“Dumb” cruise control?

[Concerned]

Yeah it does it every time I pass a larger truck, bus etc. and really don’t like the lane keep assist bc it hugs the center line way too close for comfort.
My $30k Honda Odyssey minivan has a much better cruise and lane keep assist features.

My wife’s Subaru Legacy likewise does much better than my Y and honestly it’s terrifying, really surprised that this is so poor..

 

[Concerned]

How does it not work? Mine works fine. I have three friends who's "cruise control" works fine. Can't brush such a broad stroke. How many Teslas have issues with autopilot? Less than 1% or more like .05%? If your model has issues, get it looked at. I've driven on country roads and highways using autopilot. I have no issues.

That said, at ANYTIME if the person behind you hits you due to you braking it is 100% their fault. The responsibility of the vehicle BEHIND YOU is to be far back enough to brake in case of emergency. That's driving 101. People follow too close, that's not your issue - it's theirs (regardless if it's a sedan or trailer). A Tesla phantom braking is no different than a Tesla driver braking as a deer flies into the road. The vehicle behind you should be far back enough to react.

Lastly, if you purchased a Tesla just so you didn't need to drive, that's on you. The technology in these cars are new and buggy. Everyone knows this. Any research on Tesla shows they still has issues. You took that risk when purchasing this car. I didn't purchase a Tesla so it could drive itself. For me, and most people (I believe), it's just a nice perk. This isn't to say it's okay that Tesla has phantom breaking. They are working on it. But, to purchase a Tesla knowing there are still issues with autopilot and FSD...that's the risk you took.

Respectfully, I don’t believe the basics of adaptive cruise control that Subaru perfected years ago with their EyeSight is something that a car over twice the price is something that the buying public should have “known” about. I “assumed” that the complaints posted were overstated, clearly they are not. Its a safety hazard, plain and simple. Forget letting it drive, you have to go old school and use the accelerator peddle alone when approaching trucks on the highway otherwise you have no idea what the car will do.

 

[Jjrss]

Ive noticed in the last month or 2, my Radar equipped Y LR is failing to maintain speed/distance in the left lane by 3~10 mph under the set max. I'm constantly needing to manually accelerate to maintain the 1~2 second gap.

 

[arghx7]

Ive noticed in the last month or 2, my Radar equipped Y LR is failing to maintain speed/distance in the left lane by 3~10 mph under the set max. I'm constantly needing to manually accelerate to maintain the 1~2 second gap.

They've definitely toned down the "catch up" acceleration in a recent software update.

 

[jackmott]

Is there a contact information to plead with Tesla to please allow “dumb” cruise control? Because my 2022 MYP cannot go more than 10 seconds without phantom braking on my 2 lane undivided highway. It is dangerous as I almost was rear ended yesterday.

Report phantom braking as a safety problem to the NHTSA:

Report a Safety Problem | NHTSA

File a complaint with NHTSA if you experienced a vehicle, tire, car seat or equipment safety problem that could be a safety defect.

www.nhtsa.gov

You will need you VIN which you can easily copy and paste from the tesla.com web page by logging into your account

 

[tm1v2]

Auto pilot is not cruise control.


This post is 100% on point. Rational. Common sense thinking.

1. Better to brake than not brake. I don't trust self driving or full auto pilot so this features doesn't impact me. I prefer to drive myself and only use auto pilot off and on during long highways.

I said a similar thing. Quite frankly, phantom braking is far less dangerous than the car not reacting.

@EmbersDC @stopcrazypp Those points are deeply false. TACC is a driver assist feature. It doesn't need to automatically stop for every possible road hazard. The driver still needs to pay attention and be ready to intervene anyways. The phantom braking gets in the way of doing its assistance job.

I agree that Tesla has clearly tuned TACC, and especially VO TACC, as though they're building it into autonomous driving. Which makes TACC worse as a driver assistance ACC feature than those just focused on distance following.

And @EmbersDC TACC *IS* cruise control, it's even in the name - Traffic Aware Cruise Control.

 

[WhiteWi]

It starts with Traffic Aware in case you missed it. (360 degrees around car).

 

[Fourdoor]

They are making progress on vision only TACC's. Now (during the day) it only brakes hard (If I don't intervein, 60 mph down to 30 mph) for virtually every semi truck in the oncoming lane, it no longer slows down at random for no discernable reason and no longer reacts to passenger car sized oncoming objects... sometimes it does the hard braking for a large pickup truck, but not nearly as often as it used to. At night TACC's is still complete trash so I use the "speed limit mode" work around.

