The future is NOW. Not two years from now, not this Winter, and not tomorrow. The future has arrived with Tesla’s autopilot system, and this footage of a Jalopnik editor riding in the driver’s seat of a Model S as the car navigates itself through the crowded streets of New York City is blowing my damn mind right now.
I used to think that ‘the future’ meant flying cars and hoverboards, but no, this is it. As somehow who drives around in Manhattan on the regular, and has almost gotten into multiple altercations in traffic due to road rage, I can tell you that this is the fucking future right here. Once this autopilot system takes ahold of the world no longer will the awful taxi drivers who learned to drive in Rio and Djibouti cause the non-taxi drivers to want to want to drive off the highway (FDR, BQE, choose one). If those taxi drivers aren’t in charge of their own vehicles, and can’t cut everyone off at will, then NYC might no longer be the worst place in America to drive a car.
Los Angeles and Atlanta might have serious traffic jams, with super congested highways, but in terms of actual ‘shitty drivers’ those cities have nothing on Miami and NYC, and when you narrow those two down Miami can’t even shake a stick at NYC because the congestion in New York is 1000x what you get in MIA. Driving in this city is actual hell. Last Friday it took me over 2.5 hours just to get off of the island of Manhattan in a car (~13 miles in 2.5 hours). This autopilot system is what I’m banking on to save the future of car travel…..Now I’m just crossing my fingers that Tesla doesn’t flounder.
[Jalopnik]