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by grecy 2447 days ago
> Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count

I don't think you're being very accurate there. There are lots of videos of people commuting 50+ miles to and from work every day without touching anything while on the interstates, including interchanges. It's doing a lot more than just lane keeping.

4 comments

I disagree. It’s completely fair. Handling basic tasks on nice freeways is exactly what adaptive cruise control + lane keeping is for. Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims.
What other vehicle will change lanes by itself, and take on/off ramps through interchanges to take you where your navigation is routed, without you touching a single thing?
You have to keep touching the wheel or it will disengage. It sounds like you’ve never used it.
OK, sure. You have to touch the wheel or it turns off.

What I mean is, you are not providing input to the wheel, or pedals, or turn signal or driving the car in any way. You're just letting it know you have not fallen asleep.

And, yes, thanks for asking, I have used it.

None, because every other manufacturer is more concerned about not killing people than they are about releasing beta features for cars. The most surprising thing to me about autopilot is that Tesla hasn't been sued into oblivion for it.
>Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims.

Perhaps you should check more frequently? Here is a video of a Tesla on Autopilot stopping for a stop sign:

https://electrek.co/2019/05/29/tesla-autopilot-stop-sign-mak...

Based on the description in that article, it doesn’t seem that the Tesla autonomously reacted to the stop sign, so much as it slowed to a stop before making a right turn based on its navigation system. The driver says he had to manually start AutoPilot after the stop for it to initiate the right turn:

> “The car always stops at the end of a highway exit since Navigate on Autopilot. At the stop, you just need to touch the accelerator to start Autopilot again without Navigate on Autopilot. I didn’t accelerate, you just need to touch the accelerator for less than a second and the car will do the rest at the intersection.”

Perhaps you should confirm what it's actually doing in the video? Tesla itself says that stop sign and traffic light handling is in shadow mode only [1].

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-autopilot-fsd-traffic-light-...

I have never seen another TACC implementation that doesn’t ping from side to side.

Which cars have you drive with a superior cruise control implementation?

Tesla will "ping" you straight into a concrete wall at full speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z8v9he74po

It's trying to center in an extremely large lane. An easy fix would be to not have a huge concrete wall jutting into the middle of the freeway without lane markers.

I feel like people forget human drivers hit those same barriers with alarming frequency.

The lane markings looked pretty clear in this instance.

That being said, Tesla's cruise control capabilities are best in class, but it's misleading marketing-speak to call it true self-driving.

Comma ai's OpenPilot makes freeway driving really nice. I've gone miles without touching pedals or the wheel, it's definitely better than stock. Though I haven't tried AP on Tesla, and OpenPilot is basically just a really good LKA and ACC.
Cadillac super cruise worked pretty damn well when I used it in a rental last month.
Freeways are a very ideal environment - wide, clearly marked lanes, no traffic lights, no pedestrians/bikes, no random stops, no navigation ambiguity. Unless Tesla has self driving cars on city roads (which all of the others so), they can't really be part of the same conversation.
I recently drove on the other side of the road for the first time. Staying in the same lane on a freeway was the easiest part of it.
Sure but specifically the staying in its lane feature doesn't work.