In looking over my upcoming build, I was pondering the Autopilot Convenience Features (ACF) package...
Just about the only features in that package that I would desire are the on/off high beams and the TACC Traffic Aware Cruise Control.
I began to wonder, what type of Cruise Control do you get, if any, if you do not order the ACF?
Plain old cruise control is more than good enough for me and I could always add the ACF feature if desired at a future time (it is retrofittable).
I don't mean this to be an anti-autopilot post, but it's a matter of a software update/cost later on down the road and I had to make the choice again, I'd opt out of two options above for now. No offense meant for Tesla, but the other features aren't even released yet and we dont know how long it will take for them to iron out the remainder of the bugs. They have admitted that it is still reading lines wrong in the road as recently as last week. But here is a newsflash: it was doing that back in November/December of last year when it first came out. Skid marks, poorly painted lines, wet spots, and snow tracks all threw the lane departure in a tizzy.
I think it's great that Tesla has decided to pioneer or at least join other leaders in pursuing this technology. But it's hard and in hindsight, they should have just shut-up about it until they actually had a full suite to offer. Although, with the exception of blind-spot monitoring, that's more of a safety feature and not auto-pilot.
As for TACC; personally, I'm usually the fastest guy in the left lane so there really isnt anyone else in front to set the cruise to:
But they really should let the driver choose between TACC and Classic Cruise Control as an option.
And yes, can confirm on loaners, cruise control period does not work above 75mph.
I've said this before a couple of times. It seems like their dev teams are all one group, so that the interface guys are the same programmers that do the auto-pilot software. From a proper dev standpoint, they really need to split these guys/gals into two groups. Either have a strictly auto-pilot group or do a driving dynamics group and then an infotainment group. But here is the truly evil plan that would allow:
You restrict all the driving dynamic stuff in the SDK and release it so that 3rd party developers can touch all the stuff that wouldn't necessarily kill you if it went wrong. Then you shrink your infotainment group down to just a bug check/software verification teams. You let all the 3rd party guys make the software, add the bells and whistles people want, track change-logs and progress, and you sit back with your coffee and make sure there aren't any glaring memory leaks or performance issues. Basically I've just described a app store.