Car behaviour on Minor Roads

[Glan gluaisne]

Moderator comment - numerous posts moved from [UK] 2021.4.x even though they related to 2020.48.35.5 - but topic worthy of its own thread
Similar posts also moved from closed thread Was going to order, now in 2 minds


I had the "klaxons of doom" go off again this morning, accompanied by a serious attempt to steer the car right off the lane. I managed to get a glimpse of the message on the screen. It read something like "deviation from road detected, steering correction applied". The daft thing is that every time it does this it's the steering correction that the car is applying that threatens to steer it off the road. I wasn't using AP or TACC, either, just driving down a narrow country lane at around 30mph.

 

[Dilly]

I had the "klaxons of doom" go off again this morning, accompanied by a serious attempt to steer the car right off the lane. I managed to get a glimpse of the message on the screen. It read something like "deviation from road detected, steering correction applied". The daft thing is that every time it does this it's the steering correction that the car is applying that threatens to steer it off the road. I wasn't using AP or TACC, either, just driving down a narrow country lane at around 30mph.

If it were trying to keep brambles off the paintwork it would be amusing. It isn’t and it’s not.

 

[MrBadger]

I managed to get a glimpse of the message on the screen. It read something like "deviation from road detected, steering correction applied".

A limited log of most (all?) recent messages are available from iirc the service menu.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

FWIW, I'm still on 2020.48.35.5 too. I'm disinclined to install any future updates until after I see some evidence that they haven't broken even more stuff. . .

 

[nightowl]

I had the "klaxons of doom" go off again this morning, accompanied by a serious attempt to steer the car right off the lane. I managed to get a glimpse of the message on the screen. It read something like "deviation from road detected, steering correction applied". The daft thing is that every time it does this it's the steering correction that the car is applying that threatens to steer it off the road. I wasn't using AP or TACC, either, just driving down a narrow country lane at around 30mph.

If that's one of the Lane Departure Avoidance features kicking in, apparently they only take effect above 40mph (was reading up on this feature recently as I wondered how it would cope with certain roads near me.)

Not picking holes in your quoted speed, just worth being aware of so you don't have to think "oh no is it going to push me off the road" at lower speeds. Assuming of course that it's not a bug triggering this at lower speeds...

 

[Glan gluaisne]

If that's one of the Lane Departure Avoidance features kicking in, apparently they only take effect above 40mph (was reading up on this feature recently as I wondered how it would cope with certain roads near me.)

Not picking holes in your quoted speed, just worth being aware of so you don't have to think "oh no is it going to push me off the road" at lower speeds. Assuming of course that it's not a bug triggering this at lower speeds...

I had just accelerated out of a bend on to a straight stretch, but the only thing that threatened to drive the car off the road was the steering input it provided, it damned near made the car hit the hedge on the opposite side. This is the bit of lane where it did it. It's pretty typical of the roads I drive on much of the time, but a rare straight section that invites a push of the loud pedal. Just before this is a fairly tight bend.:

 

[Rustybkts]

I had just accelerated out of a bend on to a straight stretch, but the only thing that threatened to drive the car off the road was the steering input it provided, it damned near made the car hit the hedge on the opposite side. This is the bit of lane where it did it. It's pretty typical of the roads I drive on much of the time, but a rare straight section that invites a push of the loud pedal. Just before this is a fairly tight bend.:

View attachment 639834

Wales looks very warm at this time of year!

 

[Adopado]

Wales looks very warm at this time of year!

Lovely tarmac too ... I'm moving!

 

[Glan gluaisne]

This is the rear view, the bend I'd just accelerated out of (with the reflective markers that at night always, without fail, cause the lights to dip right when you don't want them to):

I've been wondering if the car mistakes the line of the hedge as being a part of the lane. The pretty dangerous (IMHO) steering correction is something that happens very regularly, and there are some stretches of road where I can pretty much predict that the car is always going to do it. I can't see any way to permanently turn this "feature" off, either, which is a pity, as it's the main reason my wife refuses to drive the Tesla now, she hates those loud warning noises and the way the car tries to take over.

 

[Bernard_S]

I had just accelerated out of a bend on to a straight stretch, but the only thing that threatened to drive the car off the road was the steering input it provided, it damned near made the car hit the hedge on the opposite side. This is the bit of lane where it did it. It's pretty typical of the roads I drive on much of the time, but a rare straight section that invites a push of the loud pedal. Just before this is a fairly tight bend.:

View attachment 639834

That's not a road that's a bridleway

 

[Glan gluaisne]

That's not a road that's a bridleway

That practically passes for a motorway around here. Our lane is a heck of a lot narrower than that! It's my favourite spot for giving the car a bit of welly, being pretty much the only straight bit of road around.

