Tesla Autopilot update

I'm coming up on having owned my Tesla Model Y for 5 months, and thought it might be useful to give a little update on my experiences using Autopilot. I use it pretty consistently where I can, with a few exceptions that I'll get into below. Since I don't have the FSD beta yet, that means that it's usually offered whenever there are lines on the road. I've found that it'll be available even on two lane roads without a center double yellow line, as long as there is a line on the edge of the road. So for example, there's a residential street nearby that has a bike lane marked, and thus has nice stripes along the edges but no double-yellow line. That seems to be enough for autopilot.

Right now, if you are on a divided interstate highway and some selected limited access US and State route highways, it'll offer Navigate on Autopilot, which is a slightly more autonomous mode, where if you've set a destination in the nav system, it will recommend, but not execute until you confirm, lane changes to get you into a faster lane when you're overtaking slow traffic, to keep you from clogging the left lane, and to get away from construction cones, as well as to make sure you're in the correct lane when the road divides or you need to take an exit. It will also actually signal and make the exit for you so that you follow the navigation. It's pretty seamless, and the amount of interventions I need to make in this mode are very minimal, though occasionally it is fussing at me to get out of the left lane when I am literally in the process of overtaking a slower vehicle. My only real complaint here is that it is ultra-conservative about speed on cloverleafs, to the point that I always feel like I'm annoying the driver behind me if I leave it to its own devices. But given what I'll say below about how it manages curves elsewhere, that's probably appropriate.

Regular Autopilot is what happens everywhere else. It follows lanes, will change lanes when safe to do so if you signal your intent with a turn signal, it stops at stop signs, traffic lights, and maintains a safe following distance. On 2 lane and some 4 lane roads, the max speed you can set autopilot to use is speed limit + 5MPH. On other 4 lane roads, the logic allows you to set whatever speed you want. There are settings in the system regarding how you want it to manage set speed vs speed limit, so that when you invoke Autopilot, or the speed limit changes, it responds in the same way you'd be when driving. It still will not make turns that are more than just following a curve in the existing lane of travel, so even if you have navigation active, it won't make that right turn at the intersection it just told you to do. As I said initially, it works well for what it is, as long as you remember that it's not autonomous and pay proper attention. Inclement weather is a mixed bag. I was honestly super-impressed with how well it did on a secondary two lane road on a foggy, rainy night where the visibility wasn't great, but the driver is still definitely responsible for managing its safe speed - it doesn't slow down because the wipers are on, or because of temperatures, or whatever. I have also had situations where Autopilot was unavailable due to crud on the front or side sensors when driving in a post-snow melt where that salt and slushy crud all mix to throw a bunch of trash on your car and you use a half-gallon of winshield washer fluid in one drive.

But I now have a better sense for what it does poorly, what confuses it, etc. and that has led to both some situations where I don't use it, and areas where I have to intervene more frequently to keep things literally between the ditches. Here's a list in rough order of increasing severity: 

• Traffic lights - AP is pretty conservative about lights. Unless it's following a vehicle at close range so it can see that they're proceeding through the intersection, it requires you to tap the stalk or press the accelerator briefly to confirm it's safe to proceed through the green light even though it's clearly recognizing it as a green light. I had hoped this was a matter of teaching the AI, but it hasn't improved at all over time. It will stop for a yellow if it hasn't entered the intersection yet, including if you have already given it permission to proceed because the light was green and now isn't. This all makes sense in terms of safe, conservative driving, so I can't really complain all that much other than to wonder what is different where FSD is concerned.
• Flashing lights that aren't normal traffic lights - those warning signs at the side of the road for pedestrian crossings, school zones, etc. usually are yellow and make it think it needs to slow down for what is soon to be red, or per driving rules, slow for a flashing yellow at an intersection to be sure it's safe to proceed. It especially doesn't know what to do with various flashing yellow lights that look and are placed like traffic lights, such as the emergency signal in front of my fire department that has a normal red on top that is only ever lit when the trucks need to exit, and a smaller yellow underneath that is always flashing, or the horizontal flashing lights signifying an intersection that is flashing red in the cross direction. Given the yellow light logic I mentioned above, you're having to forcefully override it with constant pedal application to get it to go past those, and if you're not paying attention, you are going to annoy the driver following you.
• shadows on the road - the lovely sun-dappled road from your car commercial occasionally makes Autopilot think there are obstacles in the road. Same for lane changes where a large truck is casting a huge shadow of itself into the open lane between the two of you where you want the car to go. It'll occasionally decide the truck is actually in that lane and refuse to make the lane change until the angle changes and the shadow isn't there. This is usually only a problem when it's a huge contrast difference, like bright, direct sun filtering through tree leaves.
• Indistinct lanes - areas where it goes from 2 to 1 or vice versa, lanes without a center line, etc. confuse it occasionally. It can guess where the lane is, but it doesn't always guess right, and in situations where it's 1 lane becoming 2, I have had it kinda dither for a minute before it commits to a lane, and when the lane is not clearly delineated by lines on both sides or is exceptionally wide, such as during a 2 to 1 merge, the car does tend to wander a little trying to decide how to center itself in the lane. 
• Blind hills - those fun little whoops that make your stomach jump a little and make the car go a little light on the wheels when you take them quickly? Autopilot basically panics when it can't see the road ahead, and the threshold for that is just long enough that it'll be upset before you get to the crest of the hill where it can see again. Usually it just disables itself, but it has panic braked on me at least once. This is generally worse at night. 

