You’ll learn when driving with cruise control to cover the accelerator. A quick jab of the pedal will convince the car to get past whatever is upsetting it, and keep going.
You’ll also learn where it tends to get upset, and when it is just slowing a few miles per hour, and will then resume, versus when it is going to slow a lot. Fortunately almost all of the time it is just a brief slowdown, then it figures out the bridge shadow isn’t a car, and resumes normal speed.
Eventually you’ll learn its quirks, and it won’t be so disconcerting. Then you’ll have the opposite problem, where you wonder why the car with old fashioned cruise control isn’t slowing down…
I have read quite a lot of ideas about this. Regular drivers who deliver to businesses will state that they are indispensable. I used to do that job and I can easily see that an autonomous truck could turn up at a customer’s site and the customer would be responsible for unloading or loading it. Naturally, there would be CCTV monitoring the process to resolve any disputes, but I don’t see a problem.
The company I last worked for was part of a “pallet system”. For those who don’t know, this is a collection and delivery service for pallets of miscellaneous goods. A truck collects the pallet and takes it to a local depot (like the one I worked for). The pallet is reloaded onto a maximum-sized trailer and taken at the end of the day to a central warehouse where it is loaded onto a trailer going to a depot local to the delivery. It will be delivered (usually) on the day after collection.
The system is controlled by coded labels on all four sides of the pallets, and it is not hard to imagine most of the intermediate handling being fully automatic.
Customers who are either unwilling or unable to do this will probably have to pay for the personal delivery service.
Delivering parcels to private addresses is a different problem. There are several local stores in my area that will accept parcels for me to collect at my convenience. This is very useful for people who are out all day.
Glad to hear we’ll get used to it. We’ve gone 1500 miles in the month we’ve owned it (we used to do an average 750 miles/month on our one car) as we are doing weekend trips now that it is nearly “free” with home charging, and I’m loving a lot about it. Just more to learn. We decided to keep our old Subie and it is just sitting in the garage. I drove it for the first time recently and it feels quite crude in comparison. Also, it is very low to get into compared to the Y.
Back to the self driving topic: I’ll keep watch on this because I was amazed at the demo of it but it was very odd to let the car take on and off ramps to the freeway and navigate through intersections. As I said above, it did horrible in roundabouts.
I hope you will, like I did. And don’t take that in any way as me excusing the car’s behavior. Phantom braking is still a problem, and shows a pretty poor allocation of development resources when these problems still exist, yet there was engineering time spent on making fart sounds appear to come from different seats.
Yeah, “emissions testing mode” has been a thing for a few years now. I’m sure there are some videos of it. You can have it make fart noises on demand, or as the turn signal sound. The farts can be tuned to sound like they come from any of the seats.
Just remember who is CEO of Tesla. There are other threads in the pit for that discussion, so I’ll just leave it there.
Even if it was only a few days of some programmers’ time to get the sounds, put together the UI, etc., that is a few days of time that could have been spent on phantom braking, making the automatic windshield wipers not try to clean sun glare, or having the high beams not turn off when they see their own reflection from street signs.
New to the thread. I read everything since last December.
A little background. I hate driving and I am one of the 20% of drivers who consider themselves a below average driver. My driving sucks. I have always owned economy cars. I buy an Accord or Civic new and get another one twelve years later. My current ride is a 2017 Civic EX.
Last night a friend of mine was giving me friendly shit about how I should treat myself to a Tesla since I can afford it and I would love the self driving mode. Basically the full self driving would be life changing and such a stress reducer that it would be worth it to me. The local Tesla dealer is a six minute drive from my house.
I spent this morning researching Teslas and then was able to make an appointment for a test drive for 30 minutes in advance so I picked up my friend and met up with Chad from sales. I found the Y to be much more comfortable than the 3. My previous experience with Teslas was maybe four Uber trips and one 90 minute round trip with a friend last year.
I took the Y down the freeway a bit and then a down the road and around the corner into a residential neighborhood. I set it to go to my house and off we went. I was completely blown away. I am in awe at how well it did. It saw a construction guy off to the side of the road and it slowed down and avoided him. There are times when I would have done things a little differently but I have no complaints. And I could have one in a week or two if I order now.
I was going to say something similar. You can only grind on one project for so long. I keep a few side projects going that I switch to in case I get stuck on something. Sometimes I come up with the answer while doing the other thing. Other times, I just needed the break.
And in any case, the people at Tesla are not interchangeable, either in skill level or expertise. Maybe they put an intern on the fart noises.
I tried FSD 12 again today (sorry for the gap, but I was sick the past several days). Did ok, with one exception. There’s a right turn onto a fast expressway coming back from the office. Kinda annoying even for humans, due to the level of traffic, and having to judge the lane that the oncoming traffic is in, and the weird angle. The car basically gave up and beeped at me. However, I gave it some gas (at a time I judged appropriate) and the car actually did the rest just fine–I still didn’t have to touch the wheel. Still, it’s a situation they’ll need to address.
Heh, said the person who themselves say they’re bad at driving. Get back to us when you know how it performs in bad weather like snow, or the other “edge conditions” that are daily driving tasks.
I’ve been trying to come up with an alternative, with no success. “Hit the accelerator” is just too clumsy. “Apply power” too boring. “Give it the volts/amps” too silly sounding. “Give it some juice” is the best I’ve come up with, but isn’t great…
I live in Santa Barbara so I don’t give a fuck how it performs in the snow or any bad weather really. I can take the wheel when it occasionally rains. I’m not sure why you presume a bad driver wouldn’t know if autopilot is good or not. Can you identify a good guitar player?
But seriously, I think “amp” is best. As in, “I amped it past the slowbie when the light turned green”.
What I’m still trying to figure out is something simpler than “regeneratively braked”. Maybe “regen”, like “when the light turned red, I regenned to a stop”.