Tesla Motors Club

Whenever I see this infuriating alert, it makes me want to jump out of the car and let it drive itself into the ocean.

This punitive alert appears when you "miss" multiple apply light force to steering wheel warnings -- the alert means you can't use autopilot until you next park the car. When this happens to me (it has happened somewhere between 5 and 10 times now), I've invariably had my hands on the wheel with my eyes straight ahead. The repeated "hold the wheel" warnings are too subtle to get my attention and the force required to prevent the warning is more force than is required to actually steer the car most of the time, so holding the wheel in a natural fashion alone doesn't satisfy the car.

In other words, preventing the "autopilot unavailable" penalty requires specific attention. The irony is that I'm a lot better at avoiding the penalty when I'm doing anything but paying attention to the road (tuning the radio, sorting through postal mail, straight-razor shaving, sponge-bathing, trying out my latest Stitch Fix, etc), so the warning is not doing a lot to encourage good behavior. If it does anything, it distracts me from paying attention to the road.

These are the changes I believe I've observed over the course of many months that have made this experience worse (subject to memory):

• The "apply light force to wheel" warning used to be accompanied with reliable chimes. Now it doesn't seem to chime every time, and if it chimes, apparently I've already been awarded a strike.
• The warning used to include white pulses at the top and bottom of the instrument panel. Now it just pulses at the top, which is completely occluded by the steering wheel with my positioning, so that element is completely invisible to me. (the only ergonomic means of making it visible would involve surgical height reduction)
• The warning used to give more time to supply the input it's looking for.
  
• It used to be more sensitive to forces applied to the wheel (I think?). Since the warning started having teeth, I have frequently applied a variety of torques in response, but the warning often doesn't go away until the 3rd or 4th effort. I can't count the number of times I've jerked the wheel in frustration to the point that autopilot disengages completely. Probably half the time the car is concluding I "missed" a warning when in reality it just wasn't satisfied by my conscious input.

If I'm driving for miles in the same highway lane with autopilot on, I have no legitimate reason to look at the dash, my only concerns are the physical dangers out there on the road. The subtle warnings in the dash simply aren't enough to draw my attention. Furthermore, when Autosteer is engaged, it does a good enough job now that no actual force from me is needed to drive pretty good lines, so I hardly ever find myself adjusting it anymore. I've experimented with strategies like "constant force" or "wiggle at random" just to keep the warnings away, but these are at least very annoying and at worst an unnecessary strain on my joints, one that I don't actually experience when I'm driving without autosteer.

I'd be happier if the car occasionally jerked on the steering wheel to make sure I was paying attention: if I could feel the warnings, I'd rarely miss them. Of course, the most obvious fix is to do a better job of detecting my hands on the wheel; "light force" doesn't actually work right now, it's more of a "carpal-tunnel-inducing force". But at the very least I need the warning to work harder at drawing my eyes down from the road and not penalize me for not staring constantly at the dash.

Maybe I should try using an orange... does that still work???