Oh, wow! That’s really very kind of you. Your point certainly makes sense: that the car would be more concerned about crossing a line on the road if there’s no clear sign (i.e steering wheel pressure) that it’s intentional. On the other hand, I’m one of these old-fashioned types that always (and I mean at least 99% of the time) drive with my hands at “ten to two” on the wheel (otherwise I’m pretty sure my dad’s ghost would yell at me). And I’m confident that the only times I’ve received an alarm while crossing the line in the middle of the road it was because I turned the wheel to steer in that direction. But my Model S seems to be even stricter than my stickler dad was, and “saves” me on a fairly regular basis. Anyhow, I really appreciate you taking the time and trouble, and it’s more data I can use to figure out how unusual my car’s behaviour is. Previously I really had no idea how common unprovoked alarms are and now I’m building up a picture. Thanks!
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Corrective steering ruining everything
- Thread starter warraqeen
- Start date
Thanks! Every owner I learn about who never gets spurious alarms gets me a bit closer to getting mine fixed, I reckon. It’s something more to tell the Service Centre people when they’re being noncommittal about whether there’s a problem or not.
Mini-update: My S is at the Service Centre and is apparently undergoing a “firmware upgrade”. I haven‘t been able to find out much about the software stack of Teslas, so I don’t know what lives in firmware, but I’m assuming it’s closer to the hardware than the typical OTA software upgrade, so perhaps it will do some good.
I’ve also been driving the Model 3 SR+ they’ve lent me while my S is being worked on. I’ve been so conditioned by my S that I still don’t trust it enough to drive it the way I used to drive cars, pre-Tesla. But I like how quiet the transmission is compared to the weird noises my S makes - and no panel gap haunted house noises either! And the only alarm I got was when someone stopped suddenly in front of me, which I would describe as “over cautious” rather than “WTF”. If it keeps not trying to kill me, I think I could get to like it (though I probably have to give it back soon).
My S doesn’t offer to park itself, but when I got the loan car back home it showed a parking spot on the display. Intrigued, I told it to go ahead and self-park. But I had to stop it after a few seconds because it turned out that the parking spot it had identified was between a couple of ornamental trees on my raised lawn. I’m not sure what it would have done when it encountered the row of stones at the edge of the raised lawn but I didn’t want to find out. Somehow it reminded me of when our new cat mistook the container of kindling near the fireplace for a litter tray. As software hiccups go, this one left me chuckling rather than panicking, so I can’t complain.
I’ve also been driving the Model 3 SR+ they’ve lent me while my S is being worked on. I’ve been so conditioned by my S that I still don’t trust it enough to drive it the way I used to drive cars, pre-Tesla. But I like how quiet the transmission is compared to the weird noises my S makes - and no panel gap haunted house noises either! And the only alarm I got was when someone stopped suddenly in front of me, which I would describe as “over cautious” rather than “WTF”. If it keeps not trying to kill me, I think I could get to like it (though I probably have to give it back soon).
My S doesn’t offer to park itself, but when I got the loan car back home it showed a parking spot on the display. Intrigued, I told it to go ahead and self-park. But I had to stop it after a few seconds because it turned out that the parking spot it had identified was between a couple of ornamental trees on my raised lawn. I’m not sure what it would have done when it encountered the row of stones at the edge of the raised lawn but I didn’t want to find out. Somehow it reminded me of when our new cat mistook the container of kindling near the fireplace for a litter tray. As software hiccups go, this one left me chuckling rather than panicking, so I can’t complain.
Thanks, All. I think this thread might have served its purpose as far as it can. I got my S back and the little bit of good news is that they fixed the auto-present handles problem. I can unlock the car now by approaching it with the key fob. Never been able to do that before and it’s apparently due to a “firmware update” that I mentioned earlier. Makes no sense to me that it would have the wrong firmware in some unspecified way, but that’s all I could find out.
