Agreed. This is basically EAP with some poor decision making added, some odd regressions, and confusing behavior on top.
I actually disagree with this point somewhat. I have an offramp I've experimented on before, and EAP could navigate it acceptably well but needed to be monitored carefully. NoA made it significantly worse. To the point where I do not trust it whatsoever. Other offramps simply demand you take over immediately before you've completely existed the highway. While I appreciate the early warning that the system can't handle what's about to happen, that does make me think there's some level of HD map data involved instead of relying solely on the sensors.
This is a lot wonky though. With the aggressive changes in speed as the car is approaching an exit, I've had people attempting to speed past me while they take the exit, not realizing my car is about to try to maneuver into the exit lane. Most exits I've attempted with NoA, it moved over as soon as the exit lane began. But there were one or two where it didn't attempt to move into the exit lane until half way down it.
I didn't have NoA suggest I merge into anybody, so that's pretty interesting. But my testing was done at night with a mostly empty highway.
I've not trusted EAP in ending lanes yet. I'm just not confident enough that it will do the right thing while trying to find the middle of a lane that doesn't exist. But I will say that when passing an onramp that doesn't have a dashed line, EAP will violently jerk right to try to find the middle of what is two lanes narrowing into one. This is especially fun on a curved section of highway where it feels like it is way too aggressive. In the winter time, if that happened, my car would have easily spun out and caused a major pile-up. Not NoA specific, but an EAP flaw for sure.
Again, I didn't see any of that in my test. But that's an interesting data point for sure.
This was the most frustrating part of my testing. On a clear, two lane highway, it constantly prompted and dinged to get my attention. Even on a three lane highway, it just always wanted to move left until it was a mile from a planned exit or so. I have no idea why it wanted to move left while traffic was regularly passing me on the left, but I do know that it has no concept of it being the cause of traffic slowing down behind you.
This is a really fundamental rule of the road, and the fact that it's missing is a bit concerning. Then again, it probably prevents the car from wildly seeking the middle of a lane that's merging from the right. So maybe it's a blessing for people that live where 8 lane highways are the norm.
This to me is the most infuriating EAP experience. Here in the northeast US, we have undulating highways, and they seem to cause EAP to really lose its mind and smash the brakes. This is pretty inconvenient for everybody around me when traffic is accelerating to 75+ and suddenly my car wants to go 45. It is completely unacceptable.
Even worse, there are areas around me where highways merge for several miles. The speed limit posted is the normal highway speed. But EAP insists on traveling at least 5 under the posted limit no matter what I do to adjust the speed it selects. If I cancel and resume EAP, it will drive the speed I choose. That's utter nonsense- I'm either on a speed enforced interchange, or I'm on a highway with two route designations. Make up your mind EAP.
I'm probably one of the few people that thinks reading speed limit signs is an awful idea. It's common near me for people to vandalize speed limit signs and either remove digits or modify existing digits to make them something else. So, spray painting a sign that says 65 to make it read 85. A human can easily detect the difference, but I flat out do not trust a neural network to do the same. Another neat practice is for someone to add a "1" prefix to a sign so now it says 170 instead of 70. I'd rather the system flag an event for review by Tesla where it says it read a sign that says something, but the tile data says something else.
The obvious exception is construction zones where temporarily reduced speed limits are common. But in those cases, I frankly don't think people should be using EAP in the first place. It's far too unpredictable.
This is why I think EAP through a construction zone is too much of a hazard. Imagine a worker steps out partially into a lane of traffic. Do we know what EAP will do? My honest fear is that it would hit that person and be none the wiser. There's just too much going on at road work sites to trust a line follower robot to do what needs to be done.
I will say that the deceleration starts earlier and happens much more smoothly than it did in 32.2 for me. I appreciate that, because it was like getting sea sick and whiplash at the same time before. So that's a very welcome improvement.
There was a situation where the car was traveling slower than my set speed but still faster than the speed limit, and it just stuck behind someone. Eventually it did ask me to change lanes, but I couldn't tell if that was just the normal desire to not be in the right-most lane, or it was a real speed adjustment suggestion. They both say the same thing on the screen.
I've had a new experience where I'll put my blinker on fully (Model 3, push the stalk all the way up or down until it can't move further), it will blink a random number of times, the car will do nothing at all, and then turn the blinker off. I was convinced that I wasn't fully pushing the stalk to where it needed to be, but it continues to happen. Auto lane change behavior in general seems wonky. I'm not sure if this is because Tesla are starting to rely more on AI to make driving decisions and relaxing some of the manually coded decisions, or what, but it's a minor frustrating point.
As for features that used to work, I find NoA is introducing flat out wrong choices in some situations. When exiting a highway on an offramp that splits, the navigation knows to stay right, it indicates that it will stay right, and then NoA/EAP absolutely wrenches the car left to attempt to find the middle of a lane that is quickly becoming a granite block protected island. This would be fine if it was just EAP and the system didn't attempt to tell me that it understood how to handle offramps because I'd know that it would try to crash. But the fact that it still says I have a hundred feet before needing to take over is probably going to lull someone into a false sense of security and cause a very serious accident.
This is the only place I deeply disagree with you. MobilEye (now Intel) had over a decade of lead time over everybody in the industry. It wasn't until Intel bought them that any real, solid plans to release their newer platforms came to fruition, and we still have to wait and see what actually comes from them in 2021. I think MobilEye has better automatic high beam control than AP2.x vehicles seem to have, obviously sign recognition is something that exists on the EyeQ platform, but I'm not sure how much of that is actually the EyeQ systems and how much of that is existing componentry sold by Continental. In either event, I find sign reading to be of little or no value in practice.
As for Tesla versus MobilEye, I think it's good to keep in mind that within the span of 2-2.5 years, Tesla has built a system that effectively meets EyeQ3's feature set and implements some of EyeQ4's. I'll actually go so far as to say that MobilEye's claims of Level 3 and 4 autonomy in the EyeQ4 and EyeQ5 platforms is bullshit. Frankly, I've seen some of the demos they've done with Audi on their "level 3" driving, and I just don't see it being much better than EAP plus a third revision of NoA. In fact it's such BS that Audi has basically removed the claim from their A8 and appears to only still be including it in marketing materials. They made a very big deal of how amazing it was and how much of a leap it would be, and then they realized they couldn't convince any legislations to allow it, and that it didn't quite work in the autonomous manner they initially believed. So now they're calling it a driver assistance package instead of autonomous driving.
I will grant this, though. MobilEye are much more on board with using multiple types of sensors to augment their vision platform, and not just using cameras. This is a massive, massive improvement over what Tesla is trying to do with only using vision systems plus a single front facing mid-range radar. At least having some level of surround radar would be an improvement, and I'm actually a pretty big proponent of lidar on top of that, but it seems that war has been won by the "no" votes within Tesla.
