Hi All,
I wanted to premise this that I am not hating on Tesla in any way but I feel like its worth sharing my experience on this as at least in my experience the software took a step forward in terms of street driving and jumped off the cliff when it comes to freeway to the point that it could kill someone regardless of whose "fault" it legally is.
So last year me and a friend did a trip from Bay Area, CA to Vancouver, BC. During this trip we went on highway 5 most of the way up and then came down on 101 coastal highway which for those that have never done it I would highly recommend. We used Autopilot 80% of the way as it was handling the drive like a champ but did need some help on parts of 101 in Washington that are particularly curvy or had a lot of road work so overall great experience.
This year we did something similar but because we had a lot less time we decided to do a trip through Oregon. We started in Bay Area and I drove manually until we hit the intersection of 505 and 80 in Vacaville which was our first charging stop. I decided to drive that part myself due to how bad the traffic was and looking back I am glad I did. This is where we decided to let Autopilot do the work for us like we did last time, we went on 505 which is just like 5 a straight line highway and there was almost no traffic what so ever and almost immediately the issues begun. The car would randomly break from 70 mps to 35, and when I say that I don't mean once in awhile I mean every 5-10 minutes and almost got us rear ended a few times. Needless to say after about 10th phantom break we just decided to finish 505 ourselves as maybe it just doesn't like that freeway. Well turns out it doesn't like any freeway as it would attempt to do the same thing on 5 with 18 wheelers behind us. What we kind of deduced later on when we were going through Oregon on the way to Bend oh hwy 97 it seemed like it was freaking out over mirages on the road (which was never an issue before as we even drove to Vegas before and that's going through a desert) and the experience was a bit more stable if there was a car in front of you but you maintained a bit of distance by changing the max speed but needless to say we ended up driving to Bend ourselves as it just didnt seem safe for us or others on the road to continue using it.
Next day we left Bend around noon and headed for Portland via hwy 26 so we can drive right next to Mt.Hood. Since the drive is basically mostly downhill we made it to Portland from Bend with 40% battery but not before some more autopilot encounters. Since we left around 12 pm there was a bit of traffic but the road is very easy to drive and its 1 lane each direction for the majority of the way until you get to Mt Hood so we decided to give autopilot another try as there was another tesla behind us that maintained its distant and drivers in OR seem to be really chill in general. Well there were quite a few issues here as well, while in traffic it only tried to phantom break twice it kept trying to go into passing lane when one would appear despite us driving slower than the car in front and if you tell it to move right, it will and then move back left by it self, if I was driving behind me I would have thought we were drunk or worse. The cherry on top though is it gave me my first Autopilot miss use point when the screen\ipad crushed during the autopilot at which time I took over the controls only for it to not turn on "on this drive", and when we parked we got a message that we were misusing autopilot and we have 4 more chances so we just didnt use at all any more that day.
The following day we went to Astoria, OR without using autopilot as it wasn't a very long drive and the previous days experience has shaken our confidence in it. The following day we had our longest drive back from Astoria back to Bay Area via 101 which takes about 15 hours due to speed limit beings generally anywhere between 25-55 but for anyone who has not done this drive its a must. Well since its such a long drive we left at 4:30 am and as we were one of maybe a dozen cars that we saw for next few hours we tried autopilot again. Needless to say it didnt go well, as there wasn't much lighting so it kept saying that the pillar camera is blocked so we decided to just wait for the sun to come up so it can see. After the sun has come up and there was plenty of visibility we attempted to use it again only to notice that it does not seem to pick up all of the speed signs and still gets confused with the truck only signs which would happen occasionally in the previous builds. What was more concerning is the way the speed limit was calculated, previously lets say you had an offset of +5 mph, and it would honor it which means you knew what to expect. Now it wouldn't let us do MPH offset but only % so we set it to 8% (65->70) well it seems that this only works going up. Meaning, if you are in 25 mph zone and turn on Autopilot it will set the 8% to 27 (so far so good) and when you enter 45 zone afterwards it would set it to 48. So what is the issue with that you ask, well the issue is that this seems to only work now if you go up in speed limit not down which is super annoying. meaning that if you go from 45 zone to 25 zone it wont go 27 it will drop to 25 and you manually have to adjust, it also does not do so gradually but basically phantom breaks into the lower speed limit which again if you are driving behind me seems like I really have some issues.
Overall, I am not incredibly disappointed with the progress of the FSD beta and if any of you remember the fiery crash on bay bridge last year where FSD just stopped in the fast lane for no reason I can see that it could have happened to me as it acted exactly the same on even the most forgiving roads.
My question to you is has anyone ever seen this with the 22.45.15 build and is there anything you were able to do to fix the phantom breaking? Was it perhaps been better that I went to adoptive cruise control instead of FSD? I opened a ticket with Tesla regarding the point it gave me as well as this and asking them to move me on newer build as mine is till from November of last year to which they told me (its automatic) and "stalk was hit" (I mean I would pull the stalk up to disengage it after the phantom break or during the screen crash but that wasn't really helpful).