Why do I have a problem with this if they are making improvements? Because I am not a paid Beta tester employed by Tesla!

Keith

 

[Michigan Man]

I think you guys are oversimplifying the problem that removal of radar is the issue. I have an early VIN Model Y with radar and it still regularly phantom brakes, most often on curved areas of the road where I think radar accounts for a lot of false positive collision events. I agree that Tesla autopilot is dysfunctional enough where you cannot truly use it without being on high alert. GM and Ford vehicles with adaptive cruise in my experience work more reliably--even those that are several years old.

 

[stopcrazypp]

@EmbersDC @stopcrazypp Those points are deeply false. TACC is a driver assist feature. It doesn't need to automatically stop for every possible road hazard. The driver still needs to pay attention and be ready to intervene anyways. The phantom braking gets in the way of doing its assistance job.

I agree that Tesla has clearly tuned TACC, and especially VO TACC, as though they're building it into autonomous driving. Which makes TACC worse as a driver assistance ACC feature than those just focused on distance following.

And @EmbersDC TACC *IS* cruise control, it's even in the name - Traffic Aware Cruise Control.

Well you can disagree that it is "necessary", but there have been several fatal accidents already when Tesla's system did not respond (including one that NHTSA did a thorough investigation and resulted in the current restrictions in Tesla's AP). AFAIK, there are none for phantom braking. Even if the car slams on the brakes (which is more rare, most of the time it just lets off the accelerator and speed only drops a few mph), in the worse case, the car behind may rear end you, but it's unlikely to result in a fatal accident, especially when you are in an operation mode where you expect the car may slow down on its own (like TACC or AP) and you can intervene.

Of course, I'm not saying Tesla should give up on reducing false positives (they clearly need to work on it, and they are as part of FSD), but it's looking like it's going to be a long progress.

And as others pointed out, just putting in radar doesn't solve the issue (as phantom braking has been a reported issue long before Tesla removed the radar).

 

[Lipper]

I only have this happen on two lane undivided highways and I think only twice. I don’t have radar.

It’s not a Tesla only thing as I’ve seen it happen on other systems and you can search online to see as much.

However, I’m 100% on board with a dumb cruise control as an option.

I think its either problem with your specific vehicle or there is a difference between the models radar/no radar etc. I just drove 2500KMs in my MYLR (with radar) and most of it with cruise control enabled and didn't have a single phantom breaking incident - even when changing lanes or passing vehicles.

 

[Concerned]

I personally believe that this is all a function of TACC being integrated to FSD, and radar isn’t really required.. The Tesla AI folks tout all of it’s vision aspects and many say it has 50% more than us, meaning three cameras vs two eyes… yet I also own two Subaru’s that only use two cameras and do lane keeping and adaptive cruise control flawlessly If all we are asking the car to do is speed management and functionally the collision avoidance, not auto steer, the fsd features are why it functionally phantom brakes…. The irony is my wife followed me home the other day and my MY phantom braked and the Subaru‘s collision avoidance alerted …. so she then lead for the balance of the journey.. unsurprisingly her car never had an issue. the AI discussions from the experts are all impressive, but we are functionally beta testing their software development efforts and their efforts are focused on fsd not what many of us are expect TACC to be able to do everyday…. I don’t think basic TACC functions are a priority in any way….

 

[GeorgeC1]

Mine does both things the one poster mentioned. It phantom breaks on two lane roads and hugs the centerline. In addition it often drops its speed limit on Interstate 77 to 55 MpH and rapidly slows despite there being no change in the actual limit.

 

[specialgreen]

I do a monthly drive with a 4.5 hour stretch of 2-lane, both coming and going (it's a 1k mile trip). If I slowed from 65 to a random speed between 65 and 40 each time there was an oncoming semi (maybe 400 times per 1k miles?), would the small increase in risk of getting rear-ended outweigh the benefit of TACC being so defensive? I don't know. All that unneeded braking could make travel very annoying, even scary, yet still safer.

 

[ScoobyDoo82]

Yeah it does it every time I pass a larger truck, bus etc. and really don’t like the lane keep assist bc it hugs the center line way too close for comfort.
My $30k Honda Odyssey minivan has a much better cruise and lane keep assist features.

