It's fascinating to watch this technology develop, but as a driver I usually feel more anxious using "autopilot" that not using it.

With one huge exception: self parallel-parking.

I don't understand why this innovation doesn't get more love. Tesla's not the only manufacturer to offer this, of course, but this particular innovation has increased m enjoyment of city driving more than ... well, more than anything I can think of.

Even if they never get anything else to work, it would have been worth it just for self parallel-parking. lol

From an engineering perspective, of course there are serious problems that need attention, but sometimes it also good to celebrate the wins.

> I don't understand why this innovation doesn't get more love.

It's been in the Prius since 2003.

> With one huge exception: self parallel-parking.

I agree. It's really nice to have the radar say "Yes, that space is big enough." and then put the car into it.

That's basically true, but there's no reason to limit it to Autopilot. Although the high points of AP are better than any other system that I've tried so far. I've seen it do amazingly well in the rain at night, and in the rain on a road with faded markings that were hard to pick out. I've also seen it thoroughly confused by double-dashed lines at hov lanes.

I'll still take that over the ones that beep proudly to tell you that they are about to fail to maintain their lane (hi ProPilot).

> I've seen it do amazingly well in the rain at night

Not anymore, since they removed the radar. Rain seems to really interfere with the vision based system, and apparently auto high beams are required at night, and they flash constantly.

Yeah, I know. The vision based one seems to be more limited in the rain at the moment. I'm questionable as to whether this will be a long term problem, since it does so well at picking up lane line markers. It seems like a solvable issue.

The high beams are a different story. I only like to use auto-high-beam on rural roads as they tend to be problematic on busy highways in Tesla and my non-Tesla. But requiring them even on highways would be a big problem that I don't foresee them solving soon. I'm worried that this is going to take a long time to fix.

IMO, they actually work pretty well on rural roads.

Rain really interferes with human vision based systems as well. It's insanity that we don't better design road markings to better compensate. It's often the case where old painted-over lines are more visible on wet roads than the current markings. Making road information systems standardized and better for humans works out great for autonomous cars.

Why did they remove radar?

It's worth noting that Subaru vehicles have been doing vision-only adaptive cruise / lane keeping / emergency braking for many years, which they brand Eyesight. In my personal experience its adaptive cruise is as good or better than most other cars I've driven which use radar.

(Admittedly the reasons why the Subaru impressed me was more for its programming rather than absolute precision. I liked how smoothly it transitioned between following and open road ahead. Much less jerky.)

Long term: Vision is better, and less prone to false errors (see all the talk of phantom breaking).

I think it was on the way out by maybe 2022

Short term: Global chip shortage made supply tight, and it was either remove it and rush out with the no radar code branch, or stop shipping cars.

Long term I think it's a fine decision, but short term it's kind of a big thing to rush.

Does it give you pause that practically every other company pursing self-driving cars disagrees with Tesla?

Sure, in 5 years we will see what shakes out. I am not taking my entire savings and investing in tesla stock or anything.

That said, i want a cool fast BEV that makes highway driving easier. Right now, Tesla is the only option. A few others are close. If someone else beats Tesla to FSD with another system, I will be happy to go that way on my next car. Working FSD is worth a lot to me.

Cost saving

To buy more bitcoins.

love react because HN only does upvotes. I feel like they're straying from their mission. They did really well with moving the market but now that the market is moving, I have a hard time believing Tesla will stay at the top.

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the clip of autopilot hallucinating flying traffic lights was that it was clearly DUI and there’s no way I’m getting in the car with that guy.

I actually don’t want autopilot for the fast, freeway speed driving. That’s easy. I want it for the mundane, exhausting stop-and-go, bumper to bumper traffic as we all slowly creep through the traffic.

There are already cruise control systems that do this for you

That's all Autopilot is, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Autopilot doesn't react to stoplights, stop signs, or basically anything else. That is a separate feature set that they misleadingly call Full Self Driving.

I think it still doesn't read speed limit signs either like it used to be capable of, but some areas are programmed in.

You can once again - https://electrek.co/2020/08/29/tesla-software-update-visuall...

It was lost due to Tesla's decision to remove MobilEye as a supplier.

Mobileye generally focuses on highly optimized HW/SW that does individual things very well, in a manner similar to how factory automation works (e.g., they basically built a "lane keeping + auto-braking + sign reading" appliance).