Unfortunately they either couldn’t reproduce the other faults or they consider them normal behaviour. They couldn’t hear the whistling panel gap or the weird graunching noises on hard acceleration, which seems strange. And they (supposedly) couldn’t get the car to give them any alarms while driving on a variety of roads, which seems completely extraordinary to me. Sadly I couldn’t provide them with the timestamp for a really egregious alarm - and perhaps that’s the big problem here. All the old alarms had aged off the log and I‘d been avoiding using the car so didn’t have a really flagrant recent example to share. The couple of alarms I provided timestamps for they investigated and deemed to be the car performing as it was supposed to, which I very much disagree with. Y’all have convinced me that if you stay away from AP, ACC and FSD and always use your indicators then you shouldn’t really be getting road departure (as opposed to lane departure) alarms if you’re driving normally. Plus the loaner M3 even let me drive for a few feet on the grass at the edge of a narrow road as I passed another vehicle and it didn’t give me an alarm. The M3 also let me overtake without freaking out. Twice! Which is something I haven’t dared do in the S for a while. So it *is* possible to drive the way I drive (which is very conservatively) without upsetting the car.
I’m torn between continuing and giving up. I could continue to drive the car and log every alarm, fill in a service request each time and see if they eventually find some sort of fixable fault. Alternatively, I could make my life easier and sell the car, which is what I’m currently leaning towards. I actually liked the loaner M3 a lot (partly because it didn’t try to kill me) and I’m tempted to get one (my S is really a little bigger than I need). But I can’t decide if I should give Tesla more of my money when they’ve let me down so badly this time around. On the other hand, it seems to me that Teslas still have no proper competition when it comes to the kind of car I want. If you have to give up the Supercharger network, you’d want something with spectacular range to replace it with, and the iX3, EQC and e-tron are all heavy, adapted petrol cars that don’t really impress me. If the i-Pace did 400 miles on a charge, I think I’d grab one, but overall I still think it’ll be at least a couple of years before Tesla face real competition for their 3s and Ys.
Anyway, thanks so much to everyone who provided info, suggestions and sympathy. That loaner M3 showed me that Teslas, when they work, are fantastic. I hope you all continue to enjoy yours!
Unfortunately they either couldn’t reproduce the other faults or they consider them normal behaviour. They couldn’t hear the whistling panel gap or the weird graunching noises on hard acceleration, which seems strange. And they (supposedly) couldn’t get the car to give them any alarms while driving on a variety of roads, which seems completely extraordinary to me. Sadly I couldn’t provide them with the timestamp for a really egregious alarm - and perhaps that’s the big problem here. All the old alarms had aged off the log and I‘d been avoiding using the car so didn’t have a really flagrant recent example to share. The couple of alarms I provided timestamps for they investigated and deemed to be the car performing as it was supposed to, which I very much disagree with. Y’all have convinced me that if you stay away from AP, ACC and FSD and always use your indicators then you shouldn’t really be getting road departure (as opposed to lane departure) alarms if you’re driving normally. Plus the loaner M3 even let me drive for a few feet on the grass at the edge of a narrow road as I passed another vehicle and it didn’t give me an alarm. The M3 also let me overtake without freaking out. Twice! Which is something I haven’t dared do in the S for a while. So it *is* possible to drive the way I drive (which is very conservatively) without upsetting the car.
I’m torn between continuing and giving up. I could continue to drive the car and log every alarm, fill in a service request each time and see if they eventually find some sort of fixable fault. Alternatively, I could make my life easier and sell the car, which is what I’m currently leaning towards. I actually liked the loaner M3 a lot (partly because it didn’t try to kill me) and I’m tempted to get one (my S is really a little bigger than I need). But I can’t decide if I should give Tesla more of my money when they’ve let me down so badly this time around. On the other hand, it seems to me that Teslas still have no proper competition when it comes to the kind of car I want. If you have to give up the Supercharger network, you’d want something with spectacular range to replace it with, and the iX3, EQC and e-tron are all heavy, adapted petrol cars that don’t really impress me. If the i-Pace did 400 miles on a charge, I think I’d grab one, but overall I still think it’ll be at least a couple of years before Tesla face real competition for their 3s and Ys.
