TECH SHORTCUTS FOR LIFE
My Honda Minivan Drives Itself Just as Well as a Tesla on Autopilot
And your car might be able to, as well. Here’s how to check.
Tesla gets a lot of attention for its Autopilot feature, which the company touts as offering “full self-driving” capabilities, suggesting that a new Model S or Model Y is essentially an autonomous car. Earlier this month, though, Tesla admitted to California regulators that their cars are anything but. “The currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous,” the company’s website says. “Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment,” the site adds.
I spoke to a friend who drives a Tesla with Autopilot, and he described the experience as follows: “Driving a Tesla on Autopilot is like watching a baby for hours. You’re not really doing anything, but at the end, you’re still exhausted.” Musk and others have promised the world self-driving cars since at least 2016, but instead, we’ve gotten an uncanny valley of self-driving. Cars like Teslas are good enough to take some burden off human drivers with fancy sensors and software, but still require our undivided attention when we’re driving them.
