If you can, you should start another thread with video links showing phantom braking occurrences. I'm very curious about these events, as I've never experienced anything other than very minor slowdowns (which seemed like they were due to other vehicles in adjacent lanes on slight curves). I realize it will be difficult to tell in the TeslaCam video (you will be able to see the nose of the car dip on braking though), but still curious. Just would be cool to see the spots where the issues occur and get a sense for the severity.
There are/were(?) three places total where I'd get phantom braking every time, even with no cars around. I had a chance to drive through two of them today (the other is way across town... don't get over there often), and both of them were fixed with the latest firmware update.
I also had the opportunity to drive the car from St. George, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada and back yesterday (145 miles one way, all Interstate 15). Only had one phantom braking event, very apparently caused by a vehicle rapidly moving over to the lane immediately to the right of me. He/she cut across two lanes of traffic at a high closure rate to end up in the lane to my right, ahead of me. Las Vegas has a lot of those situations where, upon entering the freeway, you gotta move over at least one lane (and quite often multiple lanes) in a hurry or else you're immediately going to be exiting the freeway again. It'll be interesting to see if Tesla is *ever* able to get that situation solved, as the closure rate really makes it look like they're going to end up in your lane. And this situation is very frequent in Las Vegas and in pretty much every Utah town.
I did have a message pop up a few times while navigating on autopilot stating that "Navigate on Autopilot is currently unavailable. It may be available for your next drive." The car would stay on AP, just the navigate portion would disappear. After a few minutes, the message would clear and the car would return to NoAP. Did it twice within ten minutes, then didn't do it again.
Overall, the AP seems a bit more sure-footed this update. Less tendency to meander in its lane, less tendency to go diving over to the right side of the lane while in the right lane with another lane merging and coming to an end in your lane. Make sense? Basically, when the lane you're in becomes large, then narrows back down to normal lane size. Car doesn't go swerving over to catch the far right side of the lane as bad now.
I did have one instance where it got completely confused and gave up. Approaching a hill, a third "climbing lane" appeared, and the car jinked left and right trying to decide which lane it was going to take (I was in the left lane passing a bus when the "climbing lane" appeared) quite heavily. It finally gave up and disconnected itself. For some reason, this landed me in "autopilot jail." I got a message stating something about AP speed limit exceeded (I hadn't exceeded AP speed limit) and that AP was unavailable for the rest of the drive. I ended up taking an exit and shutting the car down/restarting to get my AP back!
Half the drive was made at night. I was very impressed with how well the system worked at night; one of the concerns I had about a (primarily) vision based AP was night and low visibility conditions. Yes, I know that there's also a radar unit and all of the sonar units, but primary object recognition is visible light based. And it does a great job considering how early in the development process it is. Anyone have much of a chance to test it in foggy conditions yet?
Not firmware related, but something I thought was cool... Next time you drive your car at night, check out how far to the left your headlights throw light immediately in front of the car. It throws it waaay over there. Far more so than any other car I've driven. No wonder the AP has such a great sense of how many lanes there are on a freeway. They really engineered the headlight coverage pattern well; even though the light is thrown a long distance to the left immediately in front of the car, it throws it down low, keeping it out of the face of incoming traffic. Then the light pattern that is projected off into the distance has very even coverage, but doesn't bias the left side of the light pattern, making it easy on oncoming eyes. The auto high beams function also works better than in any other car I've driven. One nice thing about living in a small town? We actually get to use our high beam headlights occasionally. Hey, we gotta take our wins where we can.
. I'm sorry as much as some people hate Tesla spending any time with games on the car, it does make for a fun car unlike anyone elses...except fellow Teslas.
