Is Every Tesla a Beta?

The bad news about an excellent car

A former Tesla employee turned whistleblower, named Lukasz Krupski, has some thoughts on its “Autopilot” feature.

"I don't think the hardware is ready and the software is ready," he told the BBC.

"It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don't have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath."

The main element of Tesla Autopilot—not to be confused with “Full Self-Driving”—is a kind of fancy cruise control. In addition to keeping you in your lane and maintaining your speed on the open road, it will slow down when there is a car in front of you and speed back up when the lane is free again. It will change lanes on its own when you signal, “shoulder-checking” first to make sure there is no car there.

But what Krupski cited as especially dangerous was the system’s tendency to slam on the brakes because it mistakes a shadow for a solid object.

I can confirm that this happens distressingly frequently. On a recent trip to Nova Scotia in my new Tesla Y, on several occasions the car did exactly that when an overpass cast a harsh shadow across the highway. You are supposed to be fully engaged with the driving even when you are on Autopilot and each time it happened, I was able to override the errant braking by hitting the accelerator, but you wouldn’t want to find your car doing this if you were being tailgated by a semi.

Since Krupski made his allegations, Tesla has been forced to “recall” the vast majority of cars it has sold due to inadequate measures to keep the driver engaged when the car is on Autopilot. I put “recall” in quotation marks because it consists of a software update you do from your driveway, using your home WiFi. I haven’t yet tried out the new software, but prior to the update, the car would flash a blue warning light after a minute or two when it did not sense your hands on the steering wheel in Autopilot. It would then sound an audible alarm. Eventually, if the driver doesn't forcefully grab the wheel, the Autopilot feature is disabled for the rest of the trip.

Frankly, anyone who doesn’t keep their hands on the wheel of a Tesla is nuts.

As I’ve written here before, in most of the most important ways, my Tesla has done what I bought it for. It has a longer range than my first EV, a Nissan Leaf; it fast-charges on highway trips way quicker and without the many problems of the non-Tesla fast-charging system. I documented those issues extensively during my 14,000 trip in the Leaf last spring. The Tesla navigation system also plans your long trips, plotting out superchargers and charging times with an accuracy that strips highway travel of much of the anxiety I experienced in my Nissan odyssey.

These features will make it easier for me to take long, low-emission road trips in the Tesla and will even enable me to cut down on air travel. So, apart from my new association with the loathsome Elon Musk, I am very happy with my new car.

For years, Musk has been promising that Tesla would be capable of full self-driving within a matter of months. I could have equipped my Tesla Y with a $19,500 “Full Self-Driving” software package had I wanted to. But of course it wouldn't be legal to allow the software to drive the car on its own. And it most certainly wouldn’t be wise. My experience with the much more modest Autopilot software package doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Besides its alarming tendency to jump at shadows, the Tesla Autopilot struggles with some very routine aspects of highway travel. For example, the feature that keeps you in your lane is flummoxed when the highway you are on widens from one lane to two or narrows from two to one. In both instances, it has a tendency to swerve in evident confusion.

Swerving was also an issue the other day when I was demonstrating the lane-changing feature to a friend. The car started moving into the next lane but must have then noticed a car moving up very quickly in that lane. It zigzagged back into the original lane, then allowed the car to pass before resuming the lane change. Who knows? Maybe that was actually safer than changing lanes the old fashioned way, but it was a little heart-stopping.

A less dangerous, but nonetheless annoying bit of the car’s technology is its keyless system. The car is supposed to unlock when it detects the Tesla app on your phone. Cool. No need even to take the phone out of your pocket. And there is no need to lock the car when you are done. When you get maybe ten metres away, or up your front stairs, the car locks on its own. Neat.

Except…

Except that sometimes it doesn't work and you need to fish around for a little credit-card sized key that you tap against the side of the car to unlock it. OK. But more problematically, about one time in 20, it fails to lock when you walk away. This is an issue when you have $15,000 worth of camera and computer equipment in the car, as I often do when I am on a road trip. Weirdly, the car will sometimes send you a notification on your phone a few minutes later that the care is unlocked. WHY NOT JUST LOCK THE DAMN CAR?

So, what is supposed to be a convenience becomes an annoyance. As you walk away from the car, you find yourself looking back to see whether it locks the way it is supposed to have done.

One feature that no one ever asked for—and proof that at least some of the engineers were 12-year-old boys—is its ability to fart. Yes, fart. There’s a fart icon on the app that will provoke the car to make a loud farting noise, audible to anyone walking down the street. As further proof of Musk’s genius, each time you hit the icon, the fart noise is different, exactly like in real life.

On a recent trip to the States, I met up with my brother, David, a longtime Tesla owner, who dived into the car’s menus as I drove and managed to trigger a feature of which I had been unaware: each time I turned on the turn signal, instead of clicking, it made a farting noise. The most annoying feature ever.

There’s another strangely gendered feature of the car. If you interact through voice commands, the car answers you in a female voice. Unlike Siri or Alexa, which also default to a woman’s voice of course, you can’t change the voice (except by changing languages). But while the car always presents itself as female, it visualizes all pedestrians as male.

A sophisticated feature of the car is that its large, iPad-like display constantly shows you a graphical version of your environment. It shows you the cars around you and distinguishes them from trucks. It sees traffic cones and stop signs and stop lights. And it shows pedestrians in your immediate vicinity.

It’s just that all the pedestrians are portrayed exactly the same, as tall loose-limbed guys that remind me of Barack Obama. So whether its a 5-foot-tall woman in a burka or an obese man with a walker, they all lope along like Obama. Strange, because it doesn’t feel like he was Musk’s favourite president.