2018.21.9 Bumber Cars
I was able to experiment a little bit today, given the lighter traffic, and think I've figured-out why my Model X, Pensive, tried to ram a car in an adjacent lane earlier in the week.
I mentioned on Wednesday how, following the latest update, the car had made a sudden, extreme, jerk into an adjacent lane. At the time I was in a left-turn lane, farthest left of the east-bound side of a divided road, with heavy but moving traffic in the lanes continuing straight. The car acted as if it had wanted to ram the car next to me and it had been such a sudden extereme (nearly ninety degree) turn of the wheel that it took a surprising amount of counter force to break the Auto Pilot (which was the instinctive response, rather than try the toggle before correcting the wheel).
What I realized today, is that the spot (immediately after an intersection) had a dashed lane extension for traffic making a left-turn. It seems that, despite the markings being clearly crossing into the lane and convex from an oncoming vantage, the current version of Auto Pilot assumes they're the current lane's markings and tries an evasive manuever (I'm not sure how I feel about the change from the old behaviour of disengaging auto-steer and the speeding-up to this new eratic do something, anything behaviour).
It's clear that there are improvements to Auto-Pilot, there's a lot of iteration going on, but at the moment it feels even more dangerous and suicidal than it did a week ago, and that was more dangerous (because of the sudden stopping) than it felt a month ago. I was relaying these experiences to a co-worker today, whose serious question was "so, are they paying you for this? It sounds like they need the data to improve, it sounds like they need to pay someone to use it." To the contrary, I explained; and the car is an example of the tax-incentive that keeps charging. I'm still waiting for my state incentive check, but I've already received my excise tax bill. The former does not even cover half of the latter.