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Autosteer would not disengage

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While on the freeway today, I tried to disengage the autosteer but it would not let me. Pressing up on the right lever did not work. Forcefully turning the wheel did not work. Stepping on the brake only slowed the car down but was still stuck in autosteer. The car allowed me to change lanes only when I used on the turn signal but the wheel was pretty stiff to turn. I had to pull over on the side of the freeway and physically get out to allow the car to reset itself back to normal.

This was a first for me after 2 years of ownership. Is there anything else I can do besides pulling over if it happens again?
 
Autosteer does make the steering wheel pretty stiff. You can overpower it with a bit more resistance on the wheel.
Normally, it takes very little resistance to over power it. I was using a large amount of force just to lane change and it still wouldn't disengage. In this situation, the autosteer turned off only when I fully stopped the car and got out. Very weird.
 
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While on the freeway today, I tried to disengage the autosteer but it would not let me. Pressing up on the right lever did not work. Forcefully turning the wheel did not work. Stepping on the brake only slowed the car down but was still stuck in autosteer. The car allowed me to change lanes only when I used on the turn signal but the wheel was pretty stiff to turn. I had to pull over on the side of the freeway and physically get out to allow the car to reset itself back to normal.

This was a first for me after 2 years of ownership. Is there anything else I can do besides pulling over if it happens again?
Did you press-in on the right stalk?
 
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Sounds like this may use the motors in reverse direction mode ??? (can you reverse the direction a permeant magnet motor???) to stop the car ONLY if the brakes fail. Likely overheat the motors and could cause damage, if that is what it does.


EDIT: Just to add when Parked press and hold "locks" the rear calipers down. So there may be a backup mechanical (bypassing hydraulic/antilock) method of applying the rear calipers. Think this is more likely to be correct that the former.

Screen Shot 2022-09-10 at 7.57.30 AM.png
 
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While on the freeway today, I tried to disengage the autosteer but it would not let me. Pressing up on the right lever did not work. Forcefully turning the wheel did not work. Stepping on the brake only slowed the car down but was still stuck in autosteer. The car allowed me to change lanes only when I used on the turn signal but the wheel was pretty stiff to turn. I had to pull over on the side of the freeway and physically get out to allow the car to reset itself back to normal.

This was a first for me after 2 years of ownership. Is there anything else I can do besides pulling over if it happens again?

If something like this happens to you, report it to Tesla as soon as possible through the app, along with the precise time. Make an appointment. They may be able to read revealing data from the car and determine the cause.

Tesla needs to know.

Even if it's been a while since it happened, if you can remember what date and approx time, you can still report it, and they will have access to the logs.

My service center once had to locate something 2 months old in my car's logs, and they told me that while the info is no longer in the car, their servers archive logs for each car much longer. So as long as you know when it happened, they can look it up. This is a serious enough issue that they would dig for it, even if you only remembered the date and not the time.
 
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How did you pull over to the side of the highway if auto steer would not disengage? I’d think you wouldn’t be able to over ride it?
Of course you can override it no matter what. If you press the brakes it disengages the motors. Even if some how it didn't disengage (which it can't) the motors, the brakes can override the motors (or engines in ICE) unless they have been overheated.
 
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Sounds like this may use the motors in reverse direction mode ??? (can you reverse the direction a permeant magnet motor???) to stop the car ONLY if the brakes fail. Likely overheat the motors and could cause damage, if that is what it does.


EDIT: Just to add when Parked press and hold "locks" the rear calipers down. So there may be a backup mechanical (bypassing hydraulic/antilock) method of applying the rear calipers. Think this is more likely to be correct that the former.

View attachment 850984
When the car was new, I mixed up the clean windshield on the left with the emergency brake on the right at around 15 mph. …won’t do that again. It is pretty effective.
 
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The car allowed me to lane change when I used the turn signal but it required a lot of force to more over still.
So it allowed an automatic lane change on to the shoulder? It's not supposed to allow lane changes on to the shoulder at all.
The car is back to normal now?
Maybe it was a temporary failure of the power steering system. That would make the steering quite stiff (and disable autosteer of course since it's the same power steering motor). I would think that would throw an error code though.
 
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So it allowed an automatic lane change on to the shoulder? It's not supposed to allow lane changes on to the shoulder at all.
The car is back to normal now?
Maybe it was a temporary failure of the power steering system. That would make the steering quite stiff (and disable autosteer of course since it's the same power steering motor). I would think that would throw an error code though.
OP stated that neither manual steering, brake application nor upstalk would disengage AP. Assuming the OP is not making things up (this is the internet) then he appears to have a failure in the computer. I would hope it's a hardware issue as the AP disengagement software should be very well debugged!

If this happened to me, I would be very leery of driving the car before Tesla service looked at it and would have likely called roadside assistance immediately.

OP did not provide model and software version.
 
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