Tesla decided that 1) It was bad to outsource automation 2) Starting from scratch and 'learning' how to drive using ML was better than iteratively teaching a car how to do discrete tasks very very well (this is why Autopilot regressed a bunch in 2016).

In general, it's another symptom of Elon's 'I have an extremely specific idea, let's figure out' mentality that sometimes works and sometimes results in useless tunnels under Las Vegas.

They don’t typically work below 25 MPH, and definitely don’t stop and go and keep you within the lane.

That was true of older systems, most newer adaptive cruise control systems I've used have no issue with stop and go traffic.

A Model 3 owner confirms this...

My Toyota Corolla with Toyota Safety Sense 2.0 (fitted in nearly every Toyota post 2018/2019) has stop and start, either press resume if you've stopped for more than 5 seconds or tap the accelerator, and that's with lane tracing assist as well. I don't think there's a second I don't have both Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Tracing Assist activated.

Edit: You can also accelerate without disabling it.

I feel like I missed a huge generational gap driving a 2017 toyota. None of this lane assist, no backup camera, the only new bell and whistle I get that's different from my car 20 years ago is that this one beeps at me like I have a missile locked on my tail when someone is too close in front of me.

Best part is it's standard on nearly every model. I don't think there's a minute when I don't have it enabled and it's full range so works at any speed and road. The millimetre wave radar is great when road markings aren't visible or when cars are manoeuvring around parked cars or other obstacles.

I think only the new Honda L3 system(only on one very limited edition car in Japan) and a Subaru tech on some mainstream cars(in the US too) have this capability.

My Kia EV does exactly this, and is fairly competent at it.

My mom's Subaru Forester does hands-off stop-and-go traffic from 0 to 90 mph. It has 2 cameras and does lane departure too. It will even activate antilock breaks if it needs to panic stop.

Hyundais have exceptionally-good lane-following.

I believe this one does all of those: https://www.toyota.com/safety-sense/animation/pcspd

Most cars support this here in Europe at least. However true traffic jam assist seems reserved for cars with automatic gears.

Naturally. In my manual North American market Miata I have basic cruise control but if you touch the clutch or gear selector it disengages cruise. I can’t imagine a safe system that would work in stop and go traffic with a manual transmission.

Cruise control in a manual Miata feels only slightly less wrong than an automatic Miata.

Or maybe I'm just salty that my cruise control has never worked.

I only use it in the rare times I'm driving on a quiet highway for long multi-hour stretches. That's definitely not my preferred way of driving, as I usually trade around a half hour of extra travel time to take more winding, fun, and scenic routes.

The current VW Golf R has adaptive cruise control available with the manual transmission. I test-drove one. Not sure whether it does stop-start or whether this applies to other trim levels. Unfortunately it was not available yet when I got my 2015.

> They don’t typically work below 25 MPH, and definitely don’t stop and go and keep you within the lane.

Eh? Yes they do. Bizarre lie.

Maybe their system doesn't ? older version? Broken system? Why assume they're lying?

Just off the top of my head - Honda Sensing works in stop-and-go traffic and keeps you within the lane.

Honda Sense lane keeping is only for > 40mph. In addition, you need to press a button if the vehicle completely stops.

Subaru Eyesight goes down to zero and handles stop and go with lane centering. Though I guess provided you've started the adaptive cruise control system above the minimum speed.

It's not smooth though. Once traffic starts again, Eyesight accelerates hard and then brakes hard when it get up to the car, because it's using cruise control and trying get up to speed and there is a minimum speed (25mph? maybe 10mph? i forget) to set the cruise control.

You could try setting the acceleration curve (eco/gentle) and increase the follow distance.

Not sure if it’s different now, but older models activated Lane Keeping Assist at 45mph and keeps lanes down to 40, and always seems to be just out of reach of usefulness in the city, perhaps by design.

LKA is just that, an assist, because if you let it drive it’ll bounce back and forth between the lane markers, not keep you seemingly centered.

My BMW 5 series does that. Huh. That's only when I ever use it.

May I ask, is traveling through a bumper to bumper traffic a frequent occurrence for you? If so, are there options for you to avoid it (e.g. change commuting times, work from home, walk, bike, or use public transportation)? If also yes, why do you tolerate it?

Personally I see bumper to bumper traffic maybe 3 or 4 times a year (when driving home from a vacation or being forced to a doctor’s appointment during rush hour). And I honestly don’t get why anyone would subjugate them self to this kind of traffic as part of their daily commute.

