Autonomous Car

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Sunday, February 14, 2021

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Happy Valentine’s Day. We’re on our fifth year of our love-hate relationship with Elon and Tesla. After a second purchase of a Tesla with Full Self-Driving (FSD) and no cigar, it’s beginning to smell more like vaporware. Tesla now is morphing FSD into a "feature set" that includes Automatic Lane Changes, Summon from across the garage, AutoPark (maybe and sometimes), Traffic and Stop Sign Alerts, and AutoSteer on City Streets (coming soon). You’ll note that AutoSteer on the highways and… Read More ›

Road Warrior’s Advice: Before You Buy a Tesla…

Road Warrior’s Advice: Before You Buy a Tesla…

Thursday, November 8, 2018

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but we also have a thousand final words to share about our two-year Tesla experience. Let me preface this by saying that overall our Tesla adventure was fun, but we’ve always enjoyed being a pioneer. If you don’t, look elsewhere. We got our Tesla just after Elon Musk released his full self-driving (FSD) video in late 2016. While Elon is certainly a visionary, he’s also a snake oil salesman and the… Read More ›

Autonomous Cars: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Everybody

Autonomous Cars: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Everybody

Saturday, April 28, 2018

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It’s been about a year since our last Tesla® report card. And, wow, how the landscape has changed. For most of the year, Tesla has stumbled and bumbled through about a dozen updates. With each one, Tesla’s resident cheerleader, Electrek, has proclaimed that self-driving autonomy was "just around the corner." We’re still waiting although we’re writing this only because last month’s update finally achieved the milestone of being able to navigate the interstate highway in our own hometown without darting… Read More ›

The Autonomous Car: Tesla and the Yellow Brick Road

The Autonomous Car: Tesla and the Yellow Brick Road

Monday, June 19, 2017

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Today marks the six month anniversary since we picked up our second generation Tesla Model S. If you’ve followed our adventure, you already know that the road has been a bumpy one even giving Elon Musk credit for the best of intentions. As one new owner remarked, "The difference in a salesman and a marketer is the marketer knows he is lying." We haven’t quite decided which pigeon hole best describes Elon, but there certainly was optimistic puffing of the… Read More ›

The Autonomous Car: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Cadillac

The Autonomous Car: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Cadillac

Monday, April 17, 2017

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It’s been six months since Elon Musk announced the new Tesla HW2 models with what he proclaimed would be the world’s first fully autonomous, self-driving automobiles. And, guess what? Tesla is not perceptibly closer to a fully autonomous car today than they were six months ago. In fact, the last six months have been consumed playing catchup to the first generation Tesla with its Mobileye technology which Tesla quietly dropped while Intel spent $15.3 billion last month acquiring the company… Read More ›

The Autonomous Car: Navigating Tesla’s Slippery Slope to the Promised Land

The Autonomous Car: Navigating Tesla’s Slippery Slope to the Promised Land

Monday, March 13, 2017

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We continue our Autonomous Car series today with a report card on our first quarter results with the new Tesla Vision autopilot and a cautionary note to would-be Tesla owners. Since the new Tesla hardware was rolled out to vehicles manufactured in the last couple months of 2016, Tesla has had a bumpy ride and, in no small part, it has been due to self-inflicted wounds. The Tesla executive heading up the autopilot project abruptly quit and allegedly walked out… Read More ›

The Autonomous Car: A Hands-Free Drive with Tesla’s HW2

The Autonomous Car: A Hands-Free Drive with Tesla’s HW2

Monday, January 23, 2017

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It’s been about a month since we took delivery of a new, second-generation Tesla lovingly referred to as an HW2 vehicle.1 During that time, Tesla has provided an over-the-air map update and four firmware updates. The latest one this past weekend enabled Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) and limited AutoSteer capabilities for the entire fleet of next-generation HW2 Tesla vehicles. This includes all cars manufactured since October 19, 2016 that feature a new state-of-the-art supercomputer (pictured below) capable of 8 trillion… Read More ›

The Autonomous Car: Tesla & The Winding Road

The Autonomous Car: Tesla & The Winding Road

Monday, January 9, 2017

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We kick off 2017 with a new series on autonomous vehicles and, for the short term at least, the focus will be on Tesla simply because they’ve moved the needle the quickest and have a billion+ driver-tested miles under their belt already. I’m reminded of a quip from a pilot friend who said, "Anybody can fly a plane at 30,000 feet with autopilot. What separates the living from the dead is what you do when something goes wrong." A recent… Read More ›