Have taken several (about 6) trips (the longest was only an hour so far though) and used Navigate on AutoPilot on them. I have 2018.42.2 at this time. Here are my initial impressions. I'll update the post as I witness more or things change with future updates.
Concept and Interface
Great. Easy to use. Just enter an address and if the route involves highways/freeways you get the button to "Navigate on AutoPilot" and you just press it. After that, in the turn-by-turn directions, each step that can be handled by Nav on AP shows a small 'AutoPilot' steering wheel icon. Easy to get started in my opinion. Only small niggle is that the option to Navigate on AutoPilot doesn't always show up immediately. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds or so to become available. There is a blue path arrow that shows you that Nav on AP (NoA for short moving forward) knows which lane you are in and previews the lane it wants you to be in. The nav turn by turn alerts you to "Upcoming lane change" with an arrow pointing left or right. When a lane from the highway splits (example at an interchange between the highway you are on and the one you need), it will signal itself and move toward the split lane it needs automatically. If you need to change lanes, NoA as it stands in 2018.42 will tell you to use the stalk to indicate a lane change and then it will change lanes at that point.
In Use: On-ramps (TL;DR Grade: "F")
Even though I have gotten on several onramps that look like (according to the icon in the turn-by-turn) Nav on AP capable, so far my experience for onramps is quite bad. Maybe the icon shouldn't be showing up on the onramp and it just can't handle onramps yet. But if the icons are correct, then it seems to be telling me that it thinks it can. The problems I see are all related to speed...but there are multiple sub-problems.
Complaint #1: Too slow. In my experience so far, Nav-on-AP handles the curves/steering (in clover leaf style) OK on the onramps, but goes 15-20mph slower around curves than an average (or even cautious) human driver. This causes drivers behind the Tesla to potentially get irritated...and causes ME to get irritated too
Complaint #2: Has problems accelerating to highway speed. The car is supposed to be getting on a highway. As we all know, drivers are taught to enter the highway at the speed of traffic. But Nav on AP has all kinds of various speed limit issues. Doesn't accelerate to freeway speed in a timely manner. When coming out of the bend, it accelerates very slowly towards the speed limit. not taking advantage of the power available to a Tesla but more importantly not seeming to realize that the onramp lane it is is will soon become the highway lane. Would likely get rear ended by a car in the right-most lane (if I let it). Instead I have to hit the accelerator and get it up to speed. Seems to favor absolute smoothness over getting to highway speed in a safe distance.
Complaint #3: Has problems understanding between previous street speed limit and highway speed limit. When you engage NoA on an onramp, it often assumes the 'speed limit' is the last surface street speed limit. This is even worse than the scenario above because then the 'speed limit' (including actual merging onto the highway) is surface street speed limit (let's say 35) plus your AP offset (mine is 7), say 42mph. Obviously it is super dangerous to try to merge onto a highway where cars are going 65-75mph at 42mph.
Every onramp had one of these problems. So even though I couldn't always guess which of the particulars would be occurring, in all cases I would have to handle the onramp myself, just like pre NoA times. "F" grade.
In-Use: Off-ramps (TL;DR Grade: "D+")
Interface wise, generally not bad. Car informs you that NoA is ending in X feet (or meters I presume in other countries) and it counts down (600,500,400, etc). When it finishes counting down, you here a new "triple" tone and you are dumped back into regular AutoPilot. The NoA "path arrow" disappears from your Nav/IC at this point. What happens and when depends...a lot.
Scenerio 1: On off-ramps that end with a single lane. It works great. Logically this is because NoA gets you completely off the highway and then after perhaps a hundred to two hundred feet on the off-ramp, it puts you back on regular AP and with only a single lane of traffic, auto streer and adaptive cruise kick in to keep you moving down the offramp. This is the ideal situation and results in the best results - but personally only a few of the offramp I used were like this.
Scenario 2: On off-ramps that feature one off-ramp splitting into two lanes, it does not handle well so far. I have an offramp I have tried multiple times which consists of an offramp that splits into a "Y" - you can stay left to (eventually) turn left or you can stay right to (you guessed it!) eventually turn right. NoA turns off about 100-150 feet before it should IMO. I say this because the Nav knows which way you'll be going (left or right), so if it kept NoA just a little longer before dumping you back to standard AP, it would get you in the correct lane. Instead it dumps you to regular AP in the "no man's land" time when there is a very wide single lane just before the "Y" and AP has no idea what to do. So you have to immediately disengage it. Not very useful and could be quite dangerous in fact.
