Tesla’s Navigate On Autopilot Is Smooth As Silk — CleanTechnica Review
Credit to Author: Zachary Shahan| Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 06:20:29 +0000
Published on October 20th, 2019 | by Zachary Shahan
October 20th, 2019 by Zachary Shahan
I don’t have much opportunity to use Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot since I seldom drive on the Interstate. (I’m eagerly awaiting “Navigate the City” or whatever the next iteration is!) However, I recently drove through Tampa, Clearwater, and cities in that vicinity for about 2 hours and had the chance to really spend some time using the beta Navigate on Autopilot feature. It’s a fascinating feature and the details of it go beyond what I realized before using it. I genuinely hate driving through Tampa, and the most concise takeaway of this whole experience is that Navigate on Autopilot definitely made that task safer, easier, and less stressful.
Before getting into the details of the system and this drive, the quick summary of the tech is that Navigate on Autopilot can basically take you from onramp to offramp without making you think or do much of anything. It will merge you onto the highway via the onramp and later off of the highway via the offramp. As you exit the highway, it will disengage automatically and make a special chiming sound to make sure you notice. Now let’s get into more specific details and some photos (which my wife took since I wanted to focus on driving).
First of all, note that the navigation system shows you the segments of the trip where Navigate on Autopilot will function. You see the three green arrows in the screenshot above? (Of course you do.) You see the little steering wheel on the left of each of those steps? (Not so easy, eh?) That steering wheel symbol indicates where Navigate on Autopilot can do its magic. Beforehand and afterward, you’re in charge, buddy.
I didn’t notice those steering wheel symbols for a while, which is one reason I’m pointing them out here. I also feel like Tesla should actually require a driver to watch a video on Navigate on Autopilot before using it the first time. Better safe than sorry, and this is not the only part of the system that is not obvious right from the start.
Earlier in the trip, while going through Tampa, I was in some horrible bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Interstate. (Have I mentioned that I hate driving through Tampa?) The lane I was in and the one on my left were especially clogged, whereas the 3 or 4 (or more) on my right were moving faster and a bit clearer. I thought that was just because there was a lane of traffic joining the Interstate at that point (via the lane left of mine). Navigate on Autopilot wasn’t telling me to change lanes to get around the slower traffic, which I assumed it would, so I just kicked myself out of Autopilot and did so myself. A couple moments later, I realized why Navigate on Autopilot didn’t tell me to change lanes — I needed to be in one of those left two lanes to stay on the highway I was supposed to stay on.
What I hadn’t noticed at the time but was happy to notice later is that the navigation system shows you which lanes go on the route you are supposed to be on. As you can see inside the green box above, 2 of the 3 lanes are bolded, which means they are fine to stay in.
This can be quite helpful, since there are often places on the Interstate where you can’t tell which lanes are fine for your route far in advance. With Navigate on Autopilot on, you don’t even have to think about it — just follow the system’s directions! Also, it will tell you it’s prepared to change lanes if that’s needed. By the way …
Navigate on Autopilot doesn’t yet change lanes by itself without checking with you first. As much as that would be awesome for many of us, the system is clearly being cautious, and that is a good thing.
At the moment, when it’s time to change lanes, the navigation system pops up a light blue box that tells you a lane change is upcoming (see above). It also does this if someone slow is in front of you and it thinks you should pass the car. If you think the system is being illogical or you just have a different preference for some reason, you can just tap that button to cancel the plan.
If you don’t cancel it, when the time comes, the touchscreen asks you to put on your turn signal to change lanes. If you don’t confirm the lane change, you just keep driving straight. (I didn’t test to see what would happen if I ignored the prompt until it was too late and I passed or was about to pass the necessary lane change or turn.)
Of course, the car’s self-driving system is not going to turn into another car. As you can see in the visualization above, it indicates when there’s a vehicle blocking the path by lighting that vehicle up in red. It will wait until the path is fully clear to make the lane change. Automatic lane change in such high-traffic situations is actually one of my favorite Autopilot/”Full Self Driving” features. While it might make you feel a little nervous — giving the car control in such a situation — the things to remember are that the car has far more eyes than you, it doesn’t lose focus on the task at hand and has all of those eyes fully focused on their areas of vision, and the car is really cautious. It also lets you free up attention to scan the environment more, since you know the self-driving tech will keep you in your appropriate lane the whole way. It’s really good at this.
Yes, you may have noticed we were going 1 mph at the time of this screenshot despite being on an Interestate highway. There was an accident ahead that had created some stop-and-go traffic. That’s also what helped my wife get a fairly clear photo despite the challenge in that lighting.
The system is super smooth in taking you off the Interstate via the offramp. The critical thing is just to notice when it’s doing so. There’s a special 4-chime notification or alert that tells you Navigate on Autopilot is disengaging. You just have to be prepared and listen up for that. You can hear it toward the end of this short Tesla video about using Navigate on Autopilot:
There are some other indicators of when you’re in Navigate on Autopilot and when you’re not. As you may have noticed in the video above, the clearest is that the two-blue-line highlighting on the lane markings around your car transform into one blue line in front of your car when you are driving on Navigate on Autopilot, and then switch back when you exit the Navigate on Autopilot system.
I think that’s it. The system is really smooth. It’s superb at what it’s tasked to do, from my limited experience using it. Whether others have had a similar or different experience with Navigate on Autopilot, I’d be curious to hear. Chime in down in the comments if you’ve used this feature.
Seeing how well the system worked in this rather challenging scenario, my big remaining thoughts are:
If you’d like to buy a Tesla Model 3 and want 1,000 miles of free Supercharging, feel free to use my referral code: https://ts.la/zachary63404 — or use someone else’s if you have a friend or family member with a Tesla. I won’t cry.
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Zachary Shahan Zach is tryin’ to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He’s also the CEO of Important Media. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA] — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in this company and feels like it is a good cleantech company to invest in. But he offers no investment advice and does not recommend investing in Tesla or any other company.