My daily commute is 40 miles round trip and in the past five years I had been driving a Infiniti G37x over 50k miles. I'm a bit impatient on the highway and most time I'm over 80mph on the left lane. Not surprisingly I got one speeding ticket every year or two and frankly I deserve it. Even worse, I'm also easily distracted when driving on local roads so my G37 rear-ended people five times. Three with no scratches so all were good, but the other two were $5k and $7.5k each. The last one ($7.5k) happened month ago and the insurance company decided to total the car.
Of course I had been eyeing at Tesla for quite a while and the last accident helped me to pull the trigger. I placed an order for a basic SR+ right the next day. The top reason I decided to buy M3 is that joy of instant torque and fast acceleration - I knew I'd love to drive it fast (but not too fast given my driving habits). The second is the anti collision feature that hopefully will stop me from eventually rear-ending half of the cars around the city. Autopilot? I heard enough bad stories on internet I didn't give it a serious thought.
Now two weeks later after driving the SR+ over 700 miles, it's amazing to see how the car completely changed me. Totally unexpected, my driving mentality/personality flipped 180 degree after getting used to autopilot. I become perfectly happy to stay behind other cars, letting autopilot do as much driving as possible and keeping the distance. I even have no problem to "crawl" under 60mph on the right lane because, heck, I'm not the one with foot on pedal driving the car so I just don't care. Traffic jam changes from hell to nothing, b/c I can totally relax with autopilot on as long as I don't have to rush. I do keep my left hand on steering wheel and my eyes on road, but still like many people said, it's so much less taxing with autopilot. To me it's like 70% less tiring on everyday commute.
In the end, I realized that I didn't just buy a car made by Tesla, I actually got a chauffeur from Tesla too doing 70% of my driving. Or, it's like I'm riding the free Uber everyday. More importantly, I believe that autopilot helped me to become a so much safer driver to everyone else on the road and to myself. It's just fantastic!
Of course, I still enjoy tremendously to sprint the car time to time, but for my daily commute M3's autopilot is godsend and the biggest surprise to me in terms of owning a Tesla.
Now I'm just patiently waiting for the FSD to be fully implemented before forking over $7k...
Of course I had been eyeing at Tesla for quite a while and the last accident helped me to pull the trigger. I placed an order for a basic SR+ right the next day. The top reason I decided to buy M3 is that joy of instant torque and fast acceleration - I knew I'd love to drive it fast (but not too fast given my driving habits). The second is the anti collision feature that hopefully will stop me from eventually rear-ending half of the cars around the city. Autopilot? I heard enough bad stories on internet I didn't give it a serious thought.
Now two weeks later after driving the SR+ over 700 miles, it's amazing to see how the car completely changed me. Totally unexpected, my driving mentality/personality flipped 180 degree after getting used to autopilot. I become perfectly happy to stay behind other cars, letting autopilot do as much driving as possible and keeping the distance. I even have no problem to "crawl" under 60mph on the right lane because, heck, I'm not the one with foot on pedal driving the car so I just don't care. Traffic jam changes from hell to nothing, b/c I can totally relax with autopilot on as long as I don't have to rush. I do keep my left hand on steering wheel and my eyes on road, but still like many people said, it's so much less taxing with autopilot. To me it's like 70% less tiring on everyday commute.
In the end, I realized that I didn't just buy a car made by Tesla, I actually got a chauffeur from Tesla too doing 70% of my driving. Or, it's like I'm riding the free Uber everyday. More importantly, I believe that autopilot helped me to become a so much safer driver to everyone else on the road and to myself. It's just fantastic!
Of course, I still enjoy tremendously to sprint the car time to time, but for my daily commute M3's autopilot is godsend and the biggest surprise to me in terms of owning a Tesla.
Now I'm just patiently waiting for the FSD to be fully implemented before forking over $7k...
