In the USA, Tesla have recently upgraded some of their vehicles to include a self-driving mechanism. From what I’ve seen of the videos online, it can struggle somewhat with roads with worn-out lane markers or lots of curves but.. it’s still very interesting to watch.
Here’s a bit of an introduction into the system. What I’ve done here is chop a video by DragTimes into relevant sections so you don’t need to watch the whole thing all the way through. The driver actually got pulled over by the police for speeding at 75mph, even though he wasn’t actually doing it himself – the autosteer system was..
Here’s the Tesla Model S changing lanes by itself at around 70mph…
What’s perhaps a sign of things to come is, whilst crawling in traffic, the driver starts randomly browsing the internet…
As you might notice, when the system gets a bit confused by worn road markings, thin lanes or other drivers doing something slightly out of the ordinary, stuff like this happens…
You do, at the moment, need to be ready to grab control. It’s also pretty disconcerting to see someone quite easily losing attention. I think, personally, this is something we’ll all be doing if we started getting auto-steer functionality getting added to cruise control.
However, at same time – particularly on large and fairly straight roads like the motorways here in the UK – I can see this working at the moment. Every day I travel up the motorways and pass through a lot of managed motorway sections. A lot of the time you’re encouraged to stay in lane and do one static speed. I can find myself doing 50mph constantly for miles and miles and miles. It’s dull, it’s monotonous, it’s boring. It’s not what I’d class “driving” to be and it’s something I’d actually love a computer to do for me.
As for local roads, country roads and a lot of the other lanes I tend to drive around – I still don’t believe any computer can manage that … not at the moment.
What are your thoughts?