The above things aren't really unsafe, and are more situations where the system is being understandably conservative, but significantly more conservative than a human would be, so it's more something I mention here as a quirk or limitation in the system. The following are more likely to actually cause an accident if not caught quickly enough, and this is the area where a lot more work is needed before full self driving even as Tesla defines it is going to be a workable thing. 

• Misaligned intersections - Autopilot sorta guesses where the path through an intersection is, because the alternative would be to shut down due to the lack of any lines on the road to guide it. Reasonable assumption is "continue roughly straight" but often intersections shift slightly, and there are a couple where it has tried to drive into the median because it didn't realize fast enough that the lane shifted almost a full lane-width to the right, and times where it unceremoniously changes lanes in the middle of an intersection because it picks up the wrong lane marker when re-acquiring the lane. Also if you're the first car in an intersection, stopped at a light with cross traffic going past, it will frequently just give up and tell you AP isn't available because it can no longer make a reasonable guess as to the correct path of travel. Intersections with stripes for various turning lane paths sometimes confuse it too, rightly so. 
• curvy secondary roads - you know the type, those roads that those of us who enjoy spirited driving in a suitable vehicle relish the chance to use without someone in front of us. They're probably posted 35 or 40, but they have plenty of curves, some with those yellow signs suggesting the maximum safe speed is 30, or 25, or even 15. The Model Y actually handles pretty well in spirited driving. It's not my 911, but it can be hustled through those roads safely and enjoyably. The problem is that Autopilot is not capable of managing that sort of road even at speed limit + 5 mph without leading to some potentially scary last-minute interventions. After playing with it for a while, here's the conclusion I've come to: Autopilot is not responding quickly enough to the clues being provided, including the line direction, possible warning signs and even those arrow markers along the side of the road to consistently decelerate to a safe speed that it can manage, nor is it willing to apply aggressive enough steering angle to compensate for maybe carrying too much speed into a turn and getting a little bit of understeer. It has briefly crossed center lines, been close to crossing the outside line and being on the shoulder, and generally not been great at keeping equal distance between the lane markers through turns if more than about 40° of steering angle, or any braking, is required. As a result, I have to do one of two things on roads like this - either I have to manually dial back the max speed at the entrance to a turn it typically botches, or I can only use Autopilot when it is following another vehicle, since they're likely to slow down at the point you'd expect, thus the robot will too in order to maintain following distance. 

There are multiple instances of pretty much all of the above concerns where I have wished for the ability to take a more active role in "teaching" the autopilot to do better, whether it's the ability to give it a voice keyword to tell it that the flashing light it thought it needed to stop for isn't a traffic light so it remembers for the future, or to invoke a "watch my path" mode so that it can store some data about appropriate entry and exit speeds and steering angles on secondary roads and gradually build a crowd-sourced knowledge about how to manage them. Even being able to more successfully navigate roads that I drive all of the time by storing some of that locally, and realizing it needs info from a server for a new road would be a huge improvement in the performance in some of these fuzzy areas. 

I joked with a friend after seeing a Tesla with a Student Driver sticker that given the fairly stupid robot piloting them a lot of the time, probably that should be a factory-installed option. Don't get me wrong, it's still amazing, and I am definitely glad I have it, but objective discussion of where it can be improved is always going to be useful and necessary.