I visited a friend recently in Etobicoke (Toronto). It's a 80-minute drive on some of Ontario's most complex traffic during a weekday. When I arrived, he asked, "How was the traffic?". I paused, thought about it for a few seconds, and answered honestly: "I don't know!".

This surprised even me. How was this possible?

The main answer is that our Tesla drove itself, basically all the way. But that's not new; the car has been taking us from address to address within or between cities, since we grabbed it 19ish months ago. When activated, it operates with near-zero input from the "driver", but for regulatory reasons, does insist that the driver commit some overt acts of "supervision" every now and then. This means we have to keep looking out the windows to confirm that the car is doing the right thing. Not constantly, but generally. A little cabin camera is tasked with assessing whether the driver is looking out "enough", and if not, reminding, nagging, NAGGING, and eventually pulling over and stopping the car. (It's a purely local computation, no big brother privacy violation involved.)

The rate these acts of supervision are enforced vary by unspecified factors and the driving profile (basically an "passivity" vs "aggression" setting we control). Looking at the computer screen for 10ish seconds at a time to look at the map or change music or whatever has been fine. Staring at your phone or out the side window for tens of seconds, not fine. It means one can sightsee, monitor traffic conditions, and become alarmed at all the phone use by other drivers (whom one can now stare at and give the evil eye to). The computer screen notifies us when it wants us to look up and around.

With the current version of "Full Self Driving (Supervised)", v14.3.4, however has become so damned good, so reliable, that people have been driven coast-to-coast in North America, several times. Been driven, as in hands entirely off over thousands of kilometers and also thousands of miles. So, in "standard" driving profile, Tesla has backed off the attention-monitoring thresholds, way way off. So much so in fact that this day, I ended up looking at $social_media_platform for the bulk of the drive on the car's web browser. I only looked up a few times when I got reader's block, noticing, "hey, we're in the next city", or "look at that nice park".

The drive was smooth, and - as best as I can tell - flawless. And I still don't know how traffic was.