Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage

It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.

How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.

So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".

> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?

There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.

Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.

Tesla could have done a better job communicating that the internal look or feel wasn't finalised.

Clearly that didn't impact pre-orders but I think a lot of people didn't love the internal look even if they thought it was nice looking externally (disclaimer: I was one of these people).

In my OPINION the 3 won't be fully self driving (for certification/legal reasons). But we can reasonably speculate that it will have things like auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar. Since competitor's vehicles have this, and in order to achieve "five stars in every safety category" you actually need to have auto-braking.

Look at the requirements for the IIHS's "TOP SAFETY PICK+" which is the gold standard for safety. A system like EyeSight, Honda Sensing, or similar is required in 2016[0], and this vehicle will be looking for the 2017 or 2018 TSP+ rating no doubt.

So suggesting that it will have "auto-pilot"-like functionality[1] is very reasonable. But that doesn't mean it will have full self-driving ("hands off"), in particular given the regulatory landscape, development stage of the technology, and the costs. We'll see.

[0] "Vehicles with optional front crash prevention qualify for either award only when equipped with the technology." http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/TSP-List i.e. without frontal auto-braking as an option you cannot appear on the TSP+ list. But even vehicles on the list only quality as TSP+ rated when the auto-braking option is installed (without it they're TPS tier only).

[1] https://www.teslamotors.com/presskit/autopilot

Agreed, the nose design bothers me. Looks unfinished.

Why? What specifically is hard about narrow streets? That actually sounds like the kind of thing a self driving car could excel at.

The bigger problem, is imagine, would be weather. I dunno how completely they've solved that problem yet.