Do you enjoy using "Autosteer on city streets" (current pre-release FSD) -- a poll

[AlanSubie4Life]

@AlanSubie4Life Today, as soon as it started raining, I changed the wipers from auto to 1 (and then 2). Worked fine - no "FSD degraded" message. It wasn't raining hard - so will have to check when it does rain heavily what happens if I keep the setting at 2.

Although improbable in Southern California, I actually got a chance to test this. What I said was true (3 will disable FSD), but I think there is minimal benefit to forcing setting 2.

It has other ways of determining that it is raining it seems; I have some discussion of what I found in the original 10.69 thread.

I was able to test in a very heavy rain.

Maybe setting 2 would help in very specific circumstances. It seems like it would probably never hurt.

 

[dgatwood]

Although improbable in Southern California, I actually got a chance to test this. What I said was true (3 will disable FSD), but I think there is minimal benefit to forcing setting 2.

That was certainly true for navigate on Autopilot, but at least with 10.69, I've actually seen it refuse to engage even with the wipers at the lowest intermittent setting. FSDb is completely and utterly useless in even a light mist for me, and I've even seen it refuse to engage after just using the windshield washer without any actual rain at all.

The irony, of course, is that periods of inclement weather are when additional digital eyes are most valuable from a driver's perspective, which means FSDb fails right when you need it the most.

Until rain handling improves — and I mean a *lot* — I can't really see FSDb as anything more than a novelty in Northern California. Since it rolled out to me in January (well, December, but when I wasn't home to use it), I've literally had it refuse to engage more days than not.

My biggest worry about V11 is that they might neuter highway driving to match the FSD beta behavior, at which point Autopilot really won't be worth having anymore. Not having automatic exiting on rainy days is one thing, but not having automatic lane keeping in light rain would be quite another.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

That was certainly true for navigate on Autopilot, but at least with 10.69, I've actually seen it refuse to engage even with the wipers at the lowest intermittent setting. FSDb is completely and utterly useless in even a light mist for me, and I've even seen it refuse to engage after just using the windshield washer without any actual rain at all.

The irony, of course, is that periods of inclement weather are when additional digital eyes are most valuable from a driver's perspective, which means FSDb fails right when you need it the most.

Until rain handling improves — and I mean a *lot* — I can't really see FSDb as anything more than a novelty in Northern California. Since it rolled out to me in January (well, December, but when I wasn't home to use it), I've literally had it refuse to engage more days than not.

My biggest worry about V11 is that they might neuter highway driving to match the FSD beta behavior, at which point Autopilot really won't be worth having anymore. Not having automatic exiting on rainy days is one thing, but not having automatic lane keeping in light rain would be quite another.

I’ve noticed some stickiness with the detection where it gets stuck even though everything is fine. Have to pull over and quickly emulate leaving the car (park and butt out of seat). Just takes a couple seconds without leaving vehicle.

Sounds like that could have been the situation you had.

Pretty buggy.

 

[DrChaos]

I agree with you on the poor implementation of "hands on steering wheel". I get so many cautions when my hands are clearly on the steering wheel. It is annoying having to tug on the steering wheel all the time. But, camera on face is just intrusive. What if you are like my friend who insists on covering her entire face with a scarf and wears sunglasses? - she has skin cancer paranoia!
A camera aimed at the steering wheel would work just fine. It would eliminate all the gimmicks that people try - no squeeze balls, no cats or dogs.

all the other automakers spend a few dollars more on the wheel and have a hand touch sensor, which detects "hands on wheel", not "did you or a knee or a weight tug on it" or "are you generally looking out as far as we can sort of tell from a camera in the wrong position". (other automakers monitoring camera looks directly at the driver's face from the natural position in front of the driver's face).

Elon's "reduce all costs and don't change anything on the hardware that doesn't reduce costs even more" gets very old. Same idea deleting the $4 rain sensor which actually detects rain on the glass with active illumination and not some neural network interpretation looking through a camera which is at focus of 300 meters when the raindrops are at 0.0005 meters and definitely not in focus.

 

[Whoze]

all the other automakers spend a few dollars more on the wheel and have a hand touch sensor, which detects "hands on wheel", not "did you or a knee or a weight tug on it" or "are you generally looking out as far as we can sort of tell from a camera in the wrong position". (other automakers monitoring camera looks directly at the driver's face from the natural position in front of the driver's face).

Elon's "reduce all costs and don't change anything on the hardware that doesn't reduce costs even more" gets very old. Same idea deleting the $4 rain sensor which actually detects rain on the glass with active illumination and not some neural network interpretation looking through a camera which is at focus of 300 meters when the raindrops are at 0.0005 meters and definitely not in focus.

I agree with you on both accounts. Hands on sensor on the steering wheel would be better. Rain sensor would be nice too- maybe it matters less on the new higher definition cameras. But camera on face - no, that’s too intrusive. The only time I want camera on face is when it is someone else trying to steal my car.

 

[jebinc]

Voted, “Other”. Have FSD on two of three Teslas. FSDb/Smart Summon/and all other released but not usable stuff = not so cheap parlor tricks at this point.

 

[tinywheels]

I bought my Tesla for the longer range over my previous 2019 Hyundai Ioniq. It came with 3 months free FSD beta and 6 months free supercharging. I had followed the press for years and been interested in self driving cars, but had expected that it would be basically unusable or a party trick, and was pretty pleasantly surprised. Mind you I'm still not an Elon fan, and he does overpromise, but in Minneapolis at least, the software that the engineers (not Elon!) made is very impressive and does generally drive me to work and errands either with zero interventions, or sometimes it's a known place on a particular road that I always do myself but the rest of the time it drives. I don't plan on paying $200 every month to keep it... I'm hoping auto steer will be enough... But I will sort of miss it, and when v12 comes out I'll buy a month. I am reminded of a comedy routine I saw about how much people complain about flying, and the comedian retorted, "YOU'RE FLYING! You're sitting in a chair in the SKY like a Greek god!". I get that people are mad about Elon's promises, but this is cutting edge technology. Of course it still isn't perfect. And although I haven't ridden in a waymo car and I'm told that they're better, that you really can go to sleep in them, I think I feel more comfortable still having a steering wheel just in case. Plus, of course, Tesla has achieved a car without a super expensive lidar, that drives itself in MY city, not just a geofenced part of Phoenix. So in short I do find it to be mostly relaxing, unexpectedly.

 

[Usher]

I had to vote other: I had a P85 as my daily driver which had a really good cruise control that I used all the time. I'm still in the 3-month FSD trial on the new model S and after trying all the different settings, I ended up turning off autosteer completely along with almost everything other option, since that configuration seems to minimize the number of times the car decides to slow down for stupid reasons.
What I really want is a setting to disable the TACC from ever using regen or the brakes. If I had that setting, I'd be really happy with it and use TACC almost all the time and autosteer on freeways. Since that setting will never come, I'd also be willing to pay $$$ to buy the old "traffic unaware" cruise control and get that software installed on the new car instead of either the autopilot or FSD package.