22 April

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday, with the difficult to spot merging lane on the left, the car saw what was coming down the lane and calmly changed lanes to let them merge, before changing back again. It’s far smoother than any human driver in how it accelerates, brakes, steers and negotiates traffic. I love that they’ve coded it not just to be boring either. It will estimate when you can ‘run’ an amber light safely, and do it. It somehow seems to know when there’s a dickhead next to you at the red light, and will accelerate more quickly away. People will find every tiny mistake it might make and blow it up into ‘you can’t trust this’. The number of idiot things human drivers do every day has never disqualified humans from driving, even though it should have. Vastly more incidents happen, proportionally, as a result of human driving. And mistakes from FSD are captured for corrective updates, unlike human drivers. It also leaves you dramatically more calm and relaxed after a drive, because it’s taking a lot of the load, you’re just having to supervise. It’s the reason we’ve had autopilot on planes, for decades. (For those who imagine people dozing off or reading a book instead of supervising, the car won’t allow it. It watches your eyes, and if you’re not paying attention it warns you. If you continue to not pay attention, it turns off self-driving.)