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The only edge Tesla has is the software stack. All the rest is meh. But it is kind of amazing that traditional carmakers are still struggling to catch up on the software front. To be honest, the whole auto industry is heading in a very bad direction, where they think of the car as a way to harvest data of their customers and to introduce their SaaS offerings
We’ve got an Tesla and an Volkswagen ID3. Tesla’s charging planning is pretty good. Volkswagen’s driving assistants are vastly superior to Tesla’s (despite not being oversold as “autonomous driving”).
IIRC, the first robotaxis are operated by companies owned by Google and General Motors, and the only car that has a licence for fully autonomous driving in Germany (up to 60 km/h, only on Autobahn) is a Mercedes.
No, Tesla’s autonomous driving is not cutting edge.
Huh, how does that go together? Aren’t you supposed to go at least 80 or something on an autobahn?
AFAIK it’s intended for stop and go traffic jam situations, also Autobahn is at least 60km/h.
Minimum speed for vehicles to be allowed on the autobahn is 60. This is an autonomous traffic jam assistant – you can sleep during traffic jams now.
Your vehicle needs to be capable of 60km/h to legally drive on the Autobahn, if you don’t want everyone to hate you 80km/h as that’s the speed limit for trucks.
The Mercedes thing is a traffic jam assistant, if you don’t take over when traffic speeds up again it’s going to pull over or something.
Does not compute
You mean 160?
No, 60. seriously.
Unlike all other driving assistants you are allowed to let the car dive unsupervised on it’s own. Since 60 km/h is sort of the minimum speed for the German autobahn, this is an autonomous traffic jam assistant – you can sleep, watch tv or do whatever you like during traffic jams < 60 km/h.
I am talking about the infotainment system, and the OTA update functionality.
The infotainment is utter garbage for a proper car(!) infotainment and OTA updates are available for basically all major car brands these days.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought FSD wasn’t available in Europe until basically last month, and even then it’s still pending some regulatory hurdles. So you’re comparing VW’s lane keeping tech to Tesla’s most basic TACC (autopilot) right?
That’s possible, I’m comparing what I know.
By the way, VW hasn’t just a lane keeping tech, the car is able to drive autonomous in standard situations. Our VW (build 2022) was far better than our Tesla (build 2023) in lane detecting, lane keeping, reading traffic signs (dven in the Netherlands), navigation, detecting city and village boundaries, detecting crossroads, keeping distance and following lanes in curves – the tesla tends to ignore the law of physics and to go to fast. Tesla is far better at detecting waste bins though. It detects every single wastebin there is anywhere within 3 m of the road. VW lacks autonomous overtaking, and it slows for traffic lights but does not stop for them when they are red, that’s two points for the Tesla. Though Tesla slows for traffic lights even when they are green.
The VW was able to drive home from work almost autonomous – there were two crossings, one traffic light and one roundabout it needed my assistance. The Tesla would crash multiple times.
The most annoying thing with the Tesla is that it does not cooperate with the driver. VW has a genuine assistant – the car drives, and when I correct it, the VW just smoothly accepts the correction and carries on. The Tesla just stops working anytime the driver intervenes.
Mine drove me from my driveway, through my neighborhood, through stop signs, railroad crossings, stop lights, interchanges, highways, on and off ramps, 85 miles an hour and down to a crawl in heavy and light traffic, in rain and on clear days, almost 200 miles round trip once a week for a year. But I’m in the U.S. with access to the FSD stack. I’ve driven rentals with advanced TACC tech, and they have failed to impress ( with the exception of Blue Cruise, I haven’t had a chance to try that yet). If you get a chance to drive a Tesla enrolled in “FSD (Supervised)” as they call it now, I highly recommend it. It will get mad at you if you aren’t looking straight ahead though, and the “keep your hands on the wheel” nags generally only happen if conditions get shitty or you play with the screen/stop paying attention to the road.
That’s fascinating. Especially the rain part, because our Tesla’s driving assistant just does not work in bad weather. I cannot imagine how it is technical possible to get a camera-based system to work reliably in bad weather without some mechanism to keep the cameras clean. Our rear camera is basically unusable during winter unless we get out of the car and clean it every single time we need it.
Thank you for your advise!
Honestly I’m pretty happy with the software stack in my Volvo. But then again it’s basically stock Android.
That and the supercharger network, right?
Only in North America. Europe has quite a few competing charging networks, and cars can work on all of them because of EU standardisation. The superchargers are typically more expensive compared to the others.
No, they are one of the cheapest and easiest to use.