No disagreement there, but a couple of comments about the Tesla Zeitgeist.
So, on the one hand, and especially with a P, you're getting a serious driving machine. Great acceleration, good cornering, sort-of-track ready. Wanna zip on a curvy country road? This is the car you want.
Now, what about all that automation? Well... On the other hand, people are
good at predicting stuff. As pointed out in one of your previous posts, being able to keep in one's brain where all the other cars/obstacles/cats/dogs/trees/curbs/etc are in your environment is something people can do. And, thinking about that a bit, of those that came before that
couldn't do that, well, there's a reason those types
aren't our ancestors. Because they got eaten or dinged by the landscape, first.
Well and good. But people still get taken by surprise. For one thing, our main distance sensor suite happens to be eyeballs. Unlike deer and similar whose eyes are on the sides of their heads (not so good binocular vision, but great for watching for cougars), ours are very much in front. Yeah, we got peripheral vision. Good drivers check those mirrors. And if one's smart, one kind of glances into the blind spots on either side when one can, and uses memory to track things moving in (and maybe out) of those areas.
But all that can be best described as, "Making the best of the bad hand that nature has handed one."
Now, a Tesla.. has got cameras all over the blame place. Front, rear, sides facing forwards, sides facing rearwards. It sure makes for great Youtube videos. But.. the car's not going to be taken by surprise, at least regarding stuff in those blind spots. It doesn't require a scan that hits the rear-view mirrors - it's looking
all the time. Without a break. Ever.
Now, I'm one of the FSDb Testers. I'll freely admit that for a fair number of cases the car's reaction time to $RANDOM events, like taking a right at a stop sign, leaves something to be desired. But, if one is on a highway, the car's ability to spot (and sometimes overreact) to other vehicles in the blind spots is superior. Say one is in a lane and is thinking about moving over to the left; the car's definitely going to spot the person hovering or moving into the blind spot at lowish speeds; but it'll also spot and jerk the car to safety when some gonzo pulling 90 comes flying up from the rear.
There's Reasons that Tesla puts out that
Safety paper that says that when people are using
all the safety stuff the accident rate plummets. This isn't about crumple zones: This is about
not getting into an accident in the first place.
