Fred’s got the scoop:
Jensen Gadley, a Tesla Model 3 owner from Las Vegas who rents out his car on Turo, was thinking of canceling a rental after the customers insisted on using the Smart Summon feature in his car.
When the customers arrived, Gadley was surprised to see him come out of a Porsche Taycan, which is still not being delivered, with several more people.
Electrek
They got tired of testing the Toucan and needed to rent a Model 3. Who can blame them?
After a few questions, they revealed that they are Porsche engineers working on driver assistance features, and they wanted Gadley’s Model 3 to test the Autopilot on the latest v10 update.
Electrek
Imagine being the competition and trying Autopilot for the first time.
“Ah shit”
Gadley told Electrek that they were even jumping in front of the car to see if it would stop.
They eventually attracted a crowd in the parking lot as passersby were wondering why people were throwing themselves at a driverless Tesla.
Electrek
I would be careful with that. In the future the neural net may be trained to attack anyone trying to reverse engineer it.
When they came back, they told Gadley that they were impressed by how Autopilot had improved under v10.
Electrek
Hopefully they didn’t pee their pants in the rental car when they saw what they were going to have to compete with.
This is awesome! lol
Why doesn’t Porsche just buy one with FSD to play with? They think they can just sneak a peek without it getting out? Obviously that didn’t work out.
they’re running low on cash after all the diesel fines. they don’t want to give money to their scariest competitor
AIUI, the engineers flew over from Germany. They couldn’t do the test in Germany (because EU regulators), and they don’t have a permanent engineering presence in the US AFAIK — so it would simply make no sense to purchase a car and have it sit in a lot somewhere…