Consider yourself very lucky. Not everyone has the luxury of working from home, choosing their working hours or living close to public transit or within walking/biking distance from their job (in many areas, the farther you get away from city centers, the cheaper the real estate generally is).

In the NYC area, bumper to bumper traffic is common. It can be caused by an accident or construction that blocks one or more lanes, cars merging on to an already congested highway, etc. These conditions frequently happen even outside of rush hour.

> I honestly don’t get why anyone would subjugate them self to this kind of traffic as part of their daily commute.

You may have trouble understanding it, but empirically a huge number of people see this extremely regularly, if not daily.

It's not even necessarily a feature of horrifically long commutes. For one example, lots of places that have basically ok traffic have bottlenecks at bridges, you may be stop and go for a little while every day getting across that.

"Nobody drives that route at that time; it's too crowded."

Lot's of people have to be at particular places at particular times. Hence, the rush hour.

Try living in New York City, the whole tristate, not just Manhattan. 3 to 4 times a year is laughable. Try 30 to 40 times a year if you take the Belt Parkway.

I used to live in LA where Santa Monica Blvd was always backed up. I doubt LA traffic has gotten better either.

I'm surprised by your insolence with regard to how shitty traffic circumstances are in big cities. Simply changing one's commuting times doesn't failsafe the issue.

30-40 times a year if you own a car and drive it regularly. That's why > 50% of households in NYC don't own a car.

Large parts of NYC (much of the outer boroughs) are not near the subway, and not within walking distance of a supermarket (especially if you're carrying groceries for an entire family). Millions of people live there because they can't afford Manhattan rents, especially for a family-sized apartment.

Also, transit lines tend to connect well to mid-Manhattan but poorly between other locations. So if you live in Queens and work in Brooklyn, good luck getting to work reliably by public transportation. (Before you object to that arrangement, consider: If you own a house and have kids in school, you're not necessarily going to uproot your family and move just because your new job is further from home.)

Thus, many ordinary New Yorkers rely on cars to commute to work.

Some parts of Brooklyn are much nicer than the ratnest known as Manhattan. Manhattan is so overcrowded. It's a bad place to raise a family. Someone can literally shoot or stab you in broad daylight and easily get away with it. All they have to do is merge into the crowds of pedestrians. Then perhaps they descend into one of the many subway lines, conveniently escaping, scot-free.

when first living in NYC I had a station wagon, previously gifted to me. Not being from the area I couldn't believe there wasn't a decent supermarket. I had another friend out in Long Island near one. I got several Manhattanite friends to come along, none having ever driven. The experience was hilarious, all around. From the traffic, the experience of a wallowing beast of a Pontiac wagon on the LIE, and then the best part, one guy who'd literally NEVER left the City absolutely MARVELED at the selections as the store. Notable quotes being "I've only seen this brand on TV!" and "How could anyone EVER need a TWO-GALLON SIZE tub of laundry detergent?"

I did a quick google map survey and found that it can take about an hour to commute on public transit between a residential area in Queens and to a commercial area in Brooklyn[1]. Not ideal until you see that driving the same route takes about 40 min. So not a huge different and definitely passes as an alternative to avoid the risk of stop-and-go traffic jams.

If you need to drive to the supermarket you should have the option of choosing a time and route with minimal risk of traffic jams. I find it hard to belief that many people are frequently hitting bumper to bumper traffics on their way to or from the supermarket. Occupationally yes, but frequently no.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/84-25+168th+Pl,+Jamaica,+NY+...

82.2% of Staten Island own at least one vehicle. Averages aren't the greatest summary statistics..

The population of the tristate is nearly 20 million. Even a tenth of that is a lot of cars on the road.

This question was specifically addressed to those that have the option of avoiding it and still don’t. I was under the impression that there were several options of escaping bumper to bumper traffic on your daily commute in the New York City area.

In fact I’ve often heard people from that area complain more often about lack of parking near their commuter rail station. Which indicates that people do rather tolerate circling the parking lot in their park-and-ride rather then risking stop-and-go traffic jams.

What do you mean by "have the option?" There is not an option to avoid the random traffic bottlenecks causes by construction, accidents, road closures, and just generally poor infrastructures and even worse drivers. The traffic lights have also been increased in both count and magnitude to induce even more delay. The speed limits have been lowered. The road conditions are abysmal, potholes, cracks, and unevenness abound. You know nothing Jon Snow.

That’s better than dead grandma who is leaning her foot on the gas just so to get you to keep the same speed aka cruise control. Dead grams is in many many cars.