It's time to talk about self-driving cars again.

I’ve had a Tesla with autopilot since the HW2 became available in 2016. It was always good enough to let me text and drive on the freeways, and that was good enough for me. Then in 2024, Tesla released a game-changing update that enabled true full self-driving on my car. It was still terrible in a lot of edge case situations, and it didn’t run so well on my 2016 hardware. I had a lot of times where I had to take over. When I upgraded to the 2026 Model Y, I found the self-driving in it life changing in how it changed my relationship to driving.

After recognizing that this version was a leap forward, I committed fully to the process, letting it self-drive as much as possible for a month. I would put in a destination, buckle up, and hit the autopilot button. I found myself getting into a balanced seating position, no longer having to use my feet for anything, and getting into something akin to a meditative state as I look forward and wait for my self-driving chariot to arrive at my destination.

Autopilot still has flaws, but they’re now manageable. It can be aggravatingly slow in parking lots and making left turns in traffic, to the annoyance of other drivers. It fails to see obvious traffic problems coming up in 6-12 seconds that a lane change would avoid. It fails to get into the correct lane for an upcoming turn when that lane is empty, and delays until merging annoys other drivers. I’ve now switched my driving habits to take over and correct it in these instances, and using the feedback system in hopes it will improve.

However, I can now comfortably say that it is a better driver than me unless I am taking over for one of the above transgressions. I’ve been using it this way for months, because I know it’s safer this way, even as I’m watching my driving skills deteriorate just as my navigation skills deteriorated a few decades ago. Hopefully I won’t need them much anymore either.

I was thinking about driving myself a bit more to keep my skills, and then this happened.

When the light turned green, my car started to go and then stopped. I saw the light was green, the coast was clear, and, somewhat annoyed at my finicky self-driving car, I stepped on the accelerator to get us to go. I had the briefest moment of wondering why my car wouldn’t accelerate before the car running the red light zipped past, and then my car started going again. No hesitation, no shock at the near accident, just on to my destination.

If I were driving, I might have noticed the car to the left of me slowing down and matched it, but probably not. There’s a good chance that I would zip past it and be in the center of the intersection when the other car arrived.

So that settles it. I’ll be taking over in parking lots and when autopilot is bad about lane changes. And I’ll be letting autopilot use its superior vision and reflexes the rest of the time. And doing my best to convince my parents to get a self-driving car. It’s time.