[ericd]

I didn't realize how good Teslas had gotten until I had the chance to spend significant time in one. Their insane acceleration was always apparent, but they've gotten really good in other ways as well.

They've had a chance to do a clean sheet rethinking of cars, and it works wonderfully well. If you have your phone on you, you just walk up to the car and the door is unlocked and on by the time you touch it. There's no "start" button, you just press the brake, push the mode stalk to drive or reverse, and go. When you walk away, the car locks itself silently and turns off. Depending on whose key it depends, the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors are adjusted by the time you sit down.

There's no "idling" to keep the AC on, so there's no guilt about doing it. They've recently added a very efficient heat pump that shares loops with the battery so the heat doesn't drain much, either. We spent an hour in the car with AC on recently, it used about 1 mile of range.

I thought I'd hate the touchscreen controls, but what I didn't realize was that you generally don't need to use them while driving. Wipers and climate are automatic and work well, so there's no real need to adjust them. The voice control is incredibly good, and seems to have access to almost every non-driving setting. Press a button on the steering wheel, and speak "Set wipers to auto", "I'm cold", "Play Spanish Moon by Little Feat", "Navigate home". They all work as you'd expect.

Jury is still out on "autopilot", lane following and dynamic cruise control are fine, but the onscreen world representation (cars, especially) is very jittery. I guess not too surprising, it's a DNN making guesses about the state of the world, but I'm surprised there's not a more persistent context vector between states. If it's very sure about a car being there in frames 1-10, it should really not expect that car to just blip out of existence in frame 11.

But overall, I'm extremely impressed, and I think I'll have a hard time going back to cars by traditional automakers. The impression is of a holistic design that's extremely well integrated, rather than the impression of a hodge podge of poorly integrated new and old systems that I've gotten with any car with an "infotainment" system that I've ever used.

[powerbroker]

I have been driving two Teslas over the last few years. I find that their voice recognition to be roughly 75-85% accurate. More important, the manuals for the cars have not correctly described operation of voice commands for over a year. This speaks volumes to the software culture at Tesla. If you can't make the code conform to the documentation, you really can't trust the code.

[CrazyStat]

I've had my Model X for almost three years now. I find the voice control to be almost completely unusable. Seems to be something about my voice, though I have a fairly typical American accent so I'm not sure what. I demonstrated the issue to a technician when I took it in for unrelated service, thinking it might be a faulty microphone, but it worked fine for him.

Definitely one of the most disappointing features of the car, which I generally love driving.

[ericd]

Oof sorry, sounds like they should add your voice to the training dataset.

[ericd]

True, discoverability via docs needs work. But looks like lots of users have picked up the slack there.

[powerbroker]

Nothing that the users do will correct a company culture that actually has the wrong way to operate the car described in its manuals. This is the kind of communication that pervades the company, top to bottom. I don't know if they fail to understand how their cars work, or if they deliberately exaggerate.

[ericd]

Ah I thought that you meant the commands weren’t listed. What are they incorrectly describing? I’ve seen some other examples of this (notably, the getting started tutorials mention getting to the manual via a Tesla T at the top of the touchscreen, which has gone missing).

[powerbroker]

Model X Owners Manual October 2020 (2020.44) manual, page 53 -- and the corresponding page in the Model S Owners Manual. Tesla changed the operation of their voice command button around December of 2019. The manual describes two ways to signal a complete command has been vocalized -- but only one truly works. Since the 'update notes' are extremely sparse, there was never a hint in the car's instrument cluster explanation of the update, that Tesla had removed the protocol for invoking the voice commands.

If Tesla will 'forget' to tell you that a feature is removed, or changed, then expect similar behavior around edge conditions for FSD if it ever materializes. For example, a number of different protocols could be added, tried, removed revolving around contention at 4-way stop signs. If the update notes are silent on FSD adopted behavior, a lot of annoyance and potential hazards will be created.

[FDSGSG]

Have you actually driven new comparably priced cars by "traditional automakers"? There's not many things where Tesla is actually significantly ahead Audi, BMW and Mercedes.