For more than two years, Tesla has been testing a technology it calls
Full Self-Driving with Mr. Cook, a 53-year-old airline pilot and amateur beekeeper, and a limited number of car owners across the country.
Tesla has long offered a driver-assistance system called Autopilot,
which can steer, brake and accelerate its cars on highways. But Full Self-Driving is something different. It is an effort to extend this kind of technology beyond highways and onto city streets.
This summer, Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, said the system would be available in more than a million cars by the end of the year. In August, we spent a day driving around with Mr. Cook and his Tesla to assess the progress of this experimental technology.
Over six hours, his car navigated highways, exit ramps, city streets, roundabouts, bridges and parking lots. With his hands near or on the wheel and his eyes on the road, the car attempted more than 40 unprotected left-hand turns against oncoming traffic. It kept us on the edge of our seats.
The most telling moment came as the car drove us to lunch. After navigating heavy traffic on a four-lane road, taking an unexpected turn and quickly remapping its route to the restaurant, the car took a right turn onto a short street beside a small motel.
Cade:Did you intervene with a turn signal?
Chuck:No, no.
Chuck:I am not doing anything.
Chuck:It is going to have to remap though.
Chuck:I’m doing everything I can to have this take us to lunch.
But watch as the Tesla struggles to make sense of its environment, veering from the road into a motel parking lot. Chuck is forced to retake controlTesla is driving
After driving around the motel, the car almost immediately made the same mistake, jerking into the lot this time
Cade:Whoa!
Cade:What’s this?
Chuck:I don’t know.
Cade:Whoa!
Chuck is driving
Chuck:I don’t know why it did that.
Chuck:So we had one disengagement and a reroute into a ...
Cade:Whoa!
Chuck:So let’s see what it’s doing here.
Tesla is driving
From a different angle, it was sobering to see how close we came to hitting a parked car after we rolled over a low curb separating the parking lot
Even the car’s internal display, which uses red lines to denote boundaries that the computer vision system detects, suggests that the car struggled to distinguish the curb between the road and the lot.
