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Cruise control / Auto Pilot is Garbage

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My issues with autopilot after about 2500 miles driving my Y:

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- in traffic, autopilot is jerky: it speeds up and slows down much too abruptly. I find myself turning off autopilot in stop and go traffic (which really should be one of the most useful places to use self driving).
- it has a hard time with an unusual road pattern like merging lanes. It will alert and then disengage.


<snip>
I have a radar equipped model, and with the current software release these two issues "seem" to have gotten worse. I was in Santa Monica in stop and go traffic last weekend when the MY braked hard (car in front was slowing, but the Y stopped short) causing the car behind me to swerve onto the shoulder to try to avoid rear ending me. It still would have hit me, but I had to hit the gas to allow him room to swerve. This is my third vehicle with radar cruise, and I'm sorry to say, the worst implementation of it so far. I really hope Tesla dedicate some time to significantly improve this system. I feel it's dangerous in Stop and Go, and that's where I tend to find it useful.
 
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Okay I want to start off by saying I understand your frustrations. I've had my vehicle for approximately 6 months and I'm a heavy cruise control user. I find that autopilot and cruise control work fine for me with the exception of not being able to resume after I disengage the cruise control. In order to work around this particular issue I have set the speed in the settings for autopilot to +4 mph. What this does in this case is the cruise control set point now always shows up as 4 mph above the speed limit. So for someone who's like me and always wants to set the cruise at 4 mph above the speed limit this eliminates the need for the resume function.

The phantom breaking I have found in my experience is caused by two issues. Issue number one is when I'm passing large semi trucks and it doesn't happen 100% of the time. My guess here is that there is radar on the truck it's making the car think there's an object there that's not so what I do in this case is I keep my foot near the accelerator when I'm passing a semi truck just in case the vehicle starts to break I can stop it from doing so by pressing on the accelerator.

The second issue I have found that causes phantom breaking for me is the fact that the Tesla detects based on street signs the speed limit and it's doing so incorrectly about 80% of the time. What happens then is when I'm in cruise and it sees a street sign that it thinks is a speed limit sign it will drop the speed limit down to 25 mph for example if I'm on the highway and I'm doing 65 this results in a hard break. I'm not really sure what to do about the speed limit issue I don't see any way to turn off the speed limit detection via the cameras but I think Tesla should disable this function and use GPS for detecting the speed limit for a given location. This is especially frustrating on road trips where you're not familiar with the speed limits in the area and the speed limits are constantly changing. What I have to do on road trips is I have to keep my smartphone handy with a navigation app like Waze or Google maps open so that I can check the speed limit displayed on the Tesla against the GPS speed limit reported by the navigation app.

Hope this helps.
 
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I picked up my vehicle yesterday, and have ~150 miles on it. Maybe 50 of that is with TACC/autosteer.

The TACC has been great except for one weird slowdown when I was passing a semi truck at night. I won’t call it “phantom breaking” because this instance really wasn’t that; it just decreased speed smoothly from 75 to maybe 72, then slowly increased back to the set point. My wife’s car has Nissan’s ProPilot and it does similar things when a vehicle crosses slightly into my lane (though I don’t think the truck did so).

Autosteer is aggressive. It really wants to control the wheel, and unless you put (momentarily) fairly significant torque into steering, it doesn’t let go. Changing lanes takes some getting used to. The Nissan system disengages steering when you put on a blinker, then re-engages after 5 or so seconds when you’ve changed lanes. Autosteer remains on when I activate the blinker, and I haven’t quite gotten the hang of smoothly disengaging it with the wheel; there’s a significant “jerk” when the car releases control back to me. Some systems (Nissan, Mazda, etc.) seem to make their auto-steering somewhat of a suggestion, and in the presence of any input from the driver, the driver wins. Others (Tesla, VW) sleek to treat the vehicle’s inputs as the priority until the system is disengaged. I don’t know that one is better or worse than the other, but changing between them takes some getting used to.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get used to autosteer’s idiosyncrasies, because re-engaging autosteer after a lane change also re-engages the worst implementation of automatic high beams I’ve yet encountered. I certainly don’t need high beams (or any headlights, really) 45 minutes before sunset in clear weather with a car 150 feet in front of me. And yet, there is my new car, blinking the high beams at the car in front, then apparently turning them off when the reflection becomes visible in the polished metal of that car’s tailgate (that’s an assumption, based on the fact that the blinking went away when a different-colored car got in front of me). I know I can turn them off, and I do, but there has to be a solution that doesn’t involve constantly remembering to disable the automated road rage generator.

