I carefully noted it was just a data point of one. ... I'd be curious on the differences between those who own an X or an S (and have one set of expectations), vs. brand new owners. Age. Gender. Culture. Previous vehicles owned. Eyesight. Bifocals required or not. And so on.
I'm probably an outlier - Roadster owner who never owned an S/X (and only drove each for less than a day). I'm puzzled at Roy's emphatic insistence that AP in Model 3 "sucks." I think he's got it completely wrong in many areas:
1) He says it's OK to have driving-important information like the speedometer and fault telltales in the center screen, but not the status of the AutoPilot. That's ridiculous! If anything
he has it backwards. When auto-piloting, one doesn't need to be on top of every detail like one does when manually driving, so it's less important to have the feedback right in front when auto-piloting. So when he complains about the "hands on the wheel" alert not being in the cluster, yet is OK with Speedometer and critical faults, he's flat-out wrong, IMHO.
Matter of fact, I'd argue that since
everything is on the touchscreen now, it's better because you only have 1 place to look for information, not two different ones.
2) He says Model 3's AP is a step backwards "
because semi-autonomous driving systems require human interaction. The more complex and capable a semi-autonomous system, the more critical the human-machine interface (HMI)." Again, in my view
he has it backwards. The
more capable the AP system is, the
less you need to mess with the controls while auto-piloting. Which brings us to the next item:
3) After saying how fine it is that normal driving controls are now all on the touchscreen ("
I felt liberated from the tyranny of traditional car dashboards full of knobs and buttons."), Roy goes on to complain about the lack of hard controls for AutoPilot. I find that bizarre. While Auto-Piloting I want to be tweaking controls
less than when manually driving.
And that's the heart of the matter as to why I think Alex Roy's Auto-Pilot critique is completely wrong. He thinks there shouldn't an an "Auto" in Auto-Pilot, that it's important for drivers to get the results they want by changing the parameters by which Auto-Pilot works. That's silly. I go into Auto-Pilot precisely so I don't have to be constantly tweaking controls, whether it's pedal and steering, or stalks to flip and twist. I don't
want to be telling Auto-Pilot to do its job differently while it's doing that job.
Think about it, why would I want to be switching, as Roy says, between 3 and 4 second follow distances on the same road? Why would I want to adjust the max speed, as Roy says, by 5 or 10 MPH increments on the same road? We don't need quick shortcuts to those parameters, because we shouldn't be changing them. The only reason I can fathom why someone would want to continuously tweak them is because Auto-Pilot isn't doing its job. What could be going on is that Roy just can't let go. He wants Auto-Pilot to drive the car like he would, but that's not it's goal. The goal is to drive the car more safely than people would. If that means a second longer follow distance, so be it - once we're all on AP traffic won't jam up as much and we'll get there faster anyway.