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Tesla Updates Autopilot To Make It Follow the Speed Limit On Roads (electrek.co)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Before a recent update that is being gradually pushed to Tesla owners, the automaker allowed its Autopilot to be set at a higher speed than the speed limit on all roads where the driver assist system could be enabled, but now Tesla is pushing a new update to make Autopilot follow the rules of the road more closely. Owners of Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot have, up until now, been able to set the speed of the Autopilot's 'Traffic-Aware Cruise Control' feature to up to 5 mph over the speed limit on roads and non-divided highways. Now they are restricted to following the speed limit exactly, without the 5 mph leeway. On highways, the speed limit doesn't have a direct effect on the Autopilot's speed. The speed is still limited by the Autopilot's overall 90 mph speed limit. Every time Tesla introduces new restrictions to its Autopilot system, it gets a mixed response from owners. While the new restrictions are often coming from the aspiration of making the system safer, some owners always see them as taking away capabilities that they already had and had paid for. With the introduction of the software update v8.0 in September, Tesla introduced a more aggressive "Autopilot nag," which prompts more 'Hold Steering Wheel' alerts.

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Road Hazard by networkBoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    only applies to autopilot.
    Assuming that soon this will be the norm, then all cars will be going the same speed, until then if there is enough traffic that is at a dissimilar speed, just drive instead of autopilot and you're golden.

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  2. Re:Road Hazard by taustin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Especially the cities that rely on traffic tickets to pay for the city budget. Auto-driving cars that never violate traffic laws will be doom for many small towns.

  3. Re:Road Hazard by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You do realize that Germany has no speed limits except 'safe and reasonable'. In fact, driving slower than the existing traffic is what causes many of the crashes on the Autobahn. They have places where it is illegal to stop

    Germany pretty solidly proves the opposing argument - that obeying a posted speed limit set not by road conditions, but instead set for political reasons is EXACTLY the cause of car accidents.

    You can look at a theoretical world or the real world. In the real world. shmucks driving slower than the prevailing traffic cause accidents - whether they are all driving the speed limit or all driving 10 miles less than the speed limit for a practical joke/ due to a traffic jam/ or any other reasons.

    Driving on public roads is a swarm activity. The driving laws are a partial but incomplete set of rules used to help that swarm activity. overlaid on top of natural psychological swarm rules. While following the rules of man is a good idea, following the rules of nature is practically essential.

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