 

[Dilly]

I had just accelerated out of a bend on to a straight stretch, but the only thing that threatened to drive the car off the road was the steering input it provided, it damned near made the car hit the hedge on the opposite side. This is the bit of lane where it did it. It's pretty typical of the roads I drive on much of the time, but a rare straight section that invites a push of the loud pedal. Just before this is a fairly tight bend.:

View attachment 639834

I’m jealous of the quality of the road surface. If that was Norfolk it would have a foot of grass up the middle.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

I’m jealous of the quality of the road surface. If that was Norfolk it would have a foot of grass up the middle.

Our lane is a bit like that, the centre has weeds growing out of it, plus it's got a thick layer of gravel and mud down where we are at the bottom of the valley, as the lane turns into a stream during heavy rain.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the issues I see with the car relate to it never having been designed to drive around narrow lanes. That lane in the photo is quite wide, yet still narrow enough to cause the ultrasonic sensors to be red most of the time, and to sound the warning beeps at low speed (I leave those turned off all the time).

I drove around 30 miles this morning, and had three moderately serious events, along with the side cameras being blocked on one or other side the whole time, from the sun and shadows. One event was a false road departure warning, the other two were false warnings about cars ahead, both because the car misinterpreted what it was seeing. One time it was a van parked in a lay-by, the other time it was a hatchback some distance in front that the car thought was a truck, flagged it up in red, then changed its mind and showed it as a car again.

It was interesting watching the process, as I think that the visualisation changes gave some clues as to what may have been going on. My wife was with me, and as it happened she was watching the screen at time (she wanted to see the brake lights come on when one pedal driving). The visualisation correctly picked up the hatchback around 30m in front, then as we went around a bend in the road the warning sounded, the brakes were applied and the visualisation changed into a truck. Almost as soon as that happened, the car seemed to realise it had made an error and things returned to normal, with the truck changing back into a car.

I think that what happened was that the car got confused when it partially lost sight of the car in front, then mistook some other roadside feature for a truck, and applied the brakes because of the apparent increase in closing speed. When it reacquired the car, with no closing speed at all, normality returned. This may also explain why it consistently swerves and brakes when I drive past a particular junction to the left, where the joining lane is at an acute angle to the road. I can guarantee it will throw a wobbly if there's a car in that side lane. That would also give a high apparent closing speed, if the car fails to realise that the other car isn't actually on the same road.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

An older photo of our lane, it's since degraded a bit. The tarmac bit is around 7ft wide, and we had several concrete trucks manage to get down it OK when we built this place:

 

[Drew57]

Not sure what all the fuss is about?

 

[Dilly]

An older photo of our lane, it's since degraded a bit. The tarmac bit is around 7ft wide, and we had several concrete trucks manage to get down it OK when we built this place:

View attachment 640187

I popped out this morning to fetch the in-law’s prescriptions. The lane I used was a tad wider than yours but with similar hedges & trees. Every time I passed a gap I got the multiple cameras blinded warning presumably from bright sunlight.
On the way back, on a normal 2-way B road, I passed a parked car my side which gave rise to gentle hesitancy, then another parked car on the opposite side. Didn’t like that one at all and braked sharply. But It was further away !
Without some heavy surgery in the software, the door pillar cameras will be next to useless in the UK

 

[Zakalwe]

They're not roads. They are glorified footpaths. Or maybe cycle tracks.

 

[Blokie]

They're not roads. They are glorified footpaths. Or maybe cycle tracks.

What's your point? The guys are not trying to use autopilot on these roads!

 

[Zakalwe]

What's your point? The guys are not trying to use autopilot on these roads!

I didn't say or imply that they were.

Any car with sensors or ADAS will struggle with roads that narrow. Heck, my last Merc would regularly crap itself on normal urban roads if it saw a car waiting to emerge on the left.
Driving down roads that narrow will have the ultra-sonic bumper sensors beeping and throwing up warnings left right and centre. Just turn them off if you intend to drive on roads like that.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

I didn't say or imply that they were.

Any car with sensors or ADAS will struggle with roads that narrow. Heck, my last Merc would regularly crap itself on normal urban roads if it saw a car waiting to emerge on the left.
Driving down roads that narrow will have the ultra-sonic bumper sensors beeping and throwing up warnings left right and centre. Just turn them off if you intend to drive on roads like that.

The ultrasonic sensor sounds are turned off, have to be, as otherwise they'd drive you made with all the beeping at low speeds. I obviously never use AP or TACC on these roads, but it would be very useful to be able to turn off all the sensors completely at times. Until such time as the sensing systems are as good as those I was born with, I'd rather not have the car constantly throwing up false alarms.

Apart from the irritation these cause, there's also the "cry wolf" issue. I pretty much automatically just accelerate every time I get an unwanted braking event, as that overrides it, and this reaction, to hit the accelerator when this happens, is becoming a reflex now. The snag is that there might be one of these events that's a real hazard, when I'm driving at speed on a wider road, and I may just accidentally cancel it because that's just what I do with all the many false alarms.