Payne: Riding along with my self-driving Tesla student driver

Posted by Talbot Payne on December 10, 2022

Detroit — I’ve put a STUDENT DRIVER sticker on my trunk. Not for me, it’s for the car.

My Tesla Model 3 has downloaded Full Self Driving, the Austin, Texas-based company’s ambitious beta software that enables its products to drive themselves on public roads. It’s a major upgrade over Autopilot, which pioneered self-driving features in production vehicles, but has been limited to driving in a linear direction and stopping at stoplights.

With FSD, my car makes all the decisions. Freaky, yes? Give it a destination (“Navigate to Eastern Market, Detroit”) and it will do the rest — a blue steering wheel graphic on the big console screen’s top left indicating it’s in control. It autonomously negotiates right-or-left turns at stoplights. Highway merges. Highway exits, cloverleafs, roundabouts, ess turns, traffic jams, Michigan turns. Oh, the Michigan turns are tough.

Because just like a 16-year old, my Tesla is a very cautious driver still learning the ways of the road.

Heading north on Telegraph Road, Tesla moves across two lanes — properly turning on its left turn signal — and enters a Michigan turn in order to U-turn south on Telegraph before taking an immediate right onto 12 Mile headed west toward my favorite Crispelli’s pizza joint on Orchard Lake. Like a hesitant student driver, it slows considerably into the designated Michigan turn lanes, trying to decide which of the two lanes to take. Cars behind us respectfully keep their distance as my student driver figures things out.

FSD chooses the left-hand lane and stops at the light. You know the drill: other cars come to a stop to our right, while others stack up behind me. When the light changes, the car rolls forward into southbound Telegraph with the intent of turning across all five lanes in order to reach 12 Mile. But the cars turning next to me impede my student’s route. The car slows to a crawl, the steering wheel twitching madly back and forth looking for an opening — and I take over so as not to impede traffic (or get rear-ended). Ah, never a dull moment.

For Tesla, autonomous driving is the Holy Grail and it has aggressively pursued that goal using owners like me as beta testers. “The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving,” CEO Elon Musk told the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley club in June. “That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”

My student driver makes its decisions using data from eight external cameras, a forward radar and 12 ultrasonic sensors that is then crunched by a powerful onboard computer using software including neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the global positioning system.

“Tesla could benefit from crowd-sourced mapping software as well,” observes Guidehouse Insights analyst and engineer Sam Abuelsamid, who came along for a ride with us one day. “That would help the GPS better locate and understand how to handle Michigan turns and complicated intersections.”

Like a training vehicle with two steering wheels, I can take over from my student any time.

The Tesla Model 3 will make right/left turns on its own with Full Self-Driving (FSD).

The pattern repeats itself at other Michigan turns. In Pontiac on Telegraph Road, the car inches out into the lanes before speeding up into the middle lane. At another it turns into the immediate left lane. On Woodward, it slows for a Michigan turn — then reconsiders and moves on to another. Negotiate the Orchard Lake and M-10 roundabout? Fuhgettaboutit.

In such instances, I take control. As the adult in the room — er, cabin — Tesla demands certain things from me. No taking smartphone videos from the driver’s seat. And if I ignore the car’s pleas to take over more than five times, I will be locked out of FSD.

It’s fascinating to experience, but as a Level 2 system (a truly autonomous car is Level 4) it requires constant vigilance. When Google introduced its autonomous marshmallow robot car in 2015 in Silicon Valley, I asked engineers how it co-existed with human drivers. “The Google car is a good driver, but it gets rear-ended a lot,” was the reply.

Michigan turns aside, Tesla FSD is pretty good at intersections. It evens turns right on red.

At Jefferson and Griswold, the Tesla picked the M-10 tunnel 2 out of 3 times.

It negotiates interstates, highways and two-lane roads adeptly just as I’ve experienced in Autopilot for four years. What’s new is the Model 3 will continue driving when it exits a divided highway — rather than returning control to the driver.

FSD is a stickler for highway rules. It always defaults to the speed limit, always defers to the right (or middle) lane on a highway, always passes on the left, always stops a few feet before a stop sign before inching forward. Textbook.

But being on the road with humans means having to anticipate human behavior, something with which robots (like 16-year olds) must learn. On the Lodge south to Detroit, Tesla moved left to pass a slower car. In the rearview mirror I noticed a pickup driver approaching at a high rate of knots. My student was oblivious — but my reaction would have been to speed up in order to clear the lane.

Detroit News auto columnist Henry Payne demonstrates the Full Self Driving mode on the Tesla Model 3, December 8, 2022.

Encountering three cars abreast, the pickup driver refused to slow but instead veered right and took the right median to pass all three of us at once. Yeesh.

Tesla introduced FSD beta to select customers in 2020 — employees, Tesla club presidents, investors — before slowly rolling it out to the public. In November, the company decided to offer it to anyone.

“You can see gradual progression with over-the-air updates over two years,” said Joel Szirtes of Royal Oak, an early Tesla adopter, who downloaded FSD in October, 2020. “Initially, the visualization graphics (on screen) were crude, and the car would tend to clip curbs on turns. Al of that has improved considerably.”

And it will continue to improve as student testers like mine send streams of data back to HQ where engineers will feed it to its neural network. Competitors are also getting better too with General Motors Co., for example, using similar systems but with different tools — crowd-sourced map updates, camera-monitored drivers — as they expand their systems to secondary roads.

The Full Self-Driving (FSD) Tesla stops at Slows-to-Go so Payne can pick up a Yardbird sandwich.

In addition to the original Google bot, I’ve ridden in Level 4 robotaxi services in Tempe (Waymo) and San Francisco (Cruise) which boast expensive, LIDAR and mapping tech that occupies the entire vehicle trunk. Tesla’s FSD does not compromise interior space with extra hardware, but neither its hardware as sophisticated.

On a trip to Eastern Market via M-10, Tesla negotiated the diabolical Lodge-to-I-94 exchange (crossing four lanes to exit onto I-75 South) with aplomb. The return route via Jefferson Avenue to M-10 back to Oakland County would not be as smooth.

Where Jefferson Avenue splits at Griswold — left into the tunnel under Huntington Place or right to stay on the surface towards the convention center entrance — my student driver chose the latter under the apparently mistaken impression it could drive straight through the convention center and continue to the Lodge freeway.

At Huntington Place’s front doors, Tesla realized its mistake and slowed to a stop at the sidewalk. It gave the steering wheel back to me, the blue wheel graphic disappearing from the screen. Intrigued by this miscalculation, I tried the exercise again — and the car correctly chose the tunnel in subsequent efforts.

The Full Self-Driving (FSD) software came like any Tesla OTA update.

Is it learning in real time? No, says autonomous expert Abuelsamid. It’s likely just seeing the split more clearly due to better lighting, or even its relationship to other cars. Neural networks are complicated beings.

So I’m letting my student driver drive. Most of the time. I’ll, ahem, do the driving through roundabouts and Michigan turns. Maybe after a few more OTA updates, I’ll be able to remove the STUDENT DRIVER sticker.

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.

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