Watching a Tesla on Autopilot from the

My friend Jake bought a Tesla Model 3 last month. Over the weekend he let me ride shotgun on the highway with Autopilot engaged.

I need to tell you about the first thirty seconds.

The steering wheel moved on its own. Just slightly, just a tiny correction, and my entire body tensed. Every muscle. My hands pressed against the dashboard, my feet pushed into the floor mat. The animal part of my brain screamed “NOBODY IS DRIVING” and the rational part of my brain whispered “it’s fine, it’s fine, the car knows what it’s doing” and the animal part told the rational part to shut up.

The car changed lanes. Smoothly. Signal on, gradual drift, centering in the new lane. A truck passed on the left and the car held steady. A curve came up and the wheel turned and the car followed the lane markings with mechanical precision.

By minute five, my shoulders dropped. My hands came off the dashboard. I was still watching the road, still hyper-alert, but my body had started to accept it.

By minute ten, I was looking at the instrument panel, watching the car’s visualization of the vehicles around us. Little gray shapes on a screen, each one tracked and predicted. It was weirdly calming. The car could see more than I could.

By minute twenty, I forgot.

I just forgot. I was talking to Jake about a movie we’d both seen, and I looked out the window at the hills going by, and for a few seconds the fact that a computer was driving sixty-five miles per hour on a busy highway simply left my mind. It was just… a car ride. Normal. Like being in a taxi.

That forgetting is what bothers me.

The trust problem

I don’t think the technical challenges of self-driving are the hard part. Tesla’s Autopilot works well on highways. It has limitations (it struggles with construction zones, certain weather conditions, and NHTSA is still studying edge cases). But the engineering is progressing.

The hard part is the trust. The psychological shift from “I am in control” to “a machine is in control and that’s okay.” It’s not a binary switch. It’s a gradual dimming of vigilance. First you stop pressing your feet into the floor mat. Then you stop gripping the dashboard. Then you stop watching the road. Then you stop thinking about the road.

And that’s exactly what Tesla tells you not to do. “Keep your hands on the wheel. Stay attentive. This is a driver assist system, not a self-driving system.” All correct. All important. All completely ignored by the human nervous system after twenty minutes of smooth highway driving.

Because here’s the thing about humans and automation: we adapt. We can’t not adapt. Our brains are calibrated for threat detection, and when a threat doesn’t materialize, the alarm system dims. Every minute the car drives without incident is a minute that teaches your body “this is safe.” And once your body decides something is safe, getting it to stay vigilant is like trying to stay awake in a warm lecture hall after lunch.

The in-between

I think we’re in the most dangerous phase of autonomous driving. Not because the technology is bad. Because it’s almost good enough.

If Autopilot were terrible, nobody would use it. If it were perfect, nobody would need to watch the road. But it’s in between. It’s good enough to lull you, not good enough to catch everything. That gap is where the accidents happen.

Jake uses Autopilot every day on his commute. He’s careful. He keeps his hands on the wheel (the car beeps at him if he doesn’t). But he told me, honestly, that he sometimes zones out. Not fully. Just enough. Just the way I did.

I think about that a lot now. Thousands of people, every day, riding in the gap between “almost autonomous” and “actually autonomous.” Trusting a machine that’s earning their trust a little more each mile. Letting go a little more each drive.

The future of driving isn’t going to arrive as a sudden shift. It’s going to arrive as a slow forgetting. One day we’ll realize we stopped paying attention, and the car was fine, and we can’t quite remember when we stopped.

That forgetting. I’m still not sure if it’s progress or something else.

Related thinking: