Driverless cars are here. I know because my brother recently bought a 2025 Model Y and we “drove” it from St Paul to Chicago. So many people asked me about the drive, so I thought I’d share here.

The car is driverless, but not autonomous, which means he has to pay attention the whole time, but he doesn’t have to touch the steering wheel or accelerator – unless he wants to. I’ll tell you the coolest part first – then the mundane details. You can get the car to pick you up with no one in the car. It’s short distance (maybe 250 feet), but you could park at the grocery store and have the car pick you up at the door. Just push a button. (Videos below.)

To have the car “take the wheel” you type in an address and go. You can set parameters such as top speed or choose a setting chill, aggressive or Mad Max. (My brother may have made up those terms, but you get it.) At any time, you can take over the steering wheel or accelerate/deaccelerate. In practice you don’t have to grab the wheel but just touch the indicator and it will change lane or move over.

Highway driving seems very easy. Even off and on ramps are smooth. My brother took control once when a semi turned right into our lane to avoid a slow car. Residential driving is slow. I live on a St Paul street with on street parking and lots of family homes. Cars parked on either side of the narrow street make the car much slower. But the odds of a toddler chasing a ball are higher here than other areas. Driving on rural county roads was trickiest.

I could compare the driverless car to me driving down a winding county road – except I might put on the brake for turns. The car doesn’t appear to see the yellow warning sides, such as suggested speeds for curves and turns. Also, it doesn’t read the yellow dividing lines well if one side is solid and one is broken. It will only read the side its on. But the car gets smarter every day with AI. So I imagine this would get smoothed out the more you drove a country road; also, the cars collectively get smarter so the more you drove the road, the smarter all Teslas get.

Bringing it around to broadband, the question I had was the impact of slower or spotty broadband. The car will still be “drivable” but won’t know where to go because broadband facilitates the following:

• The car collects data to report back to the collective Tesla brain (AI); without broadband, date will not be uploaded.
• The car downloads regular updates with broadband; without broadband updates don’t happen.
• The car uses Google maps for directions, without broadband it won’t be able to go to an address. The car won’t stop and the 8 cameras around the car help the car not go through a red light or hit anything.

Looking at the economic impact of electric cars in rural areas I noticed two things:

• Again, the map reads Google maps. Make sure your business is on online maps if you want to be seen. (I couldn’t actually see businesses along the way but that can’t be far behind – and might even just be a setting we didn’t use.)
• Electric cars need charging stations. We stopped twice. It’s about 20 minutes for a full charge. Proximity to the charging station was the only criteria for where we had lunch and could have had snacks.
• And based on the observation above – recognize that yellow signs are not seen.

If you get a chance to ride in a driverless car – take it. It’s fun. If/when it snows and slushes, I’ll try again and report back. I’m curious to see how that cameras handle that!