I think I will keep delaying my Model S order until AP 2.0 comes out. AP 1.0 is more gimmick than useful. I don't think they will ever get the features working reliably enough to use without thought.
I'll respectfully disagree with the gimmick part. So... my commute to work is 30 to 45 minutes for 12 miles of driving, including stop and go highway travel along with 10 minute long highway onramp lines that go back 2 or 3 blocks from work.
Just got my Model S on Monday, and this is my second car with automation. My A6 has TACC with LDW, and was already fairly useful and life changing in taking the stress out of parts of my commute, but so I was relatively unimpressed with the MS and didn't even want to buy one at all until 3 months ago. My attitude towards anyone talking about AP was to roll my eyes and say "Your fancy Elon Iron Man car has 1 radar sensor and 1 camera? My Audi has 4 radars and a camera and can barely drive in a straight line unattended. Big whoop."
But at any rate, now that I actually have the car, wow. Autopilot really is like nothing else on the market. It handles drivers cutting into your lane, traffic suddenly slowing down, queuing multiple blocks to an onramp, and many other situations that my Audi doesn't handle. The way it does 95% of the driving is absolutely confidence inspiring and enough to the point that you can pretend to be asleep and do all sorts of stupid stuff with less risk of an accident than attempting to dial a phone number on your smartphone in a traditional car.
For that other 5%, I would say 4.9% of it is extremely obvious that you should take over well in advance. Like entering a sharp hilly curve with no cars around you. Or freeways that suddenly turn into sharp onramps. Or someone ridiculously slow merging into your lane. The other 0.1% are situations that are truly unpredictable or shocking that AP could not handle, and those are tougher to deal with (no replacement for full attention if you want to be the safest you can possibly be).
However, even with AP "1.0", it takes an immense amount of stress off driving. This past week I made 5 round trips to San Francisco. Half were in excruciating stop and go traffic (1.5hrs each way), and half was in monotonous highway cruising. Even with my Audi A6, I would rather pull out my teeth with my bare hands than do that many trips to SF in a week during commute hours. But with the Model S, I barely felt stressed during the whole time, and arrived refreshed. Did I have to intervene? Yeah. Was it a big deal? not at all. Do I think the car is smart enough that I can just read email during my commute? HELL NO, but I'm starting to recognize the circumstances where it isn't the world's riskiest thing to address something urgent on my phone while commuting. Yeah I know I really shouldn't, but shamefully I'll admit it's something I find myself doing once or twice a year regardless of which car I drive, and Autopilot makes that behavior much safer.
Overall, I'd recommend reconsidering AP 1.0 skepticism. We all want it to be better and I'm sure it will be at some point, but even in its current state it is extremely useful and stress reducing.