Anyway, thanks so much to everyone who provided info, suggestions and sympathy. That loaner M3 showed me that Teslas, when they work, are fantastic. I hope you all continue to enjoy yours!
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I tried this, BTW, for the last few alarms I got before taking the car in. But my local Service Centre told me that they don’t have access to these logged service messages. They told me that they go straight to Engineering and the repair team can’t see them. Sounds farfetched, but that’s what they said. So while it’s a very cool tip, it turned out not to be what was needed in this case. Still, I appreciate you taking the time to share it!
Interesting. In nearly 6 years with my Model S, I have never seen a message like "Road departure." My car is older, a 2015 with AP1, so maybe the newer cars have "protective" features I am unaware of, but I do not even recall any mention of the phrase "road departure" in this forum. Have I missed that?
I do recall that I did get a tug on the steering wheel maybe twice when taking a certain highway exit, alongside which there was a stone wall. I decided that the wall was setting off an alarm because it looked to the radar as if it was "ahead" whereas the path of the car was along the curving ramp, not into the wall. I remember my passenger being alarmed at the sound of an accompanying alarm sound on one such occasion. But I have not had that experience in a couple of years at least. It could be that I disable AP by habit on that ramp, not sure.
The collision alarm sensitivity can be adjusted. I have mine set to Medium. Perhaps if the OP set theirs to the lowest sensitivity, his experience of this type of thing might be reduced.
Full disclosure, we have few if any 2-lane roads with passing zones around here, so I rarely if ever "overtake" (pass someone) by crossing into an opposing lane, so I may be missing the specific circumstances being described.
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply. I appreciate it.
Yes, this “Road Departure Detected - Corrective Steering Applied” seems to be a pretty rare message. So much so that most people (including, I think, the folks at the Service Centre) sometimes seem to think that I’m talking about *Lane* Departure warnings. They also seem to think I’m using AP, ACC or FSD at the time, which I’m not. I imagined that since these kind of alarms seem so rare, it would be easy to a) agree that there’s a problem and b) pull the data for the relevant alarms and c) get to the bottom of it, but apparently not.
A while back I turned off Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance and at least a couple of times I’ve set Forward Collision Warning to Late but it seems to end up back at Medium somehow. I also don’t seem to be able to set it to Off, though I’ve only tried once. (Mind you, the Service Centre have also monkeyed with all sorts of things while trying to fix the alarms plus the key fob/driver profile problems so perhaps that’s why the settings have reverted.)
There’s a side of me that‘s really tempted to find an older S with just that one camera so that I don’t have to worry about so many alarms, but then I realise how ridiculous that sounds. For £80,000 (US $110,000) I should be able to get a vehicle that’s reasonably enjoyable and relaxing to drive for me and my passengers. My health’s not been great lately, but increasingly I think that I’ll take a little break, get my strength back and then restart the process of trying to get Tesla to fix this car. We don’t have the wider roads that the US enjoys, but British reviewers never seem to mention the scary behaviour my car exhibits (and surely they would, right?), so I think it must be possible to calibrate an S for fairly trouble-free UK driving.
I’ll add another post to this thread if I’m (ever) successful.
Best wishes, with both your health issues and getting your car to a state you enjoy it in....
Hi - got my M3 LR three weeks ago. Very happy with it - build quality spot on, no issues with road noise, and in general I’ve been massively impressed.
However, the road departure warning is a real pain - exactly what you describe. I would say I get the alarm at least once on 50% of drives.
I’m in Wiltshire and we have very narrow roads - even those with 60mph limits.
I don’t think this is a fault in the car, more a fundamental problem with the software on UK roads. The visualisation on the screen shows the software really struggles to identify road edges on country roads - especially ones with overgrown verges and big clumps of cow parsley. If you have to pass another car on the road and a clump of cow parsley leaps out from the verge, all hell breaks loose.
