Study finds the best autopilot solution, spoiler alert: it’s not Tesla FSD

A team of researchers from Consumer Reports have drawn up a new ranking of semi-autonomous driving systems used in production cars. Ford BlueCruise emerged the winner, while Tesla’s hyped Full-Self-Driving suite came 7th.

The test crew evaluated the performance of the systems over several months of driving – both on closed test circuits and on public roads. The cars were subjected to around 40 different tests, including the efficiency, simplicity and ease-of-use of the associated interfaces, the level of driver involvement and the ways the systems reacted when the driver ignored the warnings.

The BlueCruise suite was awarded 9 out of 10 points in three out of five nominations. The only criticisms concerned the ease-of-use and the reaction of the car to the driver feigning being asleep or unconscious. In the latter two cases, the system simply drops the speed to 10 km/h (6 mph) and goes on, while most competing solutions prefer a full stop.

Next down the ranking were SuperCruise by General Motors and Driver Assistance by Mercedes-Benz. The rest of the list was occupied by BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, Rivian, Nissan, Honda, Volvo and Hyundai–Kia – in this particular order.

Ford and GM solutions were praised for accurately determining whether the driver was paying attention behind the wheel. BMW and Mercedes-Benz were smart enough to allow the driver to intercept controls for a brief moment with the autopilot turned on and then release the wheel again. Hyundai and Kia, while not particularly successful with their respective systems, at least offered easy-to-understand settings and ergonomic UIs.

As for the Tesla FSD, Consumer Reports concluded that the manufacturer was not really invested in upgrading the key systems and reworking things under the hood, instead being content with just adding new features. As a result, the competing solutions kept constantly evolving until they surpassed the FSD.