HenryFarkas
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Review of Full Self Driving Feature of my New Tesla Model 3
by Henry Farkas
I actually didn't need to buy a car during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife and I are in our 70s. Where could we go? But Elon Musk took a couple of thousand dollars off the price of the M3. I figured he'd raise the price once there was a cure or a vaccine. I had already test driven all the fully electric cars before the pandemic started, and Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) was better than the lane-keeping of the other electric cars. And Tesla gives free software updates. None of the other car companies do that.
I've had the Tesla for around eight weeks now. During this time, I've received three software updates. My previous car, a Chevy Volt that my wife and I leased and then bought at the end of the lease, got one software update at the beginning of the lease when I complained to the dealer that cruise control often stopped working apropos of nothing while I was driving on the Interstate highway in good weather. I had to take the car into the service center for the update, and I had to wait around an hour or so. The update didn't solve the problem, but it reduced the frequency of the issue.
Anyway, back to Tesla. I paid the extra seven thousand dollars for the FSD feature because my wife doesn't think I'm a good driver. So I figured I'd go with the artificial intelligence of the Tesla that's had several billion miles of driving experience. That's more miles than I've had even though I'm very very old.
Sadly, artificial intelligence doesn't benefit from driving experience quite as well as biological intelligence, at least human biological intelligence.
My criterion for excellent driving is driving that doesn't prompt my wife to comment negatively about a particular driving event during a car trip. I, personally, haven't achieved that rarified level of driving excellence except on very short trips to the grocery store or to nearby restaurants to pick up takeout food. In my defense, her driving would, at times, elicit comments from me if it weren't for the fact that such comments from me might have a negative effect on my ability to get lucky.
But I have to say that so far, both of us are way better drivers than the Tesla is.
I hope the Tesla aficionados can restrain themselves from flaming me over the previous statement. I want the Tesla to be as good a driver as a person who makes a living as a chauffeur for rich people, who never gets sleepy, and whose attention never wanders.
Tesla's AI just isn't there yet. My Tesla sees a red light or a stop sign ahead, it flashes a sign on the screen saying that it plans to stop in 500 feet, and it abruptly accelerates. It does stop in time, but why does it need to accelerate noticeably before it starts to slow down? This happens often. When there's time, an excellent chauffeur accelerates and decelerates so gently that passengers don't even notice that the speed of the vehicle is changing.
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Possibly, not all people want such a sedate driving experience. If that's all it is, then the Tesla engineers can just put in a driving mode. They could call it Sedate Mode, or Chauffeur Mode, or just Make Your Spouse Happy Mode.
There are more issues with FSD than just abrupt changes in speed. When the Tesla is in the right lane on a limited-access highway and it's passing an exit, the painted lines start to widen. The right thing to do if you don't plan to take the exit is to keep going straight. That's not what Tesla AI does. Instead, it starts to veer right in order to stay centered between the lines. It does this with an abrupt noticeable movement. Then, when the line appears between the exit and the travel lane, Tesla AI abruptly switches back to the center of the travel lane. The car should see far enough ahead to know that the lines are widening because there's an exit. It should know that unless there's a turn signal, the exit is not intended to be taken, and it shouldn't veer right to stay centered between the widening lines. Those movements don't merely upset the non-driving people in the car. They make the driver of the following car think, briefly, that the Tesla is about to exit without signaling. If the following driver speeds up figuring that the Tesla is about to exit, there could be an accident when the Tesla abruptly swerves back into the travel lane.
Staying in the center of the travel lane seems to be a priority for the Tesla AI, but recently, it swerved my car toward the Jersey wall (those concrete walls they sometimes put on the side of roads) on the right side of the road. About a year ago, there was a fatality when a Tesla swerved into a Jersey wall. Apparently, the AI that drives a Tesla still doesn't always recognize that Jersey walls are vertical walls rather than horizontal parts of the travel lane.
Finally, there's the really big issue that sometimes the Tesla doesn't see an object stopped in the road. We know what the car sees and what it doesn't see. They show up on the left side of the center screen as we're driving along. I've had the car less than two months, and this has happened to me twice that I've noticed.
In summary, I like the FSD feature, but it's still not a good enough driver to make my wife happy, and it's not safe for the human drivers to take their attention off the road for even a few seconds. Judging by the way my FSD feature works, it's going to be a long time before I can send my Tesla out to work as a taxi when I won't be needing it myself.
Henry
