You couldn't pay me to use it in stop and go traffic. My stress would be through the roof. I was using Autopilot once on one of the straightest stretches of highway in America (I-80 as it passes through Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah). With no cars on the road, and perfectly clear conditions, Autopilot decided that the lane I was in was ending (it wasn't) and began merging on to the shoulder.

I've never used Autopilot without it doing something clearly stupid. That is not a recipe for "stress free."

Are you sure we're talking about the same thing here?

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 instinctively slammed on the brakes immediately, though the car also beeped loudly so I suspect it also would have hit the brakes anyway)

Interesting, I would have thought that when (if) the autopilot intervenes it would be way faster than human reaction.

I have no car with similar features but I remember renting a VW golf that had some adaptive cruise control, the simple "keep the speed constant" worked just fine (like in older, simpler cruise controls) but the "adaptive" part was (IMHO, and it may well be a specific/single issue of the car or some settings that I knew not how to regulate) very, very cautious.

On the highway, driving in the left lane at a speed of 120 km/h, every time a car a long distance ahead (100 metres or more) merged from right lane to left lane the car would suddenly slow down/brake long before I would have normally done manually (and often without need as the car was travelling at my same speed or nearly so), it was, if not uncomfortable, "strange".

It’s possible I hit the brake the same time as the car did and just didn’t notice, we’re talking fractions of a second here. Like I said in a previous comment, since I had the autopilot on I was able to look at more of my surroundings rather that just focusing only on the car in front of me so I actually saw him driving erratically a few minutes before that so when he was next to me I was being extra defensive and I reacted really quickly to it.

I see, you were already somehow alerted.

Thanks for providing a positive perspective. It feels like I only hear negative things of autopilot and Tesla on HN and Reddit, so it's nice to hear a different perspective.

It is pretty unfortunate, I don’t know how else people think we’re going to solve driverless cars and eventually save tens of thousands of people from dying in car crashes every year in the US. At some point these systems need to be tested on real roads.

This does not reflect my experience with autopilot. I've found it to be incredibly reliable and convenient.

Autopilot doesn’t merge or change lanes on it’s own. That only happens with “Navigate on autopilot” which is a FSD feature not part of basic autopilot.

Jfc people make a ton of excuses for Tesla. This doesn’t invalidate what they were saying in any way. If lane changes are this buggy, why should they trust the auto braking?

Because one is fully baked, the other is explicitly billed as under development not yet complete Beta software. Also there are a lot of people that just make up lies about Tesla people deserve to hear the truth.

A company that allows people to use "beta" software on public roads should not be trusted to manufacture vehicles. That is grossly irresponsible.

I love the FSD beta, and the car has already prevented my wife from getting hit head on by a car running a red light at 80-90MPH. Your comment is exactly how I feel about Microsoft, it's grossly irresponsible to run that crap, and it's not even labeled as beta.

Lane keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control make long distance driving significantly less physically stressful. It's really impressive.

I agree 100%. It definitely makes me a safer driver because I can pay attention to other things that may be going on 7 cars away when I don’t have to micromanage the job of staying in the lane and making sure I’m at the correct distance between the car ahead of me.

I too use adaptive cruise control (this is the real name for it, not that Autopilot PR of yours). This is not something Teslas are unique for