Drove a little over 600 miles since Thursday. Majority of which were autopilot. Did some demos for friends and family last night, which was fun. Car definitely performs auto steer much better at night, as expected.
The car's confusion with lanes that split off in either direction, especially to the left, is a little bothersome. For example, on a four lane divided highway I had a left turn lane come up while I was in the left lane. The car got to it, then jerked the car to the left half-car length or so past the left turn lane. There wasn't an intersection ahead, so no reason for it to not have been able to simply follow the unbroken lines... but it decided that jumping towards the turn lane was the right move, incorrectly.
As mentioned previously it can't take sharp curves without freaking out, but it can take most curves on most normal roads. It does better with slightly tighter curves when there is a vehicle ahead and the TACC distance setting is near the middle of the range. Too close and it doesn't see the curves quickly enough and freaks out. Too far and it loses the car ahead too quickly... and freaks out.
So far all of the interstate driving I've done has been pretty painless. A few caveats include construction zones. While so far the car has done well at following the correct path, it's a little uncomfortable with more cars around in these situations. For example, it recognizes the concrete construction barrier to the left and stays away from it, but it stays very close to the center lane marker regardless of where cars in that lane are, cars that are probably staying close to it as well to avoid their own concrete barrier. I tend to slow and stay more centered in these situations when I'm driving, but the car tends to prefer one side or the other and doesn't stay centered when there are obstacles on both sides, which I found odd. I've taken over a few times in these situations just in case.
My record so far is about 65 miles of interstate auto steer driving with no nags and no hands on the wheel (only because that's the longest interstate stretch I've done so far). I did do change lanes a few times with the auto lane change feature, which may be enough to silence potential timed nags, if there are any, but the car is definitely happy to drive along without nagging for long boring stretches, which is excellent.
At first I thought the nag would be more prominent when there were no other cars around. But last night I drove home at about 1AM, very few cars on the road, and the car rarely had another vehicle ahead in its lane. Still no nags. Very cool.
I'm admittedly still disappointed and irritated that they advertised this feature as if it were basically done and ready over a year ago and that this factored into my purchase decision. It's cool, and works OK, but it doesn't "wow" me enough to justify last year's deception on it. I was hoping it would. I think this is what they should have already had ready to go when and released when they announced it, and a year from then we'd have vastly improved performance, but would have at least had the feature to use when we got our cars. It's been handled very poorly from a marketing and customer service perspective.
At this point, at the very least, Tesla should start the warranty counters on the auto steer related hardware as of Thursday and not as of delivery. I personally got no use out of this hardware for a full 1/3rd of my factory warranty, yet if it breaks at 51k miles I'm technically SOL, even though I've only had use of it for ~35k of those miles. Seems like it'd be the right thing for Tesla to do on this matter. Would probably be a grand gesture if they simply included all autopilot hardware, but I'm not holding my breath on either.
