5 ms·

When was the last time you used it? A couple years ago, it wouldn’t go 10 minutes before I had to intervene because of a phantom break or some other stupid/weir

When was the last time you used it? A couple years ago, it wouldn’t go 10 minutes before I had to intervene because of a phantom break or some other stupid/weird thing it was doing. But just last week, I engaged FSD and Autopilot when I left an Airbnb in New Jersey and it drove me from the house to the highway and all the way through dense NYC traffic into Long Island, an 85 mile (!) drive with only two interventions. The first was when a car to my right darted into my lane (I instinctively slammed on the brakes immediately, though the car also beeped loudly so I suspect it also would have hit the brakes anyway), and the second time I shut it off because it was being too cautious getting into an exit lane and other cars were never going to let me in (if you drive through NYC you know what I’m talking about).

Gunnerhead 4y ago
Thanks for providing a positive perspective. It feels like I only hear negative things of autopilot and Tesla on HN and Reddit, so it's nice to hear a different perspective.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
- jliptzin 4y ago
  It is pretty unfortunate, I don’t know how else people think we’re going to solve driverless cars and eventually save tens of thousands of people from dying in car crashes every year in the US. At some point these systems need to be tested on real roads.
jaclaz 4y ago
> (I instinctively slammed on the brakes immediately, though the car also beeped loudly so I suspect it also would have hit the brakes anyway) Interesting, I would have thought that when (if) the autopilot intervenes it would be way faster than human reaction. I have no car with similar features but I remember renting a VW golf that had some adaptive cruise control, the simple "keep the speed constant" worked just fine (like in older, simpler cruise controls) but the "adaptive" part was (IMHO, and it may well be a specific/single issue of the car or some settings that I knew not how to regulate) very, very cautious. On the highway, driving in the left lane at a speed of 120 km/h, every time a car a long distance ahead (100 metres or more) merged from right lane to left lane the car would suddenly slow down/brake long before I would have normally done manually (and often without need as the car was travelling at my same speed or nearly so), it was, if not uncomfortable, "strange".
- jliptzin 4y ago
  It’s possible I hit the brake the same time as the car did and just didn’t notice, we’re talking fractions of a second here. Like I said in a previous comment, since I had the autopilot on I was able to look at more of my surroundings rather that just focusing only on the car in front of me so I actually saw him driving erratically a few minutes before that so when he was next to me I was being extra defensive and I reacted really quickly to it.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    I see, you were already somehow alerted.

Gunnerhead 4y ago

Thanks for providing a positive perspective. It feels like I only hear negative things of autopilot and Tesla on HN and Reddit, so it's nice to hear a different perspective.

CryptoPunk 4y ago
jliptzin 4y ago
It is pretty unfortunate, I don’t know how else people think we’re going to solve driverless cars and eventually save tens of thousands of people from dying in car crashes every year in the US. At some point these systems need to be tested on real roads.

jaclaz 4y ago

> (I instinctively slammed on the brakes immediately, though the car also beeped loudly so I suspect it also would have hit the brakes anyway) Interesting, I would have thought that when (if) the autopilot intervenes it would be way faster than human reaction. I have no car with similar features but I remember renting a VW golf that had some adaptive cruise control, the simple "keep the speed constant" worked just fine (like in older, simpler cruise controls) but the "adaptive" part was (IMHO, and it may well be a specific/single issue of the car or some settings that I knew not how to regulate) very, very cautious. On the highway, driving in the left lane at a speed of 120 km/h, every time a car a long distance ahead (100 metres or more) merged from right lane to left lane the car would suddenly slow down/brake long before I would have normally done manually (and often without need as the car was travelling at my same speed or nearly so), it was, if not uncomfortable, "strange".

jliptzin 4y ago
It’s possible I hit the brake the same time as the car did and just didn’t notice, we’re talking fractions of a second here. Like I said in a previous comment, since I had the autopilot on I was able to look at more of my surroundings rather that just focusing only on the car in front of me so I actually saw him driving erratically a few minutes before that so when he was next to me I was being extra defensive and I reacted really quickly to it.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  I see, you were already somehow alerted.