The other scenario is UK b-roads with the solid white line along the edge. Typically these white lines are painted a little in from the edge of the road, making the lane rather narrow. The white lines enable the software to identify road edges very clearly. But the white line painting can weave somewhat. So on occasions when heavy traffic on a b-road is coming the other direction, I may stray into the solid white line at the road edge, but still be some way off from “departing the road”. And that kicks the alarm off too.
I haven’t yet experimented with turning off all the “helpful” warning features, but will do so. But I agree with you, being unable to turn these off seems a massive oversight and really weird. We’ve got a few more months of summer here yet, and the road verges are just going to become even more overgrown.
Thanks so much for commenting! Your post was both exactly what I was hoping for and exactly what I feared. It would be much easier if my car is the problem rather than the roads. Aberdeenshire, like Wiltshire, has a lot of narrow, winding roads with what I think are called “soft verges”, i.e. the road turns into grass and mud, without a kerb/curb, pavement/sidewalk and often without a white line either. Plus, even some of the larger roads seem to have very faded lines here.
Do you think there’s anything we can do about this? We could find other UK owners and petition Tesla to allow more settings to be turned off in countries with narrow roads, but would anyone listen? We could take the view that not every Tesla behaves this way and try to get ours fixed. After all, there seem to be plenty of British YouTubers who own or review Teslas who don’t mention these alarms. (I only had a loaner M3 for 2 days but it didn’t give me any Road Departure Detected alarms, even though I overtook other cars twice and even drove slightly up on the grass verge once.) Commenter Cypho raised the possibility of taping over the windscreen camera to disable all safety alarms (but commenter DerbyDave pointed out we’d get constant error messages and that rain sensing and auto-dimming headlights wouldn’t work, but perhaps it would be worth it). Or in my case, I could try to buy an old, AP1 Model S to replace my 2020 model. Just wondering if you’ve got any thoughts on what you might do. Grin and bear it? Anyway, thanks again for posting and my commiserations that your exciting new M3 is giving you trouble.
coalesce99
Member
Why, I'm driving a 2001 Buick LeSabre that's three colors. It was my grandfather's, and I got it when he passed away a few years ago. It's three colors because a lady made a left out of Walmart and T-boned me. Car was totaled, but we put it back together. My wife drives a plug-in Ford C-Max.
After being a Prius owner as well, I can say I'm done with hybrid vehicles. They have two systems that can (and do) malfunction.
I would never get a Model X. The back doors open right to head level for me. Also, the visor is completely worthless. I'm 6'4". When we drove to the Grand Canyon, I had to wear a hat to keep the sun out of my eyes.
I've also rented a Model S, and that's what I want. I've test driven the Model 3 (too small for my liking) and the Model Y, but I like having the display panel in front of me and not having to always look over to the center panel.
I’m looking forward to the day when it’s easy to buy an old gas-powered car retrofitted to be electric. I reckon an older LeSabre could be a good candidate for that. I haven’t driven a LeSabre for about 20 years (coincidentally) but I remember them being about as comfortable as my living room. Very civilised motoring.
coalesce99
Member
Yeah, and for better or for worse, the LeSabre just keeps on running. Yeah, retrofitting (cost effectively) would be awesome!
I have had a Model S in the UK since 2016 and I do definitely think you get more alarms and corrective steering here due to the narrowness of the roads. I haven't experienced the same level that you are talking about, but I live in London so we're probably driving on very different roads. Some examples: when driving on narrow country roads with high banked sides I've experienced collision alarms quite a few times and corrective steering on a couple of occasions (once was very annoying, since it tried to 'correct' my path into the middle of the road just as a large truck came round the corner in the other direction!). I also get occasional collision alarms sometimes when driving round bends on roads with central reservations (I think this leads to odd radar returns).
I would say I'm not seeing this as much as it sounds like you are though. Certainly it doesn't happen enough to bother me, so it's possible there is some specific issue with your car that's making it worse than for others.
I would say I'm not seeing this as much as it sounds like you are though. Certainly it doesn't happen enough to bother me, so it's possible there is some specific issue with your car that's making it worse than for others.
