I use autopilot between Seattle and Portland regularly. It requires intervention a half dozen times or so, each way. Sometimes my wife makes me switch back to TACC-only, because she finds the interventions unnerving.
Just the other day I was using the Tesloop [1] service from near LAX and the driver was praising the autopilot feature. I thought it was really neat at the time, but I would be much more hesitant about it now :/
One of my colleagues, a young and smart man 100% relies on Auto Pilot for a certain routine 400+ mile commute between cities. We have talked to him about it, his experience of never seeing it fail IMO creates a false sense of security in relation to Auto Pilot for him. I doubt he is alone in this kind of thinking.
I use autopilot everday on my 50 mile one way commute. This statistic is so misleading. Autopilot is used while i ride in the HOV lane for 45 miles of that commute. Autopilot including Navigate on Autopilot can't get me to cut across 5 lanes of traffic in under 1 mile or do the city driving where i am 10x more likely to get in a car accident.
I’ve wondered if that is part of their autonomous strategy. Autopilot makes things less safe but other aspects make it more safe, so it becomes harder to point the finger at autopilot.
When was the last time you used it? A couple years ago, it wouldn’t go 10 minutes before I had to intervene because of a phantom break or some other stupid/weird thing it was doing. But just last week, I engaged FSD and Autopilot when I left an Airbnb in New Jersey and it drove me from the house to the highway and all the way through dense NYC traffic into Long Island, an 85 mile (!) drive with only two interventions. The first was when a car to my right darted into my lane (I instinctively slammed on the brakes immediately, though the car also beeped loudly so I suspect it also would have hit the brakes anyway), and the second time I shut it off because it was being too cautious getting into an exit lane and other cars were never going to let me in (if you drive through NYC you know what I’m talking about).
I know these kinds of situations are frightening, but as long as AutoPilot is significantly safer, statistics-wise, over similar driving, it's hard to argue otherwise.
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