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I can answer that because I just drove home in the rain at night in my Tesla Model 3. It was a light rain that has been falling for hours. The roads are sleek
by zaroth 4y ago
I can answer that because I just drove home in the rain at night in my Tesla Model 3.
It was a light rain that has been falling for hours. The roads are sleek but very few deep puddles. No problem with traction, but the sheen of the water combined with poor lane markings means it’s often hard to see the lanes.
My experience has always been the vision AI can discern lines and road markings significantly better than I can. So I often choose to drive with autopilot on and keep close attention at night in the rain.
The car will be almost always perfectly in lane while I am freed up to pay more attention to the greater surroundings, traffic signs and lights, route planning, and watching for hazards and other traffic.
I find at night in the dark driving without autopilot, lane keeping requires significant focus, which can mean other driving tasks like route planning and identifying hazards can suffer.
As of right now, exceedingly few cars are being driven entirely automated. Humans using autopilot will have more time and focus to identify and avoid cyclists/pedestrians that are on or entering the road. Autopilot is a massively useful safety tool.
Unfortunately some humans abuse their driving privilege. Drunk driving and distracted driving are huge and growing killers. Human drivers that are supposed to be paying attention that instead hit a cyclist / pedestrian are at fault. If it’s done while driving distracted on autopilot that’s even more so the human’s fault.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoI find that Model 3 FSD hugs the center line even on roads with a huge amount of lane space, to the point that some cars and trucks will honk at me because they think I’m about to cross over. It also gets confused constantly by badly marked roads and can’t drive for more than a mile or two on complex streets without making some critical error or behaving like a drunk driver. It’s interesting to drive if you watch it like a drivers ed teacher teaching a vision-impaired student’s first lesson. It is not yet an assistive technology (outside of highways) that anyone should be delegating any amount of their attention to, and I wouldn’t want to be walking on a road with people using it that way.
- willio58 4y agoI’ve been in FSD mode with this exact thing of being too close to the line, it’s dangerous. I wasn’t in the driver seat btw. Anyway, one time we were in a low density town and the Tesla swerved from being close to the center line to literally turning into an oncoming vehicle. Out of nowhere on a sunny day. Luckily my driver regained control but that scared me out of wanting to use fsd for years. Scared the shit out of the other driver I’m sure.
- zaroth 4y agoI don’t have this issue at all. AutoPilot (not FSD Beta) is not designed for back roads or complex city driving. It’s best on highways and state roads with limited intersections. I do not use it in the city. The issue I have with AutoPilot is it doesn’t always shy away from poorly driven cars and large trucks in the next lane over. So while a human would be all the way over to the far side of the lane, AutoPilot stays perfectly centered or only slightly shys away from semi-trucks.