In the weeks since Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software has been released, we have seen a few videos of the car impressively avoiding road debris and a traffic cone that was in the path of the vehicle.
Now a Tesla Model S owner, who appropriately has the license plate ‘AIDRIVR’, has put together a number of different scenarios to see what kind of obstacles the software can detect, and how it decides to go around them.
The tests start off with the very common traffic cone. As expected, it easily avoids it when placed on the side of the road. But we already knew it did that, so AIDRIVR places the cones in different spots, including in a position where the car would need to either drive through three cones blocking its path, or stop entirely.
Unsurprisingly, it stops, and as the beta tester points out, that is the best possible outcome rather than attempting to barrel through them.
Probably the most impressive result from the video was when the cones were placed in a slalom configuration. In the first test, the cones are spaced out enough for any driver to easily avoid them. In the second, they are placed closer together, making the test much more difficult.
In an impressive showcase of its abilities, the car elegantly drives around the cones, making autocross drivers watching the video a little envious.
As the video progresses, the tests get more and more difficult. Other objects like a bucket, plastic bag and paper bag are used both by themselves and together in different configurations.
While the self-driving software is still only in an early beta phase, and a lot of work still has to be done to get it to a wide public release, what we see in this video is truly impressive. For a Tesla equipped with the current public version of Autopilot, the car would likely fail all of these scenarios.
The one downside to these tests is they were all performed on a quiet side road at relatively low speed. Hopefully we some tests soon with oncoming traffic, and at higher speeds.
Check out the full video below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
