Author: JAMES B. STEWART / Source: New York Times
As I zipped up the West Side Highway this week in a gleaming red Tesla Model 3, I found myself wondering: Are American drivers ready for Autopilot?
Autopilot is Tesla’s enhanced driver-assistance technology, which the company maintains is the most advanced system available. Tesla says all its vehicles “have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
In this case, I was the human. I had tried a gull-wing Model X last fall with an earlier version of Autopilot, but since then the stakes — for both Tesla and consumers — have soared.
On March 23, a driver was killed in Mountain View, Calif., after a Model X crashed into a concrete highway divider while Autopilot was in use. The fatal accident attracted intense media coverage and sent Tesla stock, long an investor favorite, into a nose dive.
Four days later, Moody’s downgraded Tesla’s debt from stable to negative. Tesla was already so plagued with Model 3 production delays that its chief executive, Elon Musk, said he had been sleeping on the factory floor. By the beginning of this week, Tesla shares had dropped over 30 percent from a peak of almost $390 a share last summer.
Despite this wave of negative publicity, it seems clear that Tesla will rise or fall based on the performance, safety, design and value of its cars. If it gets those things right, all the other issues will sort themselves out. Tesla has already defied skeptics and attracted legions of die-hard fans by surmounting seemingly impossible odds to build all-electric cars that have drawn lavish praise from automotive critics.
That includes the Model 3, which Popular Mechanics named its 2018 Car of the Year. (It was a finalist for Motor Trend’s similar award. That it lost out to the Alfa Romeo Giulietta has drawn howls of online protest.)
When my Model 3 test vehicle pulled up to the curb on Eighth Avenue, it didn’t quite stop pedestrian traffic the way opening the gull-wing doors on the Model X had, but I could see why the automotive press is so excited. The interior features a single slab of wood sweeping around the cockpit interrupted only by a touch-screen interface that houses nearly all the controls, many of them voice activated.
With its Zen minimalism, it doesn’t look or feel like any other car I’ve been in. The synthetic-leather seats are comfortable, and there’s ample room for someone my size (6-foot-3). This all comes at a cost: $57,500 for this luxurious long-range version, far from the $35,000 base price that has excited many potential Tesla buyers.
The Model 3 may not have the rocketlike acceleration of the X, but I found it nimble and responsive. I easily accelerated from a full stop into traffic flowing at highway speed, usually a nerve-racking maneuver in a conventional car. Driving the Model 3 was such a pleasure I was reluctant to cede any control to Autopilot.
For someone with decades of experience driving a conventional car, my first taste of semiautonomous driving last fall had come as a shock. The sensation of a vehicle moving on its own was so…
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