Driving with Tesla Autopilot for a Whole Day?

As (almost) everyone knows by now, Tesla offers Autopilot in its vehicles. Once you enter a compatible route, the only thing the driver has to do is activate it... and let go of the wheel. But the YouTuber Ryan Trahan decided to take that experience to the extreme organizing a trip from Austin to Chicago. 17 hours plus charging times amount to more than a day on the road, with a significant part under the control of the automatic system. How did it go...?

It's not just a few who see Tesla's Autopilot as "the future" of cars. At the same time, not a few are throwing criticisms at it, highlighting the risks of leaving a vehicle in the digital hands of a computer system. The press does not hesitate to report all incidents related to Autopilot, and that leads us to a game of responsibilities. In general terms, Autopilot is not entirely automatic. There is no "set and forget", and the driver must intervene occasionally, but Autopilot is also not free of errors.

For those reasons, the YouTuber Ryan Trahan's experiment has attracted a lot of attention. Determined to push his Tesla's Autopilot to the limit, he organized a trip from Austin to Chicago, reducing his intervention to a minimum. Google Maps presented a calculation of 17 hours for the entire trip, but when incorporating the visits to the Superchargers, the total time comfortably exceeds 24 hours:

In the initial phase he covered 194.7 kilometers in 1 hour and 57 minutes, including the 26 minutes it took to recharge. In other words, his average speed is not the best. This was reflected when he arrived at the second Supercharger, with four and a half hours of travel and 389 kilometers covered (that is, almost five hours without leaving Texas). Before reaching the third Supercharger, he was stopped by the police (request for documents, claim for not stopping in time, and the comment that he looks 12 years old), and he recorded 487 kilometers in 5 hours and 20 minutes of travel, with 80 minutes of total charging.

The rest of the video is limited to presenting distance and charging time reports upon arriving at each Supercharger, and the final results... are bad. Very bad. The original idea of 24 hours was completely destroyed with a global record of 2,032 kilometers, 27 hours and 57 minutes of driving, and 7 hours and 36 minutes of accumulated charging, coming close to 36 hours. Including recharges, the average speed does not exceed 57 kilometers per hour.

What are the positive points? Autopilot did not fail, the cost of the trip amounts to a total of zero (access to all Superchargers was free), and apparently they enjoyed each stop quite a bit. However, convenience is non-existent, everyone ended up physically and emotionally exhausted, the system exaggerates when reporting the amount of miles available in the batteries, cold weather greatly affects its performance, and let's not forget the obligation to touch the steering wheel every ten seconds. In short, no.