the driver.

[00:15:55]Tesla's doing a pretty good job, honestly.

[00:15:58]>> You know, it makes you take over when when the car is like, I I am about to make a critical mistake. Yeah. And then it assumes because it's supervised that you're going to take over. But yeah, I'm also kind of surprised that this thing's not getting mad at me for pretty blatantly filming here. I mean, allegedly, it's it's not me, but someone on the left side of the car is filming right now. So, anyway, uh they're going to pass the phone back to Ionic Adam.

[00:16:21]And yeah, I mean, we're still like it's just locked in at 54 in Mad Max mode with a 110 zone. So, pretty obviously there is a software speed cap here. Um, we do have someone slowly approaching from behind. So, that is going to be a rowdy situation. If they pass, we are going to be in the center of a dang blizzard if that happens.

[00:16:41]>> Oh, I can see lines for the first time in like 20 minutes. I can see highway lines. So, we're actually perfectly in the right lane there.

[00:16:48]>> I I I would like to go faster. So, what I'm going to do here, folks, is I am going to speed it up just with the throttle, so not with hands. Car's probably not going to like me doing that, but I'm going to kick it up to like 70. And there we go. 70. And I stopped at 70 and now it's going up to 74. So, it just needed some uh it just needed some convincing, I guess. So, hopefully Uh oh.

[00:17:10]Why does it move right when I go faster?

[00:17:14]Okay, this is a little funny. Uh there's a pretty good driving lane, but it's hitting all these It's hitting all these drifts on the right. I have to say, I wish it wasn't doing that.

[00:17:24]>> Is it correcting?

[00:17:25]>> Okay, now we're back. Yeah, I mean, we're back in our lane. It could go a little more over, but yeah, I mean, it's maintaining the speed I kicked it up to and then some.

[00:17:34]All right, folks. So, that car behind us, he is getting closer. Adam, I don't know if you can show out the rear view there if can you see him on camera?

[00:17:41]>> Barely just his headlights.

[00:17:43]>> So, he's approaching. I'm going to let the car do its thing. It's It's kind of embarrassing, honestly, to be getting taken over in something like this. But, I'm going to see if he's going to try passing me here. I mean, we're going 70.

[00:17:52]And if he does, I'm going to let the car go right up until we get till we get the red hands. So yeah, uh it looks like he's not going to try. So I'm going to be slowing this guy down a bit. So just for the folks behind us as well as just to see what Mad Max will do, I'm going to kick it up to 80 here. So there I kicked it up to 80K. And yeah, we got about 2 km there till we're turning about, you know, one and a bit miles.

[00:18:15]Just want to really test it out here since we're almost done the the highway portion of the self drive. Yeah, you know, it seems to be wherever I kick it up to, it's happy to go. So, I'm wondering um there's a curve on the highway coming, but I'm going to boost us up to 90 and see how it handles that.

[00:18:30]So, okay, I threw it up to 90 here.

[00:18:32]Still haven't touched the wheel. All I did was push the pedal and it seems to take my encouragement and just run with it. Now, this is this is getting a little bit sketchy potentially, but no, it's just kind of bad viz, but the Uhoh. Uhoh. Oh, we're on the rumble strips, folks. Uhoh.

[00:18:50]But there's not much snow. So, a plow has for sure been here. Now, we're gez.

[00:18:56]Oh, no.

[00:18:58]Okay, folks. I'm taking over because we're going way into the shoulder and I don't love that. Um, okay, we're back in the normal lane. I'm throwing it back in self drive cuz I want to get this turn.

[00:19:07]And yeah, that was a little sketchy. I don't know if I had to take over, but because there's traffic behind us, I there's only so much that I can handle.

[00:19:16]So, okay. Well, we're signaling. We're turning. Um, it doesn't see the turning lane sort of.

[00:19:24]Oh goodness. Okay. Uh, we're trailblazing out the side pretty hard.

[00:19:30]Um, this is a little Oh, it's homebaked goodness. We know that guy. That's small town stuff right there. We knew that guy that was behind us. Oh jeez. Okay, we got a bit of a whip there.

[00:19:40]>> Little drift.

[00:19:40]>> Uh, and it's turning in. So, lot of snow, but Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh jeez. Holy smokes. Did you get that on video? That was a little scary. I wasn't sure what, but it recovered it, but it was just a little bit scary at first.

[00:19:54]>> Almost hit the Crimestoppers sign.

[00:19:58]>> There would have been some irony there.

[00:19:59]Uh, yeah. I mean, this this is just a little bit rowdy in general. There's no clearance of snow happen here, folks.

[00:20:06]And I don't really have a destination set, so the car's just kind of giving her right now. Okay, folks. We're driving up the curb. We're halfway on a gravel on gravel now. Uh, normally um you can see I hope you can see on video that curb there. So, we are officially off the road. I only know this because I know this town. Oh, gez. Okay, we're going fully off the road. I'm fixing this. That's a bit excessive. Okay, let's get back on the road here.

[00:20:28]Well, folks, now we're almost driving back up on the gravel portion here off the I mean, you can't tell it's paved, but it's paved. And you can see there gas prices 99 for diesel and buck 62 for gasoline. It's a whole lot cheaper than my electricity is, folks. Okay, so it's deciding to turn right here. Look at this. I mean, this is pretty this is pretty brutal. I don't really Yeah.

[00:20:50]Okay, that doesn't surprise me. That's That's Oh, okay. That was bottoming out territory.

[00:20:58]So, if I just manually like go back here and show you guys what we just drove into. Yeah. I mean, that's that's pretty screwy. I mean, manually now, I'll just happily boost through that like like that was literally that was nothing. I understand why a self-driving system wouldn't want to do that. Well, folks, that was full self-drive in a early April blizzard here in Saskatchewan. I think that was overall a pretty decent success. Like not something that you would want to rely on, but for a gimmick basically in at least these conditions, that was that was pretty acceptable. I was I was pretty happy with that. I don't think you can throw too much worse at a self-driving system. I don't think a lidar system would be fixing that. I don't know what kind of self-drive system would be able to handle that. And thank you, Ionic Adam, for braving it with me and filming here. That was a pretty fun thing to do here on a random Tuesday night at 11:45 p.m. So, it's pretty cool to have cool brother-in-laws. So, thanks for joining me on this one.

[00:21:56]>> Yeah, no worries, man. It was a blast.

[00:21:58]Thanks for checking out another Frozen Tesla video, and I will see you guys on the next one.