Since this has pretty well morphed into the Tesla thread I’ll speak a bit on that topic today.
As mentioned upthread my GF has a Model Y. I’ve ridden in hers a bunch, although not under self-driving. I’ve never owned, rented, or driven any Tesla. Until this last weekend.
I now have a whopping 15-20 miles of suburban boulevard and side street human-controlled driving under my belt. Color me an instant expert. Not!
My impressions are that it took about 3 stop & go’s to get used to one-pedal driving. And it’s a very quiet pleasant car with good acceleration and braking, and well-harmonized steering.
The always-on lane departure warning / prevention (not self driving) is much gentler and smoother than that of my newer fancier BMW. The Tesla system feels skillful; the BMW system feels scared and stupid and panicky by comparison.
For a car that small (or at least non-huge) it has the turning radius of the Exxon Valdez. I had thought my GF just sucked at parking. Then I drove it and I see why she struggles. The large turning radius makes ordinary parking lots too narrow, and narrow parking lots extra too narrow. The camera system is pitiful compared to non-Teslas when it comes to parking assistance. How quickly we come to depend on the cameras to get well-centered and straight in our space.
I did enjoy the chime when it saw the traffic light had turned green. Every car should have one of those. Followed 2 seconds later by an angry NJ-accented voice shouting “Quit texting and start driving!!” if the driver hasn’t already reacted somehow.
I look forward to having a chance to drive it on the freeway and to exercise the FSD features.
I’m not to the point of using any of the advanced features of her car. I’d like to be more comfortable doing it myself so I can detect screwups in time to prevent crunching noises.
She apparently does use self-driving, but not self-parking. She admits she has little clue what’s on most of the menus and screens in the car. Radio (Spotify) off/on and HVAC temp up/down are about all she uses. The rest is a mystery.
It parallel parks very well and won’t attempt it if there isn’t enough space. It will also back into parking spaces in lots if the aren’t slanted and have relatively clear marked lines. It’s very slow (some say way too slow) during the parking maneuvers.
Around here the usual use case for the places we’d be going is parking straight in at 90 degrees to the “lane” in the parking lot. FL is a rear-plate only state, so in most cases butt-first parking is discouraged or outright prohibited.
The extra spice in our use cases is when we park at my building it’s inside a extra-snug parking structure with concrete pillars and walls everywhere. Including flanking one side of most spaces. Quite the maze, and any failure to avoid an obstacle will be expensive.
The top down view thing in other cars is nice. I usually park far way or back in. The mirrors can be set to automatically dip in reverse, and along with the backup camera the two side fender cameras appear on the screen when in reverse. This provides lots of information when backing in tight spaces; just don’t swing the nose into a pillar.
If the car doesn’t show the side cameras in reverse, then when it’s in reverse swipe up or down (I don’t remember which) on the backup camera view to show two more views.
This is a self driving thread, and the self parallel parking is one place that I agree works very well. The screen interactions to make it park are pretty easy, just don’t use it for the first time on a busy street with a line of inpatient cars waiting for you to figure it out.
The parallel parking is good enough that I’ll use it when I need to parallel park over doing it myself, even when the space would be an easy one to fit in manually.
The non-parallel parking system is not nearly as good, which is odd, because it should be easier than parallel parking. Starting with being difficult to pick a space. If there is only one space free, then it is easy, but if there are multiple spaces free there is nothing to indicate which “P” zone on the screen corresponds to which parking space. At work, I want to avoid the space covered in bird poop, because of the light pole extending over it, but all I see on the screen is a row of available spaces, with no context.
Once selecting a space, it is very slow about maneuvering into it. Lots of lock-to-lock steering movement and adjusting. When it finishes it often needs to be readjusted manually, and almost always needs to be moved back another foot in the space.
I agree with most of that. It’s unintuitive which space you are choosing in the lot and will have handicap spots and sometimes areas that aren’t really legitimate spaces as choices. However, I have found that when it does park, it does a great job.
This is one of my complaints as well (nice description btw). Our old Subaru Forester can do u-turns nearly everywhere. You have to plan for a 3-point turn with a Tesla.
Then, Lyu’s day took a turn for the worse. At a stoplight, his Tesla turned left onto Colorado Avenue, but it missed the lane for cars. Instead, it plunged onto a street-grade light rail track between the road’s vehicle traffic lanes, paved but meant solely for trains on LA’s Metro E Line. He couldn’t just move over — a low concrete barrier separates the lanes, and a fence stands on the other side.
There is video of the turn in an X post embedded in the article.
OT anecdote: Decades ago I was on a city bus in Rome on a crowded street. In the center was a single-track trolley line separated from the traffic lanes by curbs on either side except, of course at the intersections. As the bus was sitting there a Fiat zipped by in the trolley lane.
Thirty seconds later he was back, in reverse as fast as he could go as a trolley rode his front bumper, constantly clanging its bell. The bus erupted in laughter.
Can’t disagree with the other complaints here. I miss the turning radius on my old BMW E46. I ended up switching routes into my garage so I turn right into it rather than left–avoids some bushes that I can’t really clear while turning left.
There’s a funny video around of FSD 13.x making something like a 6-point turn. Great that it’s capable of it, but another car could have done a 3-point turn.
The train track thing certainly looks bad–and that wasn’t a case of it being some ancient version of FSD like with most other stories. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
We have a 2017 Forester, and I’ve never driven a car with a turn radius so tight. It’s a delight when you have to make a quick u-turn or park in a tight area. (funnily enough, I was able to parallel park my F150 with ease, but I still haven’t mastered the Forester yet)
According to the Google, the turn radius of our Subaru is 17’, and our Model Y is nearly 40’. That matches our experience. It’s jarring how different they are. Also, that appears to be quite a bit larger than all 2024 F150s. Hard to think a full-sized pickup can out-turn a small Tesla.
It appears that 17’ is quite tight compared to even small cars like a Civic and Tercel. I guess Subaru’s excel at turning. I’ve always been impressed where I can do a u-turn with it.
It’s clear in the conceptual sense that if we already know the basic difference between the geometric terms “radius” and “diameter”, we know what the sentence means: whether numerically measured by radius or diameter, the underlying concept (how much room required to turn around) is the same.
But for somebody already soft on that distinction, or doing monkey-see-monkey-do reading, the matching parentheticals utterly complicate matters.
In non-Tesla self-driving news, a Waymo taxi passenger got stuck in the parking lot at LAX and missed his flight because the car didn’t want to stop and let him out.