[yourapostasy]

Tesla Autopilot 2 failed to impress me for my specific use case. I have elderly parents, and city-street capable Autopilot would have made a sale at the test drive; the constant cognitive strain of defensively driving is very stressful for them though they put up with it for now, and such a feature would immensely add to their quality of life.

When I took the Tesla test drive in a Model X with my parents, the rep took pains to educate us about the limitations of Autopilot. Lane following in the highway, below 50 mph around curves, and doesn't recognize traffic lights in the highway. Can't avoid collisions below 7 mph. Can't lane follow in city streets. Can't self-drive on main city thoroughfares. I'm probably missing the message, but I don't see how this is that much more revolutionary than a Honda Sensing suite that I could purchase in a 2018 Odyssey [1]. For all the Reality Distortion Field is putting out from Tesla, I was expecting more.

As it was, I can see value if I sit in rush hour traffic on the highway for an hour or more each day, each way. But unfortunately, that is not my use case. And I can get the same tech on other more mature platforms to address the bulk of the value for that use case.

A lot is riding on Tesla's promise to bring full autonomy In The Future. I fail to see how they are besting Waymo at productizing full autonomy or even taking the next incremental steps towards that goal. If I wasn't in software and following what Waymo et al were doing to move towards full autonomy, then I would probably be dazzled, but I'm struggling to figure out how Tesla's driver assistive tech is getting us to full autonomy faster than Waymo.

I'm on the Model 3 waiting list, but that test drive has me seriously re-considering a 2018 Honda Odyssey instead. I'd welcome feedback on what I missed.

[1] https://automobiles.honda.com/sensing

[carlivar]

Odd. I drove in a Tesla and the owner showed off the Autopilot by having the car stay in a city street lane and have the car stop itself as the car in front of it stopped at a red light. When the car in front continued on, so did the Tesla.

My Odyssey can't do that.

Now I'm confused why Tesla would sound so limited, unless they are trying to cover their ass legally on how you SHOULD use autopilot versus how you CAN use it?

[yourapostasy]

Hoping Tesla owners will jump in here with clarifications/corrections. My understanding is you can engage Autopilot as long as there are lines to follow, but it gets dodgy in many city street driving situations [1], so many owners simply follow Tesla's advice and only engage Autopilot on simpler highways. By the time you get to the point where you have to cognitively engage all the time supervising Autopilot for the odd situations, you might as well only engage adaptive cruise control.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Does-Tesla-Autopilot-work-on-city-subu...