I think it will get there. I have to keep in mind that the weirdness of the system in my wife’s car is likely to be that way forever. Tesla has the capability to update core systems in very short order, especially by auto industry standards.
 
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I find the the cruise and autopilot to be exceptional. 97% of the time. For commute it is wonderful.

LR built in may. so no radar, just vision. Added the FSD subscription. LOVE lane assist, and self park, nice surprise there, parallel parked for me, wasnt planning on it doing that! Still will probably cancel FSD. If they had an a la carte, Id pay for the lane change though.

But, There are times where in cruise or AP it brakes for NO reason, this is dangerous on on the interstate. So I dont like using it in the passing lane, which takes away a bit from its coolness.

Also, we live in rural area, there are roads that are sans speed limit signs. Two roads, in particular, we often take for soccer matches is 22 miles where we cant use AP because it thinks its 25 mph and refuses to go faster than 30. lol that is an obnoxious bug I hope can be fixed. They are both straight as an arrow and boring to drive.
 
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I picked up my vehicle yesterday, and have ~150 miles on it. Maybe 50 of that is with TACC/autosteer.

The TACC has been great except for one weird slowdown when I was passing a semi truck at night. I won’t call it “phantom breaking” because this instance really wasn’t that; it just decreased speed smoothly from 75 to maybe 72, then slowly increased back to the set point. My wife’s car has Nissan’s ProPilot and it does similar things when a vehicle crosses slightly into my lane (though I don’t think the truck did so).

Autosteer is aggressive. It really wants to control the wheel, and unless you put (momentarily) fairly significant torque into steering, it doesn’t let go. Changing lanes takes some getting used to. The Nissan system disengages steering when you put on a blinker, then re-engages after 5 or so seconds when you’ve changed lanes. Autosteer remains on when I activate the blinker, and I haven’t quite gotten the hang of smoothly disengaging it with the wheel; there’s a significant “jerk” when the car releases control back to me. Some systems (Nissan, Mazda, etc.) seem to make their auto-steering somewhat of a suggestion, and in the presence of any input from the driver, the driver wins. Others (Tesla, VW) sleek to treat the vehicle’s inputs as the priority until the system is disengaged. I don’t know that one is better or worse than the other, but changing between them takes some getting used to.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get used to autosteer’s idiosyncrasies, because re-engaging autosteer after a lane change also re-engages the worst implementation of automatic high beams I’ve yet encountered. I certainly don’t need high beams (or any headlights, really) 45 minutes before sunset in clear weather with a car 150 feet in front of me. And yet, there is my new car, blinking the high beams at the car in front, then apparently turning them off when the reflection becomes visible in the polished metal of that car’s tailgate (that’s an assumption, based on the fact that the blinking went away when a different-colored car got in front of me). I know I can turn them off, and I do, but there has to be a solution that doesn’t involve constantly remembering to disable the automated road rage generator.

I think it will get there. I have to keep in mind that the weirdness of the system in my wife’s car is likely to be that way forever. Tesla has the capability to update core systems in very short order, especially by auto industry standards.
When I turn on the 3-blink blinker for lane change, it actually requires a lot less force to disengage than non-blinking, for the most of the cases (as a few times it did not work and surprised me). This actually matches the manual. It is also easy to disengage when the auto steering is less confident, such as on the local road with curve or lane merge/split.

It seems to me the only time the auto steering being aggressive is when on highway and the car’s AI is very confident about the situation.
 
