Testing Tesla on the Deadliest Road in America 🐉

Thank you so much to all the Bonnie Bees, I couldn't do this without you: www.patreon.com/cgpgrey Raw footage of the ride: https://youtu.be/Oz4yMGbRa4Q

The dragon has really clean road lines and is very well maintained. It may be curvy but it's still a pretty "happy path" test scenario. Owning a Tesla in Wisconsin quickly reveals the larger gaps in the software with our busted up roads and rough winters. It's incredibly impressive, but does have a long way to go on roads in disrepair.

wait, grey isn't a simplistically styled stickman in real life?! I feel betrayed

This wasn't a bad test, but it wasn't, IMO, a great one either. A well maintained, well marked two-lane road,;with limited crossroads in perfect weather conditions with minimal traffic. The decisions the car needed to make were minimal. The places where autopilot is going to be stressed are multi-lanes roads, cross roads, poorly marked roads, poorly maintained roads, etc.

But can it drift through every turn like it's Initial D

my verdict is very different to grey's. apart from some low-visibility hairpins this was a very, very easy environment for the algorithms. continuous bright line markings, no overtaking, almost no opposing traffic, no sidewalks, crossings, actual humans, traffic lights, ... basically this was a simple line follower exercise but it did not even manage to do that completely successfully. the only upside: the programmers knew how dangerous it is and made it go really slow.

Grey: "Dad, can I have the keys to the car?" Dad Grey: " Why? " Grey: "I need it for work...."

Grey on the Loneliest Road: death and destruction and existentialism thoughts activated Grey on the Deadliest Road: ahh i'll be fine with this BETA software

5:54 The little detail of putting his stick figure character in his place is just so funny and wall made!

Love how all the lane markings are crisp and it still manages to cross the double yellow. A+ lane keeping there.

Grey a few years ago: I have driving anxiety, and driving on a highway at night while tired (albeit with partial self-driving) was so dangerous in retrospect that I couldn't even put cheerful music over the footage. Grey now: Let's put my entire life in a full self-driving beta's hands on The Deadliest Road in America! WOOOOO!

This is a perfect example of how what's easy for humans and what's easy for machines are not strictly overlapping.

Tail of the dragon is EXTREMELY fun. I could be mistaken but i think i heard the reason its so flowing and natural is its just a paved dirt road and that dirt road might have been just made from a deer trail. So the design of it was done organically by nature.

As easy a self-driving test as it should get. No complications, single uninterrupted road, no crossings or traffic lights. No pedestrians. No merging or overtaking. Clear and consistent markings. No traffic signs. No light signals. It is practically a road sprung from a laboratory test tube. If it wouldnt do this blindfolded something would be seriously wrong.

Yeah, the only reason the Tail of the Dragon is so dangerous is that people tend to go there as thrillseekers. I grew up in the area and learned to drive on the roads there, there's plenty of roads with similar curves or a similar density of curves, but they don't see nearly the same amount of crashes thanks to the lack of people driving as recklessly, the amount of crashes really appears to me to be due to people driving irresponsibly. I drove it back on Labor Day Weekend in 2021 and saw motorcyclists driving dangerously fast around the curves, and being chased by a Tennessee State Trooper with their lights and sirens going. I was also out visiting Fontana Dam on 4th of July Weekend and saw the traffic that was redirected from the Dragon due to a large truck crashing on the road.

I dont know why but the little touch of Winter “reacting” made me smile so much.

Now whilst many debate the effectiveness of this test, I view it as amazing for one clear reason: The department which manages this road, despite its fame and supposed danger, has kept this road so well maintained that an AI can safely traverse it on its own. It also presents a theory of what if there are multiple self driving cars alongside multiple manual motorists and etc, and if self driving cars could also then at a point comfortably aid drivers who were traversing incredably long stretches of road and had little time to make stops, with the potential of running into a road like this being less of a threat or obstacle and rather just another part of the trip.

I'm so glad everyone in the comments is treating this as the interesting-yet-not-groundbreaking display it is. People can get way too overexcited by self-driving cars cough*veritasium*cough and go overboard with their praise.

Does seem like less of a challenge for a self driving car compared to city traffic.

I take car meets out to the dragon all the time. Rules are: Keep 2 cars spacing and never cross the yellow lines. The dangerous part of this road are the blind corners and the sharp turns. You have to brake way harder than you think. Honestly, this road is much more forgiving on brakes than a circuit track, but the lack of visibility and the constraint of being stuck in 1 lane has tricked even experienced track drivers in my experience. This bit of road is a lot of fun, just takes discipline and awareness to enjoy it. Never drive alone in this road.