I'm astonished consumers are still paying fifteen thousand dollars to be guinea pigs for this bullshit. No car that currently has tires on the road is going to let you fall asleep in your driveway and wake up at work.
At this point, it's looking pretty far off, especially for Tesla. Even Cruise and Waymo are having issues and they have far better sensors than Teslas. It seems silly to be paying $15,000 for something that realistically might not happen during my ownership of the vehicle.
Even if it does happen, I can purchase it later. Sure, it's cheaper to purchase with the car because Tesla wants the money now. However, I'd rather hedge my bets and with investment gains on that $15,000 it might not really cost more if it actually works in the future. 5 years at 9% becomes $23,000 and I don't think Tesla will be charging more than $25,000 for the feature as an upgrade (though I could be wrong). If we're talking 10 years, that $15,000 grows to $35,500 and I can potentially buy a new car with that money.
Plus, there's the genuine possibility that the hardware simply won't support full self driving ever. Cruise and Waymo are both betting that better sensors will be needed than what Tesla has. Never mind the sensors, increased processing power in the future might be important. If current Teslas don't have the sensors or hardware ultimately needed, one has paid $15,000 for something that won't happen. Maybe we will have self driving vehicles and the current Teslas simply won't be able to do that even if you paid the $15,000.
It just seems like a purchase that isn't prudent at this point in time. The excitement has worn off and full self driving doesn't seem imminent. Maybe it will be here in a decade, but it seems to make a lot more sense to save that $15,000 (and let it grow) waiting for it to be a reality than paying for it today.
Beyond that, you may be surprised how many people would wake you up for your stop. Especially in US Commuter Rail systems people tend to follow similar habits and get to know each other over the years. Even on a normal city bus I quickly (months) got used to the pattern of the same people getting on and off at their various stops. If you’re asleep at your stop someone can usually nudge you
I personally can't fall asleep on trains.
It's just too damn glitchy to be worth thousands of dollars extra.
All Teslas come with Autopilot. It's adaptive cruise control and automatic steering that will keep you in your lane. It's awesome, and I love it.
"Enhanced" autopilot, which currently is $6000 extra, is automatic lane change, automatically taking exits, summon, and automatic parking.
The automatic lane change is nice, but it fails too often to be worth thousands of dollars. All the rest of the features are basically party tricks.
If I could have automatic lane changes for much less, I'd happily pay extra for it.
Edit: Enhanced Autopilot was $7k extra when I bought my 2nd Tesla, now it's $6k extra.
To me, design hubris is forcing someone to accept a choice-limiting or poorly documented form of automation in order to accept a more basic form. I have a Fiat 124 Spider... love it, but it has one "feature" that I absolutely hate, which is that if you hold the clutch down and brake while stopped on an uphill incline, it holds the brake for 2 seconds after you take your foot off. Presumably this is for people who don't know how to balance clutch on a hill... although the overlap between those people and the people who'd buy this car must be vanishingly low. You can disable this dumb thing - but the only way to do it is to pull the fuse that controls antilock brakes. It's infuriating.
Yes.
BTW, the automatic steering is very easy to override by just turning the wheel. When I change lanes I just turn the wheel and then turn autopilot back on.
BTW, I also had a Subaru that held the clutch on a hill. I really appreciated it in San Francisco. Personally, I don't understand the hate. I never felt like I needed it, but I remember my mom complaining about other people rolling back in a steep driveway at my preschool in the 1980s. Maybe the feature is needed for those places in the world where everyone drives stick, even the people who are clutzes?
I don't care what features they add, and I've heard other people not be bothered by it. Just give me a way to turn them off!
In the Subaru when it would engage it would turn on a light on the dashboard. It also only engaged on very steep hills where you would always be stomping on the gas no matter what.
I think the Subaru just had a much better execution of it than the Fiat.
Edit: Maybe call the dealership and see if the level sensor can be adjusted? It really should only hold the brakes if you are on a hill that is so steep that you are naturally worrying about rollback.
The other quick-fix is to always hold the e-brake up just enough to turn on the light when you think the grade might be >3%. This is apparently because whoever designed the system assumed that people who use the handbrake on a hill know how to release it and drive better than people who don't - whereas if you grew up driving on really steep hills in the US you weren't taught that method. The other way around it is to hold the brake w/o the clutch, keeping the car in neutral, and then unbrake-clutch-shift-gas really fast before the car rolls backward (more dangerous, but acceptable as heel/toe practice). I really wish it only happened on a very steep hill; it's the very mild slopes that caused me the worst surprises when I first bought the car and almost got into several accidents.
At least the thing doesn't have GPS ;)
So like every Honda Accord as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs-e8QzTo7w
You don't need to be in 30+mph traffic for Honda Sensing to work. Most Level 2 ADAS systems behave similarly.
Does that mean "stay in the correct lane on the interstate and take the proper exits without hitting anything" or does that mean "begin inside your garage and end inside another garage five hundred miles away without touching anything"? The first one is nearly trivial.
It stops being bullshit when they stop telling the user they need to pay attention to the road, and not one second before.
Also anytime I'd pass an exit I wasn't taking in the right lane it would veer and slow down aggressively, same with trying to speed match a car rapidly accelerating on an on ramp.
Bottom line, there's absolutely nothing that isn't driver assist; everything requires a significant amount of vigilance when you aren't driving in a straight line, in the left lane, on an empty highway with no one entering and exiting.
Many drivers would see the cyclist before and be very careful when passing the other vehicle (although we don't predict correctly 100% of the time either). I haven't had a chance to test any self-driving system yet so I'm legitimately interested, do those systems reliably detect such things?
Not to mention people (esp. kids) racing through intersections on electric scooters, casually ignoring traffic rules...
You obviously don't have a 99% chance of death - but just by virtue of it being possible does not also mean it is not BS.
You can drive drunk from PS to SF also.
What's your point?
Those odds are good enough for the occasional trip home from a cocktail party, but hardly cost-competitive with Rideshares/Taxis.
How many 9's do we need before we can say it's reliable enough to trust it? A few more, for sure.
Yeah, 1% is definitely not going to cut it. What are the odds of dying when a human is at the wheel? Something like 0.000025% if my napkin math is right and my assumptions in the right ballpark.
This is demonstrably not a task that anyone can do, let alone Joa[n] Average car driver. Highly trained pilots are not expected to do that, and that's when autopilot is being used in a vehicle that can provide significant amounts of time to handle the autopilot going wrong - seriously, when autopilots go wrong in aircraft at cruising altitude pilots can have 10s of seconds, or even minutes, to handle whatever has gone wrong, Tesla's FSD provides people a couple of seconds prior to impact.
That said in countries other than the US people can reliably use trains and buses, which also means that they don't have to intervene in driving the vehicle.
Most of Europe doesn't have ideal public transport either, I'd imagine South America, Africa being the same or even worse in this aspect. It gets drastically worse the moment you want to go somewhere in the countryside.
nit: Jo[a]n
Update: https://insideevs.com/news/498137/autopilot-defeated-congest...