What is your EAP usage pattern? Bumper to bumper traffic or long stretches of highway travels?
Usually my commute is about 20-30 minutes of highway travel at around 70mph, though sometimes it does become bumper to bumper. In both cases, I appreciate it's value. I can't always use it for some parts (for about half of it there are HOV lane entrances that it likes to drive down the middle of so I have to either stay a lane over or drive manually, and when changing from one highway to another it's a dice roll if it will lane change or ignore me entirely when I tell it to change into the ramp lane - safer to do this manually).
I haven't been on a road trip yet but I am looking forward to making use of it when I do.
I don't know if I would say that EAP is worth $5000 (or TACC+EAP is worth $5000) if you only view it as a short term investment, but I expect to keep the car for a decade (as I did my previous car) and thus at $500/yr, less than $50/mo, I feel that the more relaxed driving it enables is worth it. I think that an argument can be made even if you kept it for 3-5 years, it just depends more on what your mental state is worth to you.
TACC alone is a big deal because it helps me alleviate my lead foot. I hate being stuck behind someone, but don't necessarily want to drive fast enough to be passing everyone, and TACC (usually set to max distance) is a great way to not feel crowded and also not feel too slow or too fast. EAP adds on top of that less focus being required on driving down my lane, which allows me to better focus on everything else around me. I am much more relaxed / less stressed.
I've only been in stop and go traffic a few times and EAP was wonderful. With TACC/EAP handling the stopping and going, I'm not stressing about how fast I'm getting there, or if I should change lanes because the other lane is moving faster at that moment, I'm just enjoying the music I'm listening to. With the "responsibility" (in terms of managing distance to vehicle in front etc) taken out of my hands, I'm less inclined to care about the fact traffic is terrible, because I'm not directly fighting with it, just along for the ride / monitoring the situation. It's much less aggrevating. Again of course this is more TACC than EAP, but EAP does improve things.
If I had to say which I valued more, hands down it's TACC. If the option was TACC or EAP but I had to manage speed myself, TACC would be the obvious choice. But EAP I feel is worth it, overall, and I'm sure as they continue to improve it, it will get better.
Though I don't know where EAP will stop and FSD begin. There's been talk of onramp to offramp, but I'm not sure if that will be an EAP feature or FSD. I didn't buy FSD. If I wasn't already buying a car nearly 3x the price of my previous car I would have dug around the couch cushions for another $3k and bought FSD at the time simply because it was cheaper than after the fact (which of course has gone up in price, too). Not because I ever plan to let my car drive itself unattended, but because of FOMO and the relatively small increment cost (before the price increase) for what you theoretically would get. If FSD was already out I would have definitely splurged for it, but as a future promise it wasn't worth $3k now versus $4k (now $5k?) later.