I wanted to premise this that I am not hating on Tesla in any way but I feel like its worth sharing my experience on this as at least in my experience the software took a step forward in terms of street driving and jumped off the cliff when it comes to freeway to the point that it could kill someone regardless of whose "fault" it legally is.
So last year me and a friend did a trip from Bay Area, CA to Vancouver, BC. During this trip we went on highway 5 most of the way up and then came down on 101 coastal highway which for those that have never done it I would highly recommend. We used Autopilot 80% of the way as it was handling the drive like a champ but did need some help on parts of 101 in Washington that are particularly curvy or had a lot of road work so overall great experience.
This year we did something similar but because we had a lot less time we decided to do a trip through Oregon. We started in Bay Area and I drove manually until we hit the intersection of 505 and 80 in Vacaville which was our first charging stop. I decided to drive that part myself due to how bad the traffic was and looking back I am glad I did. This is where we decided to let Autopilot do the work for us like we did last time, we went on 505 which is just like 5 a straight line highway and there was almost no traffic what so ever and almost immediately the issues begun. The car would randomly break from 70 mps to 35, and when I say that I don't mean once in awhile I mean every 5-10 minutes and almost got us rear ended a few times. Needless to say after about 10th phantom break we just decided to finish 505 ourselves as maybe it just doesn't like that freeway. Well turns out it doesn't like any freeway as it would attempt to do the same thing on 5 with 18 wheelers behind us. What we kind of deduced later on when we were going through Oregon on the way to Bend oh hwy 97 it seemed like it was freaking out over mirages on the road (which was never an issue before as we even drove to Vegas before and that's going through a desert) and the experience was a bit more stable if there was a car in front of you but you maintained a bit of distance by changing the max speed but needless to say we ended up driving to Bend ourselves as it just didnt seem safe for us or others on the road to continue using it.
Next day we left Bend around noon and headed for Portland via hwy 26 so we can drive right next to Mt.Hood. Since the drive is basically mostly downhill we made it to Portland from Bend with 40% battery but not before some more autopilot encounters. Since we left around 12 pm there was a bit of traffic but the road is very easy to drive and its 1 lane each direction for the majority of the way until you get to Mt Hood so we decided to give autopilot another try as there was another tesla behind us that maintained its distant and drivers in OR seem to be really chill in general. Well there were quite a few issues here as well, while in traffic it only tried to phantom break twice it kept trying to go into passing lane when one would appear despite us driving slower than the car in front and if you tell it to move right, it will and then move back left by it self, if I was driving behind me I would have thought we were drunk or worse. The cherry on top though is it gave me my first Autopilot miss use point when the screen\ipad crushed during the autopilot at which time I took over the controls only for it to not turn on "on this drive", and when we parked we got a message that we were misusing autopilot and we have 4 more chances so we just didnt use at all any more that day.
The following day we went to Astoria, OR without using autopilot as it wasn't a very long drive and the previous days experience has shaken our confidence in it. The following day we had our longest drive back from Astoria back to Bay Area via 101 which takes about 15 hours due to speed limit beings generally anywhere between 25-55 but for anyone who has not done this drive its a must. Well since its such a long drive we left at 4:30 am and as we were one of maybe a dozen cars that we saw for next few hours we tried autopilot again. Needless to say it didnt go well, as there wasn't much lighting so it kept saying that the pillar camera is blocked so we decided to just wait for the sun to come up so it can see. After the sun has come up and there was plenty of visibility we attempted to use it again only to notice that it does not seem to pick up all of the speed signs and still gets confused with the truck only signs which would happen occasionally in the previous builds. What was more concerning is the way the speed limit was calculated, previously lets say you had an offset of +5 mph, and it would honor it which means you knew what to expect. Now it wouldn't let us do MPH offset but only % so we set it to 8% (65->70) well it seems that this only works going up. Meaning, if you are in 25 mph zone and turn on Autopilot it will set the 8% to 27 (so far so good) and when you enter 45 zone afterwards it would set it to 48. So what is the issue with that you ask, well the issue is that this seems to only work now if you go up in speed limit not down which is super annoying. meaning that if you go from 45 zone to 25 zone it wont go 27 it will drop to 25 and you manually have to adjust, it also does not do so gradually but basically phantom breaks into the lower speed limit which again if you are driving behind me seems like I really have some issues.
Overall, I am not incredibly disappointed with the progress of the FSD beta and if any of you remember the fiery crash on bay bridge last year where FSD just stopped in the fast lane for no reason I can see that it could have happened to me as it acted exactly the same on even the most forgiving roads.
My question to you is has anyone ever seen this with the 22.45.15 build and is there anything you were able to do to fix the phantom breaking? Was it perhaps been better that I went to adoptive cruise control instead of FSD? I opened a ticket with Tesla regarding the point it gave me as well as this and asking them to move me on newer build as mine is till from November of last year to which they told me (its automatic) and "stalk was hit" (I mean I would pull the stalk up to disengage it after the phantom break or during the screen crash but that wasn't really helpful).
