"I have great respect and admiration for Elon Musk, so sorry to say this but … it’s terrible. I mean really bad. After all those videos I didn’t expect a lot, but I expected more than this. My first drive home after activating it was frightening. You’re going to see the second loop I did, one around Apple’s AAPL Headquarters in Cupertino California. I’ve now driven this loop a dozen times with the system on, and each drive is different, with a different pattern of errors, several of them serious.
This is not a complex set of roads. It’s typical Silicon Valley Suburbia, the same valley where Tesla’s HQ and most of its developers are. There’s a fast arterial and some afternoon traffic, but aside from the straight sections, there’s no turn or other complexity on the route it didn’t screw up at least once in my loops.
Self driving is a very different problem from driver assist, such as we find in Autopilot, a product I enjoy using. Some think it’s just a difference of degree — more think they are two different things. Even if, like Tesla you think you just keep improving driver assist until you have self-driving, this system just has so far to go."