Scenario 3: One ramps that feature one off-ramp splitting into more than two lanes gives NoA, as you'd probably suspect, the most difficulty. It will often give you a message saying (something to the effect of "This intersection not supported". For those in the Bay Area, try the southbound exit from Highway 17 at Hamilton. It splits from one lane to 4 (two going left, one going left or straight and one going right). Similar to how NoA didn't handle the two lane split exits I tried (see scenario #2 above), this also results in regular AP being activated at a time and place where it does zero good and you have to immediately take over. Like i-m-m-e-d-i-a-t-e-l-y immediately. Only saving grace here is that it warns you (like a few seconds before) that this is an "unsupported' intersection which would indicate that at some point in the future, it will become "supported" and will likely be handled better. But so far, I'd give it a D+ overall for offramp handling with the exception of single lane non-splitting offramp, in which case I'd give it an A.
In-Use: Highway interchanges (TL;DR Grade: "B+")
So far in my use, this is where NoA works best currently.
Scenario #1: Lane you are in splits into two lanes. One stays on highway you are on, the second goes to a different highway you want/need to get where you are going. This is where NoA seems the most "magical" and behaves like a good human driver. Smoothly handles the split in my experiences and takes the highway interchange well and (unlike the onramp experience) will handle curves at normal comfortable speeds (not too fast, but not too slow) and then accelerate smartly back up to (the new) highway speed and handle merging cars OK. It is most magical when it is allowed to stay in it's lane and the lane simply splits. This is because you don't have to activate the turn signal to change lanes like normally you still do as of 2018.42 (I know there will be a feature in the future to waive this requirement).
Scenario #2: New highway you want requires you to be in a specific lane in advance (no split). Very similar to above, except it feels slightly less magical as you have to (with NoA's prompts) to manually move the turn signal stalk in advance to allow NoA to move you into the correct lane. It feels less magical, because it is very similar to how you could have previously did it with normal AP. Still, works fine.
Scenario #3: Double Merges. Does not handle double merges well. This is where cars from one highway are moving to the right most lane to exit the highway while your lane requires you to move from the right lane to the left to stay on your (new) highway. I'll have to try this again to confirm, but I think NoA flashed me some kind of warning message (maybe saying this interchange was "unsupported" or something). In any case, it didn't really handle it well, but I forgot if I instinctively deactivated NoA or if it dumped me into regular AP which I then deactivated. Giving it a demerit for double merge handling but otherwise this is the most impressive feature so far and gives a preview of the future when NoA may really work well in all/most scenarios.
I'm excited to see this evolve and I'll try to update this thread with my own observations with new firmware releases to see how NoA changes.
Concept and Interface
Great. Easy to use. Just enter an address and if the route involves highways/freeways you get the button to "Navigate on AutoPilot" and you just press it. After that, in the turn-by-turn directions, each step that can be handled by Nav on AP shows a small 'AutoPilot' steering wheel icon. Easy to get started in my opinion. Only small niggle is that the option to Navigate on AutoPilot doesn't always show up immediately. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds or so to become available. There is a blue path arrow that shows you that Nav on AP (NoA for short moving forward) knows which lane you are in and previews the lane it wants you to be in. The nav turn by turn alerts you to "Upcoming lane change" with an arrow pointing left or right. When a lane from the highway splits (example at an interchange between the highway you are on and the one you need), it will signal itself and move toward the split lane it needs automatically. If you need to change lanes, NoA as it stands in 2018.42 will tell you to use the stalk to indicate a lane change and then it will change lanes at that point.
In Use: On-ramps (TL;DR Grade: "F")
Even though I have gotten on several onramps that look like (according to the icon in the turn-by-turn) Nav on AP capable, so far my experience for onramps is quite bad. Maybe the icon shouldn't be showing up on the onramp and it just can't handle onramps yet. But if the icons are correct, then it seems to be telling me that it thinks it can. The problems I see are all related to speed...but there are multiple sub-problems.
Complaint #1: Too slow. In my experience so far, Nav-on-AP handles the curves/steering (in clover leaf style) OK on the onramps, but goes 15-20mph slower around curves than an average (or even cautious) human driver. This causes drivers behind the Tesla to potentially get irritated...and causes ME to get irritated too
Complaint #2: Has problems accelerating to highway speed. The car is supposed to be getting on a highway. As we all know, drivers are taught to enter the highway at the speed of traffic. But Nav on AP has all kinds of various speed limit issues. Doesn't accelerate to freeway speed in a timely manner. When coming out of the bend, it accelerates very slowly towards the speed limit. not taking advantage of the power available to a Tesla but more importantly not seeming to realize that the onramp lane it is is will soon become the highway lane. Would likely get rear ended by a car in the right-most lane (if I let it). Instead I have to hit the accelerator and get it up to speed. Seems to favor absolute smoothness over getting to highway speed in a safe distance.
