“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
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.
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
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.