You think some of the right-wingers who decry climate change will adopt EVs via Tesla since Elon sucks up to their guy now?

We just did. Only reason it took this long is because it auto-renewed this time last year for a year slightly ahead of when we thought it was gonna do that. Oops.

It’s a hard balance, being parents right now. I’m going to make an assumption and guess you mean you see them in public, yeah? The thing is (I say this as a parent of currently 9 and 7 year olds), our society — at least, my society in the US — still feels a bit like it expects children to be “seen and not heard” while in public. If even seen, to be honest. I don’t see it as much here on Lemmy but I saw anti-kid posts on Reddit all the time. I don’t mean childfree; I mean they constantly complained about other people’s kids. Yes, sometimes that can be due to a lack of structured parenting, but kids are also just little socially-inept, impulse-driven creatures who are still figuring the world out. The urge to hand them a magical little device that will occupy them and keep them “seen and not heard” while you are out somewhere is perilously strong.

All that being said: just last week I was sitting to the side at my son’s martial arts class, and next to me was a mom on her phone who had a young girl, maybe 3 or 4, next to her. The girl was squirmy but quiet. I could not help noticing that the mom barely looked up from her phone the whole time. I felt really bad for the girl.

It’s funny; I live in a Tesla hotspot and I actually notice slow teslas more than aggressive ones, maybe because I’m surprised they’re being so overly cautious. I guess it’s because everyone seems to have one here. Or… maybe it’s because they’re distracted. Yeah, that’s very possible…

(Full disclosure: I also drive one.)

Your hotdog buns have more structural integrity than mine.

I live in a major metropolitan area, drive a model 3, and almost never use autopilot.

I am lucky enough to rarely be in stop-and-go traffic, but when I am, I don’t even use cruise control, because it’s too reactive to the car in front of me and subsequently too jerky for my preference.

As for autopilot, I was on a relatively unpopulated freeway in the second lane from the right, when a small truck came around a clover leaf to merge into the right lane next to me. My car flipped out and slammed on the breaks. The truck wasn’t even coming into my lane; he was just merging. Thankfully there was a large gap behind me, and I was also paying enough attention to immediately jam on the accelerator to counteract it, but it spooked me pretty badly. And this was on a road that it’s designed for.

Autopilot (much less FSD) can’t really think like our brains can. It can only “see” so far ahead and behind. It can’t look at another driver’s behavior and make assessments that they might be distracted or or drunk. We’re not there yet. We’re FAR from there.