Hey everyone! I put together a driving video to show how my new Ready to Drive Chestnut is handling on the road, so check out the clip attached! I wanted to drop a detailed first impression for anyone impatiently waiting on their shipment or sitting on the fence for the next batch. Coming from a super dialed-in setup on RDF V6, my bar was honestly set pretty high, but Chestnut is proving to be a solid, noticeable upgrade.
Installation was straightforward. The Chestnut box tucked cleanly under my driver's seat—safe from winter boot slush and potential passenger drink spills—and I routed the USB-C cable up the driver's side pillar directly to the Comma unit on the windshield. That 3-meter cable barely reached in my compact Corolla, but it made the connection. Stock OpenPilot booted right up to verify the hardware, but I quickly flashed over to Star Pilot (Dom branch) running the Lebowski model to get back to tweaking.
Out on the road, while it isn't doing anything wildly sci-fi, the overall driving feel is significantly smoother and far more contextual. The absolute biggest win for me is daytime green light confidence. Older models used to panic-stab the brakes under bright sunlight, but Chestnut doesn't hesitate for a second. Its long-range vision is also a huge leap forward—it picks up stopped traffic and red lights way earlier down the road, resulting in a super gradual, human-like deceleration. Even the final roll-out down to 0 mph is buttery smooth, avoiding the sudden brake clamping or infinite creeping I used to experience.
Navigating urban neighborhoods and tighter back roads felt really grounded. It handled unmarked roads, dodged construction cones gracefully, and unwound out of turns cleanly. Since the Corolla has pretty limited factory steering torque, I still have to help guide the wheel up to the apex on sharper turns or roundabouts, but I just let go after that and let the model finish the curve. It does hug parked cars along the shoulder a bit closer than I'd personally like, and I noticed a tiny bit of micro-ping-ponging on straights, but those feel like things I can tune out in Star Pilot.
It definitely still has some classic openpilot quirks to iron out. It gets confused at stop signs with secondary crosswalk lines, usually overshooting the main stop bar to halt at the pedestrian line instead. It also treats yield signs as full stop signs, and at one intersection, it tried to blindly follow a lead car through a red light after that car made a right turn.
Despite those edge cases, I’m super happy with the upgrade. The combination of extended vision range, refined braking, and reliable intersection behavior makes it a vastly more relaxed daily driver, and I’m really excited to see how these larger parameter models keep evolving. Hope the video gives you a good sense of what it looks like in real time!