What are you talking about? Honda’s LKAS system is Doo Doo. It can only “steer” about 15 degrees before it stops working.. it also ping pongs between the lines really badly. it can hardly handle a bend in the road let alone handle a full 90 degree turn.

 

[stopcrazypp]

I think the "who is at-fault" question is a red herring. The goal is to reduce serious accidents; not to cause accidents that are legally someone else's fault. For example, in the 90's there was a pile-up on the autobahn because a driver slowed to avoid hitting a beagle (if I recall), and the German judge threw the book at the driver who slowed. I guess US law was not helpful in the defense. The world is not Greater USA.

Now, it's an open question whether AP, left to its own devices, would help or hurt. I do a monthly drive with a 4.5 hour stretch of 2-lane, both coming and going (it's a 1k mile trip). If I slowed from 65 to a random speed between 65 and 40 each time there was an oncoming semi (maybe 400 times per 1k miles?), would the small increase in risk of getting rear-ended outweigh the benefit of TACC being so defensive? I don't know. All that unneeded braking could make travel very annoying, even scary, yet still safer.

It reminds me of bicycling in traffic: when the shoulder is unsafe, bicyclists are taught by "safe riding" classes to take the full lane. I hate doing this. I worry that an inattentive driver is going to plough into me from behind. But direct hits from behind are rare (most are from turning cars). Experts like John Forester of "Effective Cycling" said that taking the whole lane is statistically the safe thing to do. But it still feels dangerous and scary. And you get honked-at a lot.

An extra twist is that if Tesla can train drivers to goose the throttle every single time there is an oncoming semi yet the driver sees no threat, then maybe you get the best of both worlds: no spurious brake-checks, and good automated defensive braking. By changing the role of the driver from one who reacts to threats, to one who affirms safety, maybe driving is much safer (but much more annoying to the driver).

For Tesla I don't think "at fault" is the main concern. It's typically not Tesla (the company) that is found at fault either way. The main concern is which action is more likely to result in an accident (particularly a fatal one). There has been a bunch of Tesla AP vs semi truck accidents that have been fatal (also some vs firetrucks, some fatal, some not). In the comments of most reports, the public blames the Tesla system for not responding, rarely do people feel it's justified for the system to not respond. So it's kind of understandable for the car to be tuned to be "scared" of semis (and similar trucks) to reduce the risk.

 

[sckor]

For Tesla I don't think "at fault" is the main concern. It's typically not Tesla (the company) that is found at fault either way. The main concern is which action is more likely to result in an accident (particularly a fatal one). There has been a bunch of Tesla AP vs semi truck accidents that have been fatal (also some vs firetrucks, some fatal, some not). In the comments of most reports, the public blames the Tesla system for not responding, rarely do people feel it's justified for the system to not respond. So it's kind of understandable for the car to be tuned to be "scared" of semis (and similar trucks) to reduce the risk.

If it this were the case only when using autopilot, I would agree with you. When AP is engaged, there is the presumption that the driver is paying less attention so having the car take a more cautious approach could be somewhat justifiable.

But TACC is a whole other story. Like, I'm literally still driving the car, and I just want it to maintain the same speed without freaking out.

You'd see a lot less complaints if the sudden deceleration only happened when using AP and not TACC.

 

[john8899]

I don't use AP and probably never will use AP. I would like to have cruise control, any sort of cruise control, that functions normally, as on countless other cars and on every other car I have owned for the past 30 years. The Tesla cruise control, tied in with AP, is unsafe and unacceptable.

 

[bo3bdar]

I just think it's really strange how Tesla is so hard-ass about their software and denying features that would make the user happier. I guess we are calling this 'courage' now, but I'd really rather have some options.

For dumb cruise control- I can say for a fact that they already have this. It's in their software stack and it works fine, they just choose to refuse to allow you to use.

I know this because I bought the unicorn $35K car that did not even come with Autopilot. On this car, there is only dumb cruise control. I turn it on with the single downpress of right stalk, and it takes current speed as 'set'. I can dial up or down using right thumbwheel.

Obviously this doesn't help you guys, but I thought it's worth mentioning that the software already exists, it's not something they'd have to spend time on.

 

[bobbyjae]

Seems like there are still lots of issues:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/10/video-tesla-full-self-driving-beta/