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Tesla Model S 90D
The Tesla Model S 90D. Photograph: teslamotors.com
The Tesla Model S 90D. Photograph: teslamotors.com

What it was like to have Tesla's autopilot robot drive me hundreds of miles

This article is more than 8 years old

Last week, Tesla delivered an autopilot mode to its cars, striking fear into the hearts of some drivers – but it turns out the car can often drive itself better than a human can, at least on a well-marked highway

Unlike most people “driving” their cars and “steering” them, like cavemen, I spent the last few days having my Tesla Model S 90D drive me places.

Being aboard the 283-mile range, all-wheel-drive Tesla is one of the most bizarre, fascinating and scary experiences you can have in a vehicle, and a lot of people, including myself, had questions. Luckily for you, I now have some answers.

What is it and how do you use it?

Turning on ‘autopilot’ will cost you $2,500.

Technically, “autopilot” is in every single Tesla that has come out of the factory since September 2014.

It’s $2,500 to turn it on, which you can choose to do either when you buy it or afterward. Autopilot was delivered last week as an over-the-air update to your car, like you’d see on an iPhone.

When you get in your car and start driving, you’ll see an image of your Tesla in the middle of the dashboard. The display will also, using a range of sensors, show you cars in your vicinity and in your blind spot. When the car is ready to take over the driving, it will show you a little wheel. Two pulls of the cruise control button and it will, assuming it’s confident, go “boop” and start turning the wheel, showing you on the dashboard whether it can see one or both sides of a lane.

Is it actually useful? Do you retain control? Is the car going to kill me?

On a well-marked stretch of highway, the autopilot tends to work well.

God, yes. To all three points. Your car will eventually have a giant thing saying, “END OF LIFE, END HUMAN, END, END, END”. Okay, no to the last part. It will beep at you if you’re speeding, but you can tell it to have some leniency.

While I’d not advise you just straight-up zoning out, the car is eerily competent. In fact, it’s notably efficient and careful. It’ll slow down pre-emptively and speed up the moment you’re clear of a tricky situation.

So, it works?

Yes and no.

Tesla tells you that you have to keep your hands on the wheel and be ready to take over at any time (in New York state, you are legally required to comply).

Using cruise control, you can set the car to a particular speed and it will accelerate and turn within a lane in a straight line. It will dodge cars attempting to swerve into your lane, objects that it can see, pedestrians or fellow drivers simply trying to swerve into you because you’re an obnoxious prick with a Tesla blasting Party Rock Anthem.

It will follow the car in front of you and the road itself, or just the road if you’re on your own. You can also set it to stay a certain number of car lengths away from the car in front of it.

If you want to change lanes, you do a full commit (by that I mean you don’t just hold down the indicator and then let it go) to the left or the right. Assuming the vehicle “sees” nothing in the way or coming at you too fast, it will smoothly turn into the lane. If you keep the indicator down, it will stay in place, and if you attempt to send yourself careening off the road into the median, it will stalwartly refuse to let you kill yourself.

It can’t, however, direct you along every street. If it can’t see road markings, a situation more common on US roads than I would like, it will refuse to operate on autopilot. It can’t stop at stop lights. You have to behave like you’re actually driving to the extent that you’re ready to pick up the wheel. If you’re on a relatively empty highway, with a few cars, you can relax a little if you’d like. The vehicle is fully capable of noticing, for example, when a loudly hooting truck driver decides to buzz you and give you the finger (this happened).

So you can take in the scenery, look around, look at the person next to you (if you want), scratch your butt, I don’t know. The car will very loudly tell you if it isn’t happy. It will calmly make that “boop” if it thinks that it might need you to take over. But if it thinks you definitely need to take control, it makes a VERY LOUD NOISE. You cannot ignore this noise. It sounds a lot like that sound the Enterprise makes in Star Trek when it gets hit by torpedoes.

When I tried to take it on a lovely curvy residential road, it nearly plowed into a parked car. When I got on a particularly rocky and broken part of I-880, it swerved around like a drunkard avoiding the lane markings for reasons I couldn’t perceive.

Mostly, it very comfortably handles high speed and low speed driving in normal scenarios that don’t require stopping. This means on a motorway/highway, you can often drive nearly hands-free.

So ... you liked it, right?

Autopilot is handy for the highway – not so much for the city.

Yes.

I was excited, yet doubtful, about autopilot, which is a very apt term for how the car works. On long stretches of highway – even curvy, car-filled expanses – as long as the lanes are marked, the car drives like a dream. I had autopilot activated along 120 of the 150 miles I drove through California.

If you’re driving around the city, I can’t imagine this being very useful, as the car can’t turn a corner in an urban environment. However, if you’re driving along the highway, this car will happily do your job better than you do. This includes in stop-start traffic, where the car excels in removing the most frustrating part of driving.

This may seem petty (we are talking about a luxury electric car that drives itself), but for anyone that does a regular motorway or highway-based commute, this is gold. The grating, frustrating and repetitive American commute is essentially removed.

And if the car ever felt a twinge of worry, it would beep loudly at me to take control. All in all, it was better at driving than I was. It still is. I’m scared.

OK. I’m in. How much does it cost?

$420,690. Sorry, no, slight miscalculation. The cheapest price for an autopilot-ready Tesla is $72,500 before tax and destination/documentation fees. That will carry you 230 miles on one charge and accelerate to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds.

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