Complaint #3: Has problems understanding between previous street speed limit and highway speed limit. When you engage NoA on an onramp, it often assumes the 'speed limit' is the last surface street speed limit. This is even worse than the scenario above because then the 'speed limit' (including actual merging onto the highway) is surface street speed limit (let's say 35) plus your AP offset (mine is 7), say 42mph. Obviously it is super dangerous to try to merge onto a highway where cars are going 65-75mph at 42mph.
Every onramp had one of these problems. So even though I couldn't always guess which of the particulars would be occurring, in all cases I would have to handle the onramp myself, just like pre NoA times. "F" grade.
In-Use: Off-ramps (TL;DR Grade: "D+")
Interface wise, generally not bad. Car informs you that NoA is ending in X feet (or meters I presume in other countries) and it counts down (600,500,400, etc). When it finishes counting down, you here a new "triple" tone and you are dumped back into regular AutoPilot. The NoA "path arrow" disappears from your Nav/IC at this point. What happens and when depends...a lot.
Scenerio 1: On off-ramps that end with a single lane. It works great. Logically this is because NoA gets you completely off the highway and then after perhaps a hundred to two hundred feet on the off-ramp, it puts you back on regular AP and with only a single lane of traffic, auto streer and adaptive cruise kick in to keep you moving down the offramp. This is the ideal situation and results in the best results - but personally only a few of the offramp I used were like this.
Scenario 2: On off-ramps that feature one off-ramp splitting into two lanes, it does not handle well so far. I have an offramp I have tried multiple times which consists of an offramp that splits into a "Y" - you can stay left to (eventually) turn left or you can stay right to (you guessed it!) eventually turn right. NoA turns off about 100-150 feet before it should IMO. I say this because the Nav knows which way you'll be going (left or right), so if it kept NoA just a little longer before dumping you back to standard AP, it would get you in the correct lane. Instead it dumps you to regular AP in the "no man's land" time when there is a very wide single lane just before the "Y" and AP has no idea what to do. So you have to immediately disengage it. Not very useful and could be quite dangerous in fact.
Scenario 3: One ramps that feature one off-ramp splitting into more than two lanes gives NoA, as you'd probably suspect, the most difficulty. It will often give you a message saying (something to the effect of "This intersection not supported". For those in the Bay Area, try the southbound exit from Highway 17 at Hamilton. It splits from one lane to 4 (two going left, one going left or straight and one going right). Similar to how NoA didn't handle the two lane split exits I tried (see scenario #2 above), this also results in regular AP being activated at a time and place where it does zero good and you have to immediately take over. Like i-m-m-e-d-i-a-t-e-l-y immediately. Only saving grace here is that it warns you (like a few seconds before) that this is an "unsupported' intersection which would indicate that at some point in the future, it will become "supported" and will likely be handled better. But so far, I'd give it a D+ overall for offramp handling with the exception of single lane non-splitting offramp, in which case I'd give it an A.
In-Use: Highway interchanges (TL;DR Grade: "B+")
So far in my use, this is where NoA works best currently.
Scenario #1: Lane you are in splits into two lanes. One stays on highway you are on, the second goes to a different highway you want/need to get where you are going. This is where NoA seems the most "magical" and behaves like a good human driver. Smoothly handles the split in my experiences and takes the highway interchange well and (unlike the onramp experience) will handle curves at normal comfortable speeds (not too fast, but not too slow) and then accelerate smartly back up to (the new) highway speed and handle merging cars OK. It is most magical when it is allowed to stay in it's lane and the lane simply splits. This is because you don't have to activate the turn signal to change lanes like normally you still do as of 2018.42 (I know there will be a feature in the future to waive this requirement).
Scenario #2: New highway you want requires you to be in a specific lane in advance (no split). Very similar to above, except it feels slightly less magical as you have to (with NoA's prompts) to manually move the turn signal stalk in advance to allow NoA to move you into the correct lane. It feels less magical, because it is very similar to how you could have previously did it with normal AP. Still, works fine.
Scenario #3: Double Merges. Does not handle double merges well. This is where cars from one highway are moving to the right most lane to exit the highway while your lane requires you to move from the right lane to the left to stay on your (new) highway. I'll have to try this again to confirm, but I think NoA flashed me some kind of warning message (maybe saying this interchange was "unsupported" or something). In any case, it didn't really handle it well, but I forgot if I instinctively deactivated NoA or if it dumped me into regular AP which I then deactivated. Giving it a demerit for double merge handling but otherwise this is the most impressive feature so far and gives a preview of the future when NoA may really work well in all/most scenarios.
I'm excited to see this evolve and I'll try to update this thread with my own observations with new firmware releases to see how NoA changes.
