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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn't do it either.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it's getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it's practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn't even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn't used to be this bad.
Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it's either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you're in traffic because you know it'll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don't. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I'm watching it close. It can't navigate city streets, but neither can FSD....
TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it's bad and getting worse, not better. I can't believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that's why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.
I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It's a simple tractable problem that's generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it's not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.
Though they can induce another type of driver fatigue - it makes driving boring as heck as you don't need to do anything. I can't use line keep myself as it just makes me really tired and I'll risk falling asleep.
That's totally fair. I think it depends on the person and what they have going on that day. I remember, or rather do not remember, getting to work in my last car because my brain did the driving task while I was lost in thought. When I'm using lane keep, I feel like I'm hyper aware of what the cars around me are doing and what road changes are coming that I need to manually adjust for. I could see that getting very boring late at night or on empty highways though. Everyone is different and that's just another element of the equation that the car doesn't account for.
I agree. VWs' drive assists are absolutely stellar. It's just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that's essentially it. It's not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.
The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don't seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a "zone" with margins left and right.
So if you are on the inside of your "zone" and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don't really trust it with high speed turns.
I concur on the VW software. Once you understand it, it is predictable and safe where it should be used - highways with dividers
I'm a big fan of assists where I am still actively driving. They are there if I make an error (e.g. drift to the edge of a lane) rather than doing the driving for me.
Lane-keeping is actually on by default in my vehicle, and I find it to be a nice feature. Lane-centering feels too weird for me, so I've tried it out but am uncomfortable using it.
I absolutely love my adaptive cruise control, I use it all the time. I have a hybrid and it does a much better job of keeping the engine from kicking in than I do. Thankfully with Honda I can use it everywhere not just highways. It's been my absolute favorite "new" thing to have in a car!
GM’s Super Cruise is absolutely great. It only works on highways though. I recently drove for 5 hours through three states without touching the gas, brake, or steering wheel once. Except the little nub on the steering wheel to adjust the set speed.
My wife's hybrid Rav4 has it and loves it. I wish my Prius had it. I'm glad Toyota apparently knows how to do it right.
Toyota tends to stick with proven tech and does it the right way, rather than pushing the envelope on half-assed implementations.