“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn’t do it either.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.
Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it’s either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you’re in traffic because you know it’ll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don’t. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I’m watching it close. It can’t navigate city streets, but neither can FSD…
TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it’s bad and getting worse, not better. I can’t believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that’s why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.
I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it’s not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.
I agree. VWs’ drive assists are absolutely stellar. It’s just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that’s essentially it. It’s not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.
The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don’t seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a “zone” with margins left and right.
So if you are on the inside of your “zone” and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don’t really trust it with high speed turns.
I concur on the VW software. Once you understand it, it is predictable and safe where it should be used - highways with dividers
I’m a big fan of assists where I am still actively driving. They are there if I make an error (e.g. drift to the edge of a lane) rather than doing the driving for me.
Lane-keeping is actually on by default in my vehicle, and I find it to be a nice feature. Lane-centering feels too weird for me, so I’ve tried it out but am uncomfortable using it.
GM’s Super Cruise is absolutely great. It only works on highways though. I recently drove for 5 hours through three states without touching the gas, brake, or steering wheel once. Except the little nub on the steering wheel to adjust the set speed.
My wife’s hybrid Rav4 has it and loves it. I wish my Prius had it. I’m glad Toyota apparently knows how to do it right.
Toyota tends to stick with proven tech and does it the right way, rather than pushing the envelope on half-assed implementations.
Sounds like it’d be nice if you had real control over the car’s software, and you could roll it back.
This… also makes me a little more weary driving around Teslas in traffic.
wary=cautious
weary=tired
The stress of being wary for long periods of time will make you weary.
Good way for people to remember the difference! Even my wife had this one mixed up for a while, and she’s very sensitive to confrontation. So I confronted her and she was angry for a bit but now she says it correctly.
I have a good friend who thinks teetotal means very drunk when it actually means no alcohol consumption whatsoever. I’ve brought it up to him a couple times and he reacts negatively. I haven’t heard him say it since the second time.
I don’t want to be a stick in the mud about these things, I just want people to improve their communication so they are respected and taken seriously.
If I see something like a there/their/they’re mistake I just stop reading the comment. Probably unfair of me but I just disregard the person’s opinion. And before anyone wants to tell me that not everyone speaks English as a first language, it’s actually native speakers who make that mistake. People who learned English later in life generally know the difference.
The 2 that bother me are lose/loose and rogue/rouge.
Some of us Tesla drivers refuse to use any of their bullshit auto-driving software (I don’t even use lane assist anymore) because of bad experiences so hopefully most of them are just driving normally. Which I do admit may not spark much confidence given how terrible some drivers are.
Fully agree. The sort of good news for driving around them is that most of my frustrations come from it being overly cautious and almost getting rear-ended because it decided to stop for a green light or some other odd decision. It’s rare to have it interact poorly with someone that is driving predictably. Like, cut it off without a signal and you have introduced something has not already accounted for. Driving alongside it on the highway, it sees you and knows where you are. But people are unpredictable and it only takes one mistake.
It works well on freeways. I still don’t use it much on city streets except for the occasional shits and giggles. It has issues on non-divided highways and refuses to drive at my set speed limit.
Sounds like it still drives like a teenager!
Which of course is terrible since it should be improving over time.
This is worse than just driving yourself. I either need to be engaged in actively driving, or it really needs to be able to handle the task by itself.
It’s why I find the lane-keeping feature in my vehicle to be useful, but lane-centering is just too weird for me to use.
Mu dude, ad fellow tesla driver, I fully concur!
I guess he’s talking about other upgrades like radar sensors and all the stuff that people told him from the get go.
This article specifically mentioned only changes to the computer hardware, not the cameras.
My bad.