When will we have self-driving cars? Part 2

Recently I drove around 1000 miles in my Model Y and I think my original post was somewhat optimistic. For this post, I assume that standard autopilot is exactly the same as full self-driving and just software-limited.

The first thing I would like to state is that Tesla still gets confused when lane separation disappears for a short time. There were around 3-5 software updates but it is still an issue. I drove at the same place and it was still a problem.

The next problem is phanom breaking. Sometimes the car starts to break without any reason. Every case I had previously was a relatively minor case of phantom breaking that did not create any problems and was just slightly annoying.

But when I drove from road #33 and turned to road #46 in Blackwells Corner, things changed quite badly. It was a beautiful road. No cars in any direction. No clouds and the road was in good condition. Basically ideal conditions. And out of the blue, my car starts to break. Not at full power but way more aggressive than before.

I disengaged the autopilot, drove a few miles, and tried to enable it back. And it happened again. I drove around 15 more miles and it happened ago. It started to work properly only when I moved to road #41. I have no idea why it did a few times but it was quite annoying.

The next thing was road works. There were a lot of them and at some place there were cones and my car almost hit one of them and I had to take control. I think the car was confused because I had to drive over the solid line on the right side of the road and it was under the center of my car. Nevertheless, it is a big issue because I know how bad these cones can be.

Lastly, I saw that the car didn’t read digital speed limits. There were one place where speed was limited to 55 miles per hour but there were no typical sign and instead, it was digital. I think they used it because the speed limit could change. Anyway, Tesla ignored it and continued to drive at 65 miles per hour and I had to change it.

As a conclusion, I think autopilot is great. I drove around 950 miles using autopilot. It takes a lot of load from me and I think it considerably improves safety. But it is absolutely not ready to drive by itself. I would call it co-pilot because it helps the driver and it is nothing more at this stage.

There are a lot of issues with relatively simple driving conditions on highways but driving in the city is much more complicated than driving on a highway. For example, when I drive in an unfamiliar city there are a lot of cases where I’m not sure where to drive. Poor lane marking, sun into my face, and many other things that make driving hard even for intelligent humans. It requires actual intelligence to drive a car in such conditions.

As a result, right now I think it will require tens of years to make it right. Moreover, at this moment I’m not sure if it is possible to do it at all. I think the right thing to do for Tesla is to change its name to co-pilot and stop making false claims. But I repeat it is all true only for the case when auto-pilot and full self-driving is using the same code.

I hope it helps someone.