Driver Assistance Features Unavailable message on the dashboard

[joninmelbourne]

Hi there,
My new Tesla Model S had a message "Driver Assistance Features Unavailable, contact Tesla services if the problem persists" for second time this morning. Last time a couple of weeks ago it went off by the time I drove home from work and everything worked normally. The car is spotless so I can't believe any sensors or cameras are covered. Hoping to avoid trips to Richmond to fix it, anybody had it before?

Thanks!

 

[eclectricdave]

I have had this occasionally. I used to think it was caused by lack of internet. It always comes good..

 

[ZTrekus]

Hi there,
My new Tesla Model S had a message "Driver Assistance Features Unavailable, contact Tesla services if the problem persists" for second time this morning. Last time a couple of weeks ago it went off by the time I drove home from work and everything worked normally. The car is spotless so I can't believe any sensors or cameras are covered. Hoping to avoid trips to Richmond to fix it, anybody had it before?

Thanks!

This is not a big problem - but it is a headache in the sense that you need to get the car to St Leonards / or Melbourne...

They will fix it on the spot though. I got this - a darn nuisance it was. Turns out it is a calibration issue between the radar and camera. One of the Tesla technicians got in the car with a lap top computer and drove it round the block a couple of times. When he got out, it was all better. Hasn't complained since too. No big deal. But like I said - it is nevertheless a headache. So I would recommend two Panadols and a cup of coffee in the meantime...

 

[mrElbe]

Just had this for the last 2 days here in cold snowy weather. It most likely was condensation in the camera area. If the camera cannot see a clear picture you get the above mentioned message. Same goes for an obstructed or out of alignment radar unit.

 

[joninmelbourne]

Thanks for the replies guys. Actually I have just had a thought. The last time it happened was in exactly the same place. Sometimes I stop at a milk bar on the way to work and it has a crazy red and white checkerboard paint job outside, the kind that hurts your eyes. I have parked the Tesla outside facing the red and white squares and that is when the message has come on both times! So that could have confused the camera! See the photo. What do you think?!

 

[EcoCloudIT]

You just gave me a headache joninmelbourne ;-)

-ECIT

 

[Shock-On-T]

Hi there,
My new Tesla Model S had a message "Driver Assistance Features Unavailable, contact Tesla services if the problem persists" for second time this morning. Last time a couple of weeks ago it went off by the time I drove home from work and everything worked normally. The car is spotless so I can't believe any sensors or cameras are covered. Hoping to avoid trips to Richmond to fix it, anybody had it before?

Thanks!

I got it just once, about a week after I got the car. Next drive all was fine and hasn't happened since.

 

[ZTrekus]

View attachment 205381 Thanks for the replies guys. Actually I have just had a thought. The last time it happened was in exactly the same place. Sometimes I stop at a milk bar on the way to work and it has a crazy red and white checkerboard paint job outside, the kind that hurts your eyes. I have parked the Tesla outside facing the red and white squares and that is when the message has come on both times! So that could have confused the camera! See the photo. What do you think?!

Reminds me of the time when the Enterprise crew wanted to shut down the entire Borg Collective by showing them a fractal pattern.

Fancy the entire Tesla fleet going off line whenever they pass a chequered brick wall!

Resistance is futile...

 

[Ollie Jones]

TL;DR shut the car down completely for five minutes or more, and you'll get driver assistance back.

I've had this happen, three times now. The second time it happened, I was a on a long trip, and it was going to be a nuisance not to have assistance. So I stopped on a freeway ramp. The two-thumb-salute (hold down the two thumbwheels until the center console computer reboots) didn't help.

So I called Tesla Service and I'm like, WTF? I want to use this driver assistance stuff?

The guy on the phone advised me to shut the car down completely and wait five minutes. (Shutdown can be done on a screen on the center console). It worked. A tip: either stay in the car for the five minutes, or get out and stay out for five minutes. Don't open a door during the five minutes or the car doesn't stay shut down.

I asked what caused it. He said something nontechnical about a temporary loss of communication between the driver assistance subsystem and the main car control system. This causes the driver assistance subsystem to isolate itself from car control.

Each time it's happened to me, it's been at the end of a charging session, and the fault was in place already when I first put the car in Drive. Twice at SCs, once at a ChargePoint 6kw station. The guy on the phone denied it was something to do with some sort of power transient. Still.

I've also had "Temporarily unavailable" when there was frost or mist over the camera port on the windshield. That's a different problem.

 

[joninmelbourne]

Interesting thanks for the replies. I remember that Star Trek Next Gen episode! I wonder if a Tesla was following a car painted like this what would happen? Will try the two thumb salute next time. I guess that feature is disabled whilst driving along?

 

[raynewman]

Interesting thanks for the replies. I remember that Star Trek Next Gen episode! I wonder if a Tesla was following a car painted like this what would happen? Will try the two thumb salute next time. I guess that feature is disabled whilst driving along?

No - it is possible to reboot while driving and it causes no problem.

 

[garyjac]

There is a software explanation possible for all the above maladies (which I too have had/observed). The remedies recommended all work, and usually, you do not need to go to an SC to get it fixed up. OK. The autopilot features ("in-core" processes) use copious memory in real time. The programmers have the system do an auto-reset to clear the Heap memory every so often and restart all running processes as required. This is the only way they can be sure that they have a "clean" part of the memory to work with, uncontaminated with old data. Sometimes a process will be late re-starting or the system will be waiting on a process to stop, and the the collision takes the system off-line as a fail safe measure until all is in balance once more. No one has told me this, it's just an educated guess that seems to fit the occasional random behaviour. It does not mean you cannot have a camera/radar sync fault that will cause the same trouble either.

 

[BriansBucketList]

Since it started raining here, I've had this as well as cruise control not available several times, reboot fixed it several times, then it persisted. Car shut down, but only one minute. No luck. Resolved while driving. Fremont service center saw camera errors, but no less loaners. It's been raining here. How can camera see clearly ? Radar is always wet, and washed car before the problem worsened. Tapped radar a few times after latest message and it resolved. I used a hose stream like heavy rain. Fremont service wants to align camera, and somewhat unrelated, rear ultrasonics see a phantom object direct center, but it all started with the rain. Waiting for appointment with loaner.

 

[garyjac]

Water in the works...that could happen too.

 

[Ollie Jones]

... temporary loss of communication between the driver assistance subsystem and the main car control system. This causes the driver assistance subsystem to isolate itself from car control. ...

Just to clarify, he did say that driver assistance was an entirely separate subsystem from the main control subsystem that accepts input from stuff like the go pedal, stop pedal, and R N D stalk, and controls the motors. It's not like two processes running on the same computer. It's more like two separate computers.

He said when communication handshakes fail between driver-assistance and main control subsystems, the main control subsystem then ignores driver-assistance. It sounds like a worthy safety feature to me. It also sounds like something they'll get better at handling with years of experience.

 

[Ollie Jones]

View attachment 205381 a crazy red and white checkerboard

Check this out. It's Netflix's codec breaker film clip. Actually, well lit high contrast brick walls work fine with digital video. It's smoke, mist, low lighting, and large hard-to-discern moving objects that are tough.

Netflix’s spooky 12-minute film noir only makes sense to engineers and developers