If a basketball player can reliably score three pointers, it's only safe to assume they'll have no problem scoring two feet away from the board, as long as they're unmarked and not on the wrong side of it, right?
The answer is “yes,” and you know why? Because it is a similar action, except a lot easier to perform. It's two feet versus 23 feet and nine inches. Master the throw from the greater distance, and you'll have no problem putting the ball where it counts from closer to the basket.
I'm not entirely sure it is the best analogy, but I think it gets the message across. The Tesla Autopilot is supposed to be the world's most advanced driver's aid system, ready to guide a car from one coast to the other with next to no intervention from the man behind the wheel, the company's CEO said close to two years ago.
It's so clever, it could reach Level 5 autonomy (that would be the ultimate level where you can recline the seat, take your socks off, put your feet on the dashboard and continue the sleep interrupted by the alarm clock on the way to work) by the end of this year, according to the same CEO. And yet, at this point, it can hardly park a car.
Bear in mind, automatic parking systems have been around for more than ten years. Not only that, but they've worked quite well even from the start. I remember being inside Fords and Volkswagens that had no problem squeezing in some reasonably tight spots quickly and accurately.
The Tesla Model 3, on the other hand, seems to be worse at it than the generic grandma. Not only does it have problems identifying the available parking spaces, but once it does, it starts frolicking around, in and out, until you either get tired and take over, or it forces you to by saying that parking has failed.
Another thing to point out is that it seems quite selective about which moving cars around it matter and which don't. For some, it stops and waits to pass. For others, not so much. It's why early systems let the driver deal with the pedals and transmission while the computer only turned the wheel.
And before you call this anti-Tesla, just look at the person testing the feature. It's Bjørn Nyland, the second to last man you could accuse of hating Tesla after Elon Musk. Sure, you'll say, automatic parking is one of the most useless features on a car, and that's true, but it does raise some questions over other functions as well (Smart Summon, for example), not to mention the Autopilot suite as a whole.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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