Ok so I noticed most people haven't seem to have gotten the new update and, knowing how excruciating the wait can be, I made a video demonstration of the feature to maybe make the wait more (or less) bearable.
Now I'm clearly a novice in YouTube filmmaking so don't expect too much
The video quality should improve once the video is fully processed by YouTube.
Alright, from some more driving I noticed a number of interesting “quirks and features (Doug Demuro style)” with the drive on nav system.
1) As I first discovered in the video, you have to press the “drive on NAV” button on the navigation screen to activate it even after having activated the feature in the settings screen. However, oddly enough, this can only be done on a street, whether that be a surface street or expressway or highway. This means that if you enter your destination while parked on a driveway or in a parking lot you have to wait until you drive onto the street until you can activate the feature for the given route. This is unnecessary and requires you to tap a button on the screen while driving, which makes no sense. It is more safe to do it before driving rather than while driving but the system doesn’t let you do that.
2) Hov lane navigation actually works. If you don’t have the toggle activated and are in the HOV lane the car will immediately try to get you to move over, and if it isn’t activated it won’t suggest merging into the HOV lane even if it is going faster than the traffic in the lane you are in. Thankfully it’s also pretty easy to toggle HOV on and off.
3) While regular autopilot activates and deactivates with a “2 beep” sound, the drive on Nav sound is 3 beeps. It’s actually a very pleasent noise, somewhat like an airport alert sound.
4) Once the car takes the exit, it first switches to regular autopilot. If you don’t take back control then, it keeps slowing down, eventually to a stop and says something like “Navigate in autopilot complete, please take back control.” Interestingly it almost always stops exactly at the end of the ramp, where there might be a signal light, crosswalk, or stop sign.
5) The prompt to change lanes is entirely based on the difference in speed between the lane you are in and the adjacent lane. This is interesting because I was once in a situation where the lane I was in and the adjacent lane were slow for an upcoming interchange while the 3rd lane over was much faster. Because the car doesn’t look over 2 lanes, it didn’t feel the need to move over.
6) This is another really odd choice. The car never uses the indicator when 2 lanes merge. Not when merging on the freeway, nor when two lanes become one. I’m pretty sure that itself is illegal and that you need to signal with your indicator. It also feels unsafe. When exiting, it uses the indicator on an exit which forks out of the slow lane. It doesn’t use the indicator on an exit only lane, which is fine.
7) there are situations where drive on Nav becomes “limited” as alerted by a prompt on screen. So far I’ve seen this in light rain and construction. I didn’t notice any major difference in autopilot behavior, perhaps they just want the driver to be extra attentive in these scenarios
8) This should be obvious but I guess it isn’t. The car cannot deal with challenging situations. In the video I posted I took it through a number of such scenarios and you can clearly see the limitations of the system. Essentially the system is designed to be able to handle simple situations and normal conditions, which is perhaps 95% of highway driving and 70% of off ramps and interchanges. Anything remotely challenging which requires human planning and the car likely won’t be able to compensate. Again a couple good examples of this are in the video I made.
9) For all intents and purposes, this car has a very basic ability to drive itself in the freeway, meaning theoretically it has the skills to handle every basic freeway situation. A lot of fine tuning now needs to go in from Tesla’s part, but I believe that when it does, we’ll essentially have a level 3 system. So the general capabilities are there and once the particularities are ironed out, the car will be level 3. Perhaps that only happens after HW3 comes out, but I’m confident Tesla can get there in about a year or so.
