Over the holiday day weekend I did a lot of driving in a loaner Tesla (we have ordered one ourselves but it is, ahem, delayed). Well, actually, the car did a lot of the driving. I made extensive use of “Autopilot” features, including the smart cruise control and the autosteering. New cars by other automotive brands have similar capabilities. Long before getting to fully autonomous cars, I am blown away by how immediately transformative this experience is for highway driving.
For me there were two immediate and profound changes. The first has to do with being in stop and go traffic, which one often encounters on the highways to and from New York, such as heading out to JFK. I usually hate this, because the tedium of stop and go makes the time feel that much longer. Autopilot transformed this experience. Now some of that is the novelty effect for sure, but being able to fully engage in a conversation as opposed to having a big part of one’s brain tied up in not hitting the car in front of you (but also not having a huge gap), made the time go by much faster for me.
The second has to do with speeding. We drove up the Taconic Parkway, which is notorious for aggressive ticketing for speeding. Here too Autopilot was a game changer. I realized that speeding is something I do to keep myself busy while driving. And then of course occasionally I speed for the opposite reason, meaning going downhill and picking up speed while in conversation. Again I may be smitten with the novelty effect, but just letting the car do the work at a safe increment to the posted speed limit (a couple of MPH faster) made me perfectly relaxed.
Now at present Autopilot requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You can actually take them off but then you will get a prompt at irregular intervals to put them back on and if you don’t do that quickly enough, the Autopilot disengages for the rest of the trip! This happened to me a couple of times and immediately felt like the loss of crucial functionality (Hint: if you can pull over and hit “Park” the car resets and you have Autopilot again.)
Following this weekend, I can’t wait to have Autopilot permanently. I hope that for the highways I drive frequently, it will soon no longer require having my hands on the steering wheel. Getting to and from places will have never been easier!
