Good points!
This is why I'm not keen or even mildly interested in paying for self driving features on a Tesla or any other car. I simply do not have enough good weather and road conditions consistently throughout the year where I live, to make it worthwhile. Roads are dirty, dirt covers optics trying to see the road... dirt obscures road lines the car is trying to track. Or just worn or missing road paint ... is cause for concern. Snow obscures road lines or sometimes mimics road lines. Even raining on a summer day on a well marked road... is a no for basic cruise control, let alone self driving.
Any decent and
self respecting self driving car would disable piloting for much of the year, where I live. If it doesn't do that I think it would be flawed. And most of the roads I drive on have no lines, or are two lane two way traffic.. places I wouldn't dare use self driving as we see it evolving for tomorrow.
Having a "fair weather good road only" self driving car invites bad human judgement at the edges of acceptable operating conditions. To reduce the error margins of bad human judgement would require a heck of a lot more nanny controls and more "smarts" built into the car. What!? Your black ice detector was dirty... or the anti-hydroplaning monitor was acting up... too bad. The tradeoff being the more the car is capable of arbitrating what is "good conditions" the more you know it is going to do so conservatively, and the "usefulness" of self driving will be diminished because it defeats itself more often.
We'll all be reminiscing about the good old days of AP1 when we used to get away with all that crazy semi-pilot stuff. It'll be like listening to grandpa "before they even had seat belts..." and took our freedoms away. "Let me break my own neck thank you very much!"
For me, I just really hope Tesla (1) continues offering improved self driving features, and (2) as a priced option... to displace as much cost out of the car as possible for what I want to buy. At least long enough for me to buy my next car, a model 3.
"car" is believed to originate from the Latin word
carrus or
carrum ("wheeled vehicle"), or the
Middle English word
carre (meaning
cart, from
Old North French)
"automobile" is a
classical compound derived from the
Ancient Greek word
autós (αὐτός), meaning "self", and the
Latin word
mobilis, meaning "movable"
...
IMHO we need self driving capable roads before I would want or trust a self driving car. Smart infrastructure first. The road would have embedded sensors that communicate with the network of traffic riding on it. .. The road would control spacing and speed (no accelerator pedal for you!) ... and lane changes... and passing. Pretty much a world like
this movie shows, with real automobiles! However, the likelihood of this happening in my lifetime is near zero. And there would be zero joy in it for me if it actually did happen. May as well take a train, as it would no longer be using a car as we knew and loved them. But for my kids' kids... sure, it would be a safer world.
