Isegoria

In 2015, Musk was spending hours each week working with the Autopilot team, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon):

He would drive from his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles to the SpaceX headquarters near the airport, where they would discuss the problems his Autopilot system encountered. “Every meeting started with Elon saying, ‘Why can’t the car drive itself from my home to work?’” says Drew Baglino, one of Tesla’s senior vice presidents.

[…]

There was a curve on Interstate 405 that always caused Musk trouble because the lane markings were faded. The Autopilot would swerve out of the lane and almost hit oncoming cars. Musk would come into the office furious. “Do something to program this right,” he kept demanding. This went on for months as the team tried to improve the Autopilot software.

In desperation, Sam Teller and others came up with a simpler solution: ask the transportation department to repaint the lanes of that section of the highway. When they got no response, they came up with a more audacious plan. They decided to rent a line-painting machine of their own, go out at 3 a.m., shut the highway down for an hour, and redo the lanes. They had gone as far as tracking down a line-painting machine when someone finally got through to a person at the transportation department who was a Musk fan. He agreed to have the lines repainted if he and a few others at the department could get a tour of SpaceX. Teller gave them a tour, they posed for a picture, and the highway lines got repainted. After that, Musk’s Autopilot handled the curve well.

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