Really appreciate you sharing your experience, thanks!
My current thought is that I’ll write to someone fairly high up in Tesla Europe and ask for a definitive ruling on this issue. Alarms that make accidents more rather than less likely to happen are not to be taken lightly in my opinion, even if for many people they’re infrequent. Either Tesla should offer the ability to disable features that don’t work properly in, say, rural parts of the UK, or they should figure out how their software is going to safely handle narrow, winding European roads. I don’t think it’s acceptable to fudge the issue. If Tesla service teams are going to explain that the software is really only calibrated for American-style roads, then this should be made known to prospective buyers. Offering the ability to turn off these alarms would be a very cheap fix even if it’s not a long-term one. And I’d be fine with signing something to state that I was aware that my car was in “manual” mode and/or having a permanent message on the screen saying something like “Driver Assistance features are currently disabled. Please pay extra attention to road conditions!”
Anyway, I’m very glad to hear that the occasional alarms you receive aren’t too much of a problem. I’m also pleased to hear that your car’s attempt to steer you into the path of an oncoming truck didn’t result in anything more serious than a racing heart.
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sillydriver
Member
This thread is an eye-opener for me. Like David29 I have a 2015 AP1 car (P85D). In all that time, the car has only wrestled me for control once (when not on autopilot) and that was only weeks ago. I was on a divided highway in the Virginia countryside that is not limited access so there are places where you can cross the median, and then cross the opposing lanes when traffic clears, to take a left turn onto a secondary road. From the left lane I dived into the median crossing, braking to a stop from about 60. The car tried to steer me back into the left lane. I reflexively clutched the wheel with a lot of force and made the car steer the course I wanted. The force required was noticeably more than what's required to break out of autopilot when autopilot is misbehaving. I was so surprised by the correction that I didn't think to look and see if there was a message on the screen in front of me. This hasn't happened since, but I haven't repeated that exact maneuver. I often get the collision alarm, but almost always when I'm decelerating briskly with my eyes on the car ahead of me. I keep the setting on medium just in case there is ever a situation where I look away for an instant and there is an actual collision hazard. My car has never tried to correct steering when beginning a pass on a two-lane road (and there are many passing opportunities around here) even though I tend not to signal at the start of a pass.
It's an eye opener because I can't imagine car behavior that's much worse or more dangerous than a car forcefully trying to steer in a direction you don't want to go. If new Teslas now do this in a way that cannot be overridden by a setting, that would disqualify the brand for me unless all new cars of any brand now do this for some regulatory reason. And I certainly hope that's not the case.
Hi i Like to drive fast and at times swerve in and out of traffic to make progress, I know, not the safest way of driving. I’m going from a c63 to the plaid. With the c I get warnings if approaching the car ahead too fast before doing a last minute lane change but it can be turned off, can you turn it off also in the S?
Thanks for taking the time to share that! And I quite agree with your conclusion. In my case, it will take many hundreds of hours of trouble-free driving to erase the experience of one major scare. You don’t need a car to steer you towards danger many times - or even make you think it’s going to - to shake your faith in it.
I know it’s ridiculous, but I’d started to wonder whether I could swap my 2020 S for, say, a 2015 model which might cope better with European roads. I was beginning to think that an AP1 model would solve my problems. But your story of your AP1 S wrestling you for control suggests that even older vehicles might not be as docile as I’d hoped.
I’ve written a letter that I thought I’d send to the head of Tesla Europe on the matter of unwanted/dangerous corrective steering events. From what I can tell, that person would be Mark Hewitt, but I haven’t yet found an address for him. Anyone out there know where I could send my letter? I think he’s based in London, but that’s all I’ve turned up so far.
Looks to me as though you’re talking about Forward Collision Warnings, and there’s certainly an option to turn them off (but I *think* if you choose “off” rather than, say, “late” it might turn itself back on the next time you drive the car - I can’t check as mine is still away being worked on).
Sounds like we also need a “Stef1808 is right behind you!” warning built in to the car too.
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