Does Any One Actually Want a Self Driving Car?

gourraguis said:

Yeah, if you ever drove for 10 hours between 2 cities then you'd love to have a self driving car

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When Consumer Reports recently found that the braking distance on the Tesla Model 3 was worse than that of a Ford F-150, CEO Elon Musk took the criticism and found a solution. Days later, Tesla shipped an over-the-air update that, according to CR’s testing, improved the braking distance by 19 feet. It’s a wild idea: your car automatically downloads some code, and it’s instantly safer. It also wasn’t possible even a few years ago, and some have held it up as an ideal example of how futuristic technologies can make our lives better. Analysts said it was “unheard of.” Jake Fisher, CR’s director of auto testing (and the person who originally flagged the issue), said he’d “never seen a car that could improve its track performance with an over-the-air update.”

Others, like Navigant Research’s Sam Abuelsamid, looked at the recent Model 3 braking distance issue as a sign of a larger problem with Tesla’s quality control. He wrote this week that the fact there was that much room for improvement on the braking capabilities of the car shows there’s something “fundamentally broken in what they were doing” with the Model 3. Shouldn’t Tesla, which by now has made and sold over 300,000 cars around the globe, have caught this problem before CR did?

We don’t yet know why the Model 3’s braking was underperforming, and we may never know. That matters less than what the update actually signaled.

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Take this one, posited just a few weeks ago Tesla’s own official forums: ”Did Tesla just slow down our cars?”

In the thread, owners point to how a recent update (specifically 2018.18.3, released in the middle of May) lines up with what could be the possibility that their Model 3s don’t quite accelerate with as much kick as they did before.

“It seems in the latest update that my Model 3 is much slower off the line,” the original poster writes. “It doesn’t throw you into the seat like it used to!”

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