The specs says Autopilot. What does that mean? Thanks.
Autopilot may or may not be FSD. Stand by for Acronyms:
- TACC = Traffic Aware Cruise Control. General idea: set it for 60 mph. If you're following a car that's going at 50 mph, you end up following it at a distance you roughly set. If the car in front comes to a halt, you do, too. If it starts up again, you follow it, too. It's not perfect: Occasionally, the cameras/smarts will see a shadow on the road and decide that it's a car, slowing down abruptly. Comes with the car.
- Lane Keeping. The various eyeballs in the car find the lanes and keep you inside of them: Look ma, no hands! Works very well on limited access highways. By the by: If you try to drive with No Hands, the car will yell at you, and, eventually, come to a halt. Tesla will not be shy about telling you that this is Beta software, you're taking your life in your hands, and they're not kidding. They want you to keep your hands on the wheel and apply a bit of torque, continuously. They're also using the camera inside the car to see where your eyes are pointing. Point your eyes at a video and it'll detect that: It's also a very, very, stupid idea, and doing anything like that is playing the lottery with the Darwin Awards people. Don't be that idiot - some of them are dead. Lane Keeping is tons better than when it first came out, but it still makes mistakes from time to time.Having said that, the combination of TACC/Lane Keeping isn't bad: It relieves one of the minutia of steering and keeping the speed the same. And, really, having those in operation means that one can keep one's eyes open for Evil up ahead so one can take over before the TACC/LK gets overwhelmed. Comes with the car.
- EAP. Enhanced Autopilot. On Limited Access freeways, this one is smart enough, given a destination, to go into and out of on/off-ramps. Set enough options and it'll change lanes for you, although I find that a bit much. It will suggest lane changes and will change lanes automatically. Which is cool: With all the cameras, you can pretty much forget the dangers of the blind spots since there's cameras pointed right at those spots and the car's good at spotting oncoming vehicles. It'll stop at stoplights and stop signs, the latter being somewhat useless. It will also stop at green lights unless one gives it a confirm on the gas/shifting stalk. If, at a halt behind traffic stopped at a light, and the light changes, it'll follow the traffic through the light. If it's close enough to a car going at speed down the road that goes through a green light (legally), it'll follow that car, othewise it needs the confirmation bit. $$.
- FSD. EAP on steroids. $$$. More integration on changing lanes. I think. Eventually, with this option, when the full City Streets stuff comes out (one is paying money for the house not built yet, by the by), you'll get it. Cheaper now, more expensive later.
- FSD-b. Unlikely you've got this. At the moment, invitation only for FSD holders. Designed to handle city streets, but currently does a great job of giving drivers white hairs. One is basically a test driver for Tesla.
Most likely: You got the TACC/LK package, everybody gets that. Possible: Somebody paid for FSD and you've got that. If the car passes through Tesla's hands/ownership on its way to you, they'll take FSD off the car. If you bought the car from CarMax or something and it had it, you've still got it, and Tesla won't take it off the car, even if you bring it in for service.
Strong Suggestion: You've got a couple-ton car with some wild and crazy automation. It's good automation, it's safer (really!) to drive the car with the automation than not. But it's not your father's automobile. READ THE BLINKING MANUAL, COVER TO COVER, AND TAKE NOTES IF YOU NEED TO. You
don't want to get surprised by some feature or other (or lack thereof). And while you can ask picky questions about this-and-that in a forum like this, the manual is where the answers are. Also: That was a nifty link to the manual, up there. Don't use that one. Go to your account on the Tesla web site, look up Glovebox documents, and download the manual
for your specific car. Don't take any wooden nickels, accept no substitutes. Did you know that the manual changes somewhat after major version number updates of the car's software? now you know.
As an example: Older versions of TACC used RADAR, built into the front of the car, to determine where traffic was up there. Tricky bit: The RADAR doesn't see anything if the velocity difference between the car and anything else is greater than 45 mph. This is great when one is traveling on an interstate, since bridge abutments, guardrails, overhead signs and such disappear from the radar's sight, leaving just other cars traveling at roughly the same speed, sometimes a quarter of a mile ahead.
What that also means: If one was traveling at 65 mph and came up on
stopped traffic, the car wouldn't see the stopped traffic. Oops. Idiots watching videos discovered this "feature" in rather spectacular ways that often ended up with the idiots and/or bystanders deceased. FWIW, Tesla has switched to using the cameras and CPU in the car to see other cars, so that notable 45 mph limit is now history. BUT THERE WERE WARNINGS ALL OVER THE MANUAL ABOUT THE 45 MPH LIMIT; those that didn't read that and realize that Tesla was serious (as were a bunch of other car manufacturers using the same technology) suffered, badly. Don't be those people: READ THE MANUAL.
Congrats on it by the way. And probably after this the pic should be all plugged up in your garage!
