I am curious about whether many people think a driver-assist "autosteer on city streets" would be a useful product that you would want. Autopilot is a useful product. In the simpler highway environment you can monitor it without a lot of mental energy and stay reasonably safe if you don't cheat on your monitoring. There are tricks to do that.
On the streets I find driving with FSD prototype to be harrowing. Interesting in the "may you live in interesting times" sense. Now, the jerky wheel will be fixed in time, but for now you can't keep your hands on the wheel. You have to be scared about it doing something scary at any intersection. It does not make the drive relaxing. Can it make the drive relaxing? Or worse, if it gets better does it put you in a state of complacency which ends up being dangerous. For now, most "beta" testers are keeping rein on it, but I am not sure where it goes.
So would you pay money for a driver-assist city street autopilot? Or is an actual real working full self driving what you would pay for? Or would you rather they worked on highway self-driving or traffic jam self-driving, even with level-3 style standby driving necessary?
My preference beyond anything else is that a feature actually works. Like I'd rather have adaptive cruise control that worked great 99.9% of the time versus lane-steering plus adaptive cruise control that was prone to phantom braking.
So I find it disappointing that Tesla worked on city streets before really getting NoA working well. Even though NoA is an L2 system it has the potential of being really useful. The usefulness is in being knowledgeable about traffic ahead to determine the best lanes to be in, and when to get in those lanes.
With City Streets I believe its going to be really tough to balance usefulness with safety. Right now its fairly safe because of how much you have to monitor it. But, as soon as it is less nerve racking people will begin to trust it it.
It's going to be difficult for city streets to be useful because the very things we want it to take over for are actually the hardest things for it to do well at. Things like handling busy stop sign controlled intersections that have lots of vehicles going different directions. It's also going to be hard for it to deal with weather like rain.
So I question whether it really can be useful. It's just going to be another feature that sounds neat, but doesn't really deliver what I want.
Auto Lights -> Doesn't turn on during rain unless its getting dark (implementation doesn't match what I want)
Auto Wipers -> Doesn't work well in some rain situations (performance doesn't match expectations)
Smart Summon -> too slow, too unreliable
Visual Autopark -> too slow
TACC -> too prone to false braking and not smooth enough
AP -> Doesn't handle merge points well. Basically it doesn't handle any situation well where the lane width widens or it has to choose a lane (single stack V11 might fix this).
ALC -> Feature works well enough to be useful, but could be improved by handling some situations better.
NoA -> Does idiotic lane changes, and doesn't handle traffic very well (V11 might fix this).
Of all those features I only give ALC a passing grade in terms of usefulness. I think that's because I expect TACC/AP to work better so it annoys me that they don't. I'm not too annoyed by Autopark or Summon as I don't really need them. Maybe its that ALC is the only feature that I as a Tesla owner can really show someone where 98% of the time it will work great.
The auto lights is probably the most disappointing one as it makes a large percentage of PNW Tesla owners look like moron, and its the simplest thing to get right. Tesla should just do what other manufactures do and tie it to wiper speed.
Long term I plan on trading my 3 for a Rivian, and I expect that I'll have way less features but the features will work (or I might skip it). Sure I could get an MB or a Lucid to have better ADAS type capabilities, but I prefer the rugged nature of the Rivian.
L4 capability for under $100K would be hard to pass up on though. L4 by its nature requires the feature to work as advertised versus the make believe nature of so many L2 features (not just Tesla). L4 is the kind of thing you have a vehicle specifically for. L3 would be a nice to have, but I wouldn't buy a vehicle specifically for that.
