My Tesla Saves The Day

Tesla Saves The Day

Recently, a car just like mine crashed in Texas killing the two occupants. The crash was blamed on the car and its self driving technology. It was some of the worst reporting I have ever seen. Later, it was found that the car that crashed did not even have Full Self Driving capability. When the guy bought the car, he didn't pay the extra money for it. But, allow me to tell a short story about something that happened to me yesterday. 

While driving north on I-505 about 20 miles out of Vacaville, CA, I became intimately familiar with one of the many safety features of my 2019 Tesla Model S, a car exactly like the one in Texas with one exception: My car does have Full Self Driving capability. Everything was operating normally. I was following some cars in front of me traveling at about 70 mph, and I was in the right hand lane of the freeway. The weather was nice and that stretch of road is really pretty boring. And then without notice, I woke up. You read that correctly. I had fallen totally asleep. I'm not talking about dozing off or nodding at the wheel. I was asleep. I heard the "wake up" alarm and opened my eyes, and I found that I was still following the car in front of me at the proper distance, and that my car had slowed down to 55 mph to maintain a proper following distance between me and the car in front of me. I was still in my lane. Autopilot had saved me from a very bad accident. 

Here's what would have happened if I didn't wake up, or if I had suffered a heart attack and died: Had I not awakened, my car would have turned on the emergency flashers and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and placed itself in park. It would have then called 911. It would do all of this while avoiding possible conflicting traffic. 

I can't remember the last time that I had a hard time staying awake while driving. In this case, the previous day and night had been exceedingly stressful, and it all just caught up with me on that long boring stretch of concrete. I think that this kind of technology is going to be the future. It's not perfect yet, and certain features of Full Self Driving are still not activated within the Tesla package. But it has some very good features that are available now. 

What did I do next? I drove to the next off-ramp, pulled over, and took a 30 minute nap. After that I drove to the nearest Starbucks.