I wrote about Tesla’s full self-drive feature a few days ago. Since then, I was able to take a longer drive from my house to Cerritos. I was delivering some homemade cookies to a friend. I used the self-driving feature for almost the entire drive. During the drive, I had to interrupt the system several times, and there were some major failures near the end.
It worked well during the initial local portion from my house to the 57 freeway. I am unsure how the computer knows what the speed limit is at a specific location. I drove by a school zone at 9:30 pm and my car slowed to 25 miles per hour. The speed limit indicator on my dashboard stayed on 25 for several blocks. Of course, I had to disengage and drive manually. The system did take the on-ramp pretty well but was much slower than all other traffic.
I took 57 South to 22 West to 5 North to 91 West and exited on Carmenita. There was a major failure at the off-ramp. I was supposed to make a right turn on Carmenita. Traffic on the left was coming over a bridge so I am sure my car could not see what was coming. However, my Tesla decided to suddenly accelerate as it approached the traffic signal and I had to slam on the brakes, with my right foot. Likewise, the car was going way too fast as it tried to make a right turn into a side street off Carmenita. The side street had a center divider, and I thought my Tesla was going to run over it. Again, I had to slam on the brakes and make a sharp turn. I am not a software developer, so I do not know the challenges and issues with writing code for a self-driving system. However, I do write database code using SQL and I test my code a lot. Does Tesla not rigorously test their code since it is literally a matter of life and death?
I have turned off the self-driving system and I just use the Autopilot feature. I still have a week left in my self-driving demo, but I am done. Obviously, I am not going to pay $12,000 to buy, or $200/month to rent the self-driving system anytime soon.
Life with chronic diseases 