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…
>auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar I bought a mazda cx recently with all of these feature. I must say I don't find any of these really useful, but again I don't text while driving. I think these features breed a false sense of security and encourage users to text while driving. Features like these should be introduced only when they can protect users from all cases of distracted dr…
Lane keep assist is just a quality of life thing. You get on the highway/motorway, get in your lane, and it makes subtle movements to keep you centered in the lane. It doesn't drive for you.
So for example on windy days when the wind is pushing you constantly one way, Lane Keep Assist counteracts that lateral movement. On a straight piece of highway/motorway with no wind it does nothing at all.
Automatic cruise control is the same as regular cruise control but requires less driver input. Instead of picking an exact speed you set a goal speed, and the vehicle will either go that speed or the speed of vehicles in front of you.
The nice thing about automatic cruise control is that traffic doesn't often go at one set speed for a long period. Things like exits, construction, traffic composition, earlier accidents, etc can all cause traffic to slow for periods of time before speeding back up. Automatic cruise control means you don't have to manually adjust to these variances. It also keeps you a safe travel distance from the vehicle in front.
Automatic forward braking helps make automatic cruise control safer by allowing the vehicle to slow extremely rapidly if needed (e.g. an accident happens in front of you). Faster in fact that most humans.
But automatic forward braking isn't just useful when combined with automatic cruise control, it can brake you when a "foreign object" is in the road (e.g. animal, pedestrian, etc) which can either stop accidents entirely or reduce the damage done. It also helps with common rear-end accidents or rarely more serious accidents.
Day to day you shouldn't be using automatic forward braking.
They've already been looking at if automatic forward braking works and, yes, it does. It reduces accidents and when accidents still occur it reduces how bad they are.[0]
None of this has anything to do with texting and driving. In fact if I take my hands out of the wheel the automatic cruise control will bleep at me and eventually disengage.
[0] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160128/OEM06/160129871/aut...