> Is it incorrect to believe the car brakes at full braking force?
For me, that is incorrect. I would not consider it dangerous at all.
For me, it was more like lifting off the accelerator for a split second if I were in full control.
One time that my car did brake aggressively was when an 18-wheeler was gradually easing into my lane (not on Vegas drive). It was probably a slight over-reaction, but probably one that would have saved my life if the truck had veered into my lane (likely dodging something or sleeping truck driver).
I have heard of people getting the aggressive braking phantom brake experience, but I haven’t. It’s also trivially easy to address just by pressing the accelerator — the driver is supposed to be paying attention.
Fwiw, this is a deal breaker for a Tesla for one friend of mine. She has motion sickness that is frighteningly easy to trigger (autopilot or even just me driving, and I’m not an aggressive driver). She’s a bit of a motion sickness snowflake, and she readily admits as much.
Predictions seem to be the following:
1. Driving into the shadows of 18-wheelers.
2. Driving into the shadows of overpasses.
3. Driving on roads that are reflective and have weird patterns on them. I don’t know how to describe this. My buddy and I consistently experience this a time or three going up the mountain towards Tehachapi between Bakersfield and Barstow. My guess is that this problem is or should be solvable by machine learning (same phantom braking at same time of day at the same place with driver override).
My biggest complaint about autopilot is that it aggressively turns the brights on at night. I’m not sure if it is outside of legal or reasonable use of brights, but I just find it easier to take full control — I try to be a friendly driver.
One last thing that I didn’t mention in my original post — using autopilot in stop-and-go traffic is an absolute dream. It takes a ton of hassle and stress out of that type of driving.