If FSD supposedly doesn't need maps, why is my car acting lost on roads I drive every day?

The short answer is that those weird local movements you're seeing are likely a perception problem, not a navigation map problem. When people talk about maps in FSD, they ussually mean the global context of the road network. That data helps the system know which streets connect and what the general flow shold be. But the actual moment-to-moment handling of things like lane centering or sudden slowing on a specific residential street is almost entirely handled by the neural networks processing the camera feed. Your car is trying to interpret real-world visual cues, and if your specific street is highly unusual or has inconsistent features, the AI gets confused. It isn't 'guessing' in the traditional sense; it's trying to match the live sensory input against its learned models, and if your local enviroment is a weak link, it fails. That's why the Audi might handle it better; they are heavily reliant on pre-digital mapping of those specific road geometries. The map updates they are rolling out primarily help the system understand 'where' it is globally, which assists the planning part of the software. However, fixing those edge cases—like drifting toward a center line on a one-way street—is about training the perception model to recognize the visual pattern of that specific street, not just providing a digital line on a map. Since your car is operating in a region that the current software hasn't seen a sufficient amount of examples for, the over the air updates are only solving those issues gradually as the fleet drives through and those local scenarios are logged and retrained. Unfortunately, local, specific street anomalies usually require massive datasets to smooth out, and it's rare that a single software patch fixes a unique residential layout immediatly.

I had almost the same thing with a stretch near me where the car woud brake for what looked like nothing. Months of nothing changing. What actually made the difference for me was the dashcam footage. I clipped the exact moments, sent it through a bug report with the timestamp, and a couple updates later that spot smoothed out. Before that I was just describing it in words and I don't think anyone ever really saw what I meant. Worth a shot on those two streets, it gives them something concrete to look at instead of a vague complaint about a whole neighborhood.

One thing I'd check first: look at the speed limit number showing on the screen when it does those mystery slowdowns on your street. I drive rideshare part time, about 300 miles a week on FSD, and every phantom brake I've logged turned out to be the map's speed data being wrong for that segment, not the cameras. If the displayed limit reads way low on those roads, that's your answer, and the car is being cautious on purpose. Mine had a residential stretch showing 15 when it's 25, and it crawled there for a year til a map update finally bumped it. So yeah, the map side absolutely does fix street by street stuff, it just takes its sweet time getting to your block.

I don't buy the first reply's claim that this is all perception and maps only matter for the big picture. My expirience says otherwise. There's an interchange near me where FSD picked the wrong lane every single time for over a year, then one update it just knew the layout. Nobody's cameras changed, the paint is faded there and the signs are lousy, so something in the map data clearly got fed in. Lane geometry on weird streets is exactly the kind of thing that lives in maps, not in what the cameras see. That's probably what the whole in-house mapping push is about, and I'd bet the OP's streets get fixed that way too, eventually.

Funny how the story keeps shifting, right. Years of 'the car doesn't need maps' and now suddenly they're building their own. Doesn't bother me that they need them, it's the pretending that got old. For your streets though, might be worth checking if they even show up properly in the navigation. I've got a weird little lane near me that the nav keeps drawing wrong, and FSD acts confused there too. If the base map has your road drawn badly, all the camera training in the world might not fix it. Curious if your car's nav shows those two streets as anything unusual.