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I've had my Model Y for 2,500 miles. I really like the car. I love how it drives, the tech, the supercharger network, etc.

My main complaint with the car is that cruise control & auto pilot are pretty much unusable.

I've had repeated issues with phantom breaking. It seems to usually happen when approaching overpasses or exit signs over the highway. I don't understand how Tesla hasn't fixed this issue. It doesn't matter if it's daytime or night. I drove to the mountains at 4 am this morning and literally had phantom breaking on the highway 5x in 5 minutes. I have my settings to keep cruise control at my set speed (not the option to refer to the speed limit signs). I watched it this morning and I had the speed set to 70. Every time, I could see the speed limit on the screen drop from my set speed to 50 mph.

How are they going to perfect full self-driving if they can't even resolve this problem? Just ranting here as the car would be near perfect if they would fix this.
Autopilot seems to ignore school zone speed limit signs which can cost ALOT if you get a ticket
 
As a new member of the Tesla family, I was mostly impressed with how Autopilot handled our first road trip in the car this past weekend. Only used it on the highway, and by and large it did everything well. Had one unnecessary full stop in slower traffic, which may have had something to do with us being in the shade of an overpass and the car in front being out in the full sun?

The main shortcoming was when people ahead of me would start braking somewhat firmly. Where I would smoothly apply gradual pressure, knowing how much I'd need to stop eventually stop quickly if that became necessary, the car seems to take a more conservative approach of braking firmly at first, giving itself all the room in the world to slow down the rest of the way if necessary.

I suspect this is how quite a lot of people drive, but it's uncomfortable for us in the car, more dangerous for the cars behind, and it's exactly the sort of driving that creates traffic in the first place. In stop and go traffic it was exaggerated, which is a bummer because that's when I need it the most.

What the system can do is amazing, but I do think the robots should be better at this than the humans and not cause more traffic and discomfort than we already find ourselves in. But I'm sure we'll get there, one update at a time.
 
The Nissan system disengages steering when you put on a blinker, then re-engages after 5 or so seconds when you’ve changed lanes. Autosteer remains on when I activate the blinker, and I haven’t quite gotten the hang of smoothly disengaging it with the wheel; there’s a significant “jerk” when the car releases control back to me.
I was also thinking this would be a good idea. Hopefully a software update will add this function, or at least the option. Reengaging it after a lane change isn't convenient and goes against Elon's ethos of minimizing human input as much as possible.

But that said, they would probably rather you consider, ever-so-briefly, purchasing FSD every time you jerk yourself into the next lane.
 
As a new member of the Tesla family, I was mostly impressed with how Autopilot handled our first road trip in the car this past weekend. Only used it on the highway, and by and large it did everything well. Had one unnecessary full stop in slower traffic, which may have had something to do with us being in the shade of an overpass and the car in front being out in the full sun?

The main shortcoming was when people ahead of me would start braking somewhat firmly. Where I would smoothly apply gradual pressure, knowing how much I'd need to stop eventually stop quickly if that became necessary, the car seems to take a more conservative approach of braking firmly at first, giving itself all the room in the world to slow down the rest of the way if necessary.

I suspect this is how quite a lot of people drive, but it's uncomfortable for us in the car, more dangerous for the cars behind, and it's exactly the sort of driving that creates traffic in the first place. In stop and go traffic it was exaggerated, which is a bummer because that's when I need it the most.

What the system can do is amazing, but I do think the robots should be better at this than the humans and not cause more traffic and discomfort than we already find ourselves in. But I'm sure we'll get there, one update at a time.
You do need to consider adjusting the following distance as traffic conditions change. I scroll down to 1 when in stop-and-go traffic but usually use 3 when traffic is moving along.
 
We are currently on our second road trip. My wife originally was afraid of the auto-pilot because of some phantom brakings. Now she wants me to engage it as soon as possible since auto-pilot drives better than I do, especially on curves when the car pretty much stays in the middle of the lane all the time.

I can’t imagine buying anything other than a Tesla now since no other car has even close self-driving capabilities.