Tesla Model S Owner Demonstrates How Autopilot Works at Daytime and Night Time

Kon Colivas took his Tesla Model S tothe Yarra Boulevard near Melbourne in Australia to test in adverse weather conditions. On a rainy day he is explaining in this video how the Autopilot on winding road at a daytime.

he is testing the latest firmware released by Tesla with updated autopilot. Being performed in the daytime is actually far more challenging requiring a lot more intervention due to the presence of other vehicles, both driving and parked. "You can see the autopilot fail or need to be overridden a number of times in the video," he wrote in the video description page on Youtube. But you can see it yourself by watching the video. Sometimes the Autopilot takes the Model S simply over the lines crossing them and requiring Colivas to take manual control of the vehicle.

This is a complementary post to the night time video, which shows it has the same amount of Autopilot failures requiring much more driver intervention. By the way here is how Autopilot gradually stops in the middle of the road if you fall asleep or for whatever reason relinquish the control of the car.

It has "the same amount of failures as night time driving, but with much more driver intervention. It's actually extremely stressful driving with this version of autosteer enabled on a tight winding road with other cars, parked and travelling, even if it's low speed and well marked," writes Colivas. Here is a good discussion on Autopilot and nighttime driving.

Remember that Autopilot is a quite expensive beta product that can potentially kill you if you fully rely on it. We are not there yet where you can fully relinquish the control of your Model S to a software still in Beta. "It should never be given the option to kill you because you're supposed to be there the whole time," writes one Model S owner commenting under the video discussion.

Also, I don't see any sign that the Autopilot software is learning anything from the manual overrides. Because as you can see from the video it seems to repeat exactly the same behavior under same repetitive circumstance because the road is winding.

"The current software has been shown to record some new data that it didn't record previously so it will be interesting to see how this data is used in the subsequent releases but currently it's definitely not for these sort of circumstances," wrote another Model S owner.

Currently there reaelly are no written guidelines for where and how to use the Autopilot, though it is made clear that it is a driver assistance feature and NOT an auto-driving feature.