So far I've had the Tesla for about 6 weeks and love it. It's hard to explain to people that it's more than just a car, but it really feels like that (it feels like the future and also the self driving is fantastic). I've owned an Infinity G37S before so I have some (though not a ton) of perspective for comparison. Autopilot 2.0 is insane! It uses 12 ultrasonic sensors, front end radar, and 8 cameras (3 in front, 2 on each side, and 1 in back) to steer itself. I'm a safe driver in that I avoid high risk scenarios (changing lanes into someone's blind spot etc.), but I honestly feel that at least 90% of the time it does a better job than I do. That's the tricky part with automation..think of it this way:
Probably around 90% of the roads I drive on have very well marked lanes, speed limit signs, and are made up of straight sections and simple, gradual curved sections. This is very easy for a computer to navigate through (when you give the computer the rules and the eyes). However, 10% or so is more complex... stop signs (which may be turned 30 degrees or 10 feet away from the road), stop lights (is that a stop light? or a red circular light from a bicycle on the overpass I'm coming up on?). Humans then shine because we are good at improve. Call it connecting the dots or common sense. Computers struggle there because they typically need exact parameters and then the risk of a false positive or false negative are a matter of probability.
So there are certainly obstacles to overcome, however with Fleet Learning I believe all of that will be resolved. The car doesn't have to be able to consider something with no historic experience. Right now my car gets a little wobbly when driving over a hill as it's hard for the cameras to see ahead. So.. how can it see over a hill? Well it doesn't really need to because humans can't either. What it should do is remember what it was like last time and assume the road is still there on the other end of the hill. How does it learn this? My understanding is that when I don't like something autopilot did and then when I turn it off at that spot, Tesla gets that information over the air and logs it as a spot that needs fine tuning. I'm not sure if Tesla is doing this for all spots or for everything. I'm not sure how much relevant data my car holds on to, or how much it may rely on an internet connection (like loading a new level in a video game.. is my car loading information about roads in a 25 mile radius to improve my autopilot experience)?
I've been really impressed and I come from an automation background so I understand how complex their problems must be on the ground level.
Specific things about the car that have really impressed me:
- I was behind a truck at a stop sign. The truck was 2 or 3 feet into the perpendicular road in front of us which was causing drivers on that road to have to swerve a little to avoid him. My car (must have been the radar) saw this as a potential crash event and started beeping at me and turned the graphic of the truck on my dash RED. Search YouTube if you want to see videos of instances of the car predicting actual crashes.
- It goes 0-60 in 4.3 seconds with virtually no noise. There is no transmission so no gear shift. Also.. no engine so you don't have RPM and then Speed as seperate things. You tell the car you wanna go fast (by pressing on the accelerator pedal) and it directly spins the tires at the ramp up rate it's programmed to do because the motor is inline with the tires. It feels like alien technology is pulling you forward because it's almost a constant G-force.
- Charging it isn't nearly as awkward and time consuming as I thought it'd be! Each night (just for habit) I plug it in at my garage. It charges about 30 miles worth of range every hour at home (If I needed to I could double that speed by installing a faster charger). Plugging it in takes 5 seconds and on my normal commute to work, I never have to worry about refueling. So no gas stations in 6 weeks. No smell of gas. My car has 250 miles of range, so if I'm going far I'll use the Tesla Supercharging Network which is free for me and charges much faster than home.
- The autopilot is not just a gimmick. I use it between 80% and 90% of the time which means I feel much less drained when I arrive anywhere.
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