Congratulations, Boomer, on your new Model 2. I hope to see it this Saturday, April 21.
Thanks for your suggestions regarding my CCS charging problem with the i3 I rented via Turo.com. Other folks at the CCS station (dual units, people coming and going constantly), had told me about the two conditions: power off, unlocked car. I met both of those, although getting the power off was not intuitively obvious. The woman who had just charged her Golf had used that unit many times, and she warned me that unplugging it would be difficult, so I think it was mechanical.
In my previous post, I mentioned
I drove by the very spot in Mountain View where the Model X had the fatal crash.
This serious crash has affected my own plan to trade-in my Model S for a Model 3. Unlike others, who have great reasons to get the Model 3, some to add the Model 3 as their second electric car, others to join the Tesla family for the first time, my primary reason has been to get
Auto Pilot 2, since my 2013 Model S is too old even for Auto Pilot 1.
There are other threads devoted to this serious crash. Yes, the driver was irresponsible, and yes it was unfortunate that Caltrans had not yet replaced the collision damper. However, the fact that the Auto-pilot, which was engaged, made no attempt to stop really bothers me. My first-hand observations of the scene from my trip, along with posted photos, show that this obstruction was well-marked with high contrast symbols. The right-hand image is what it looked like the day before the crash:
Another Tesla driver recreated the same driving dilemma of a forking car-pool lane and posted a video. It clearly shows that AP made no response to the approaching barrier:
https://electrek.co/2018/04/02/tesla-fatal-autopilot-crash-recreation/
This crash has brought home to me what Gary had been telling me, that even though Auto Pilot tracks the vehicle in front of you, Auto Pilot is currently
not programmed to detect fixed objects as threats to the car. It has been about 1.5 years since the Auto-pilot hardware was first introduced as standard on all Teslas produced, up to and including Model 3. My goal is improved safety. Elon has stated that AP has reduced the overall probability of accidents by 40%, but for me its inability to help in this crash is unacceptable. I believe advanced narrow beam radar would help a lot, and one such prototype was displayed at CES 2018.
https://globenewswire.com/news-rele...etamaterial-Array-for-Autonomous-Driving.html
I am deferring any replacement of my Model S until I see real progress in Auto Pilot for crashes such as this.