FCW setting and Safety Score

[dave999z]

FCWs are frustrating as they seem often unpredictable/unwarranted but ding your Safety Score and therefore affect your insurance rate.

I've read that setting FCW to "early", which makes the audible alert happen earlier, means you may be able to brake before there would have been a FCW under the "medium" setting, and thus before Tesla registers the event as a ding on your Safety Score.

How do we know that is the case, as opposed to it simply registering more FCWs (triggered by the "early" setting) as dings on your Safety Score?

Does Tesla document this somewhere? Has anyone tested this and definitively established this?

 

[dave999z]

Well, replying to myself.

I've had it set to early for weeks now and keep getting ridiculous FCWs. Not once have I braked in time to avoid getting dinged. So, I'm suspicious that setting it to early simply results in more dings.

The FCWs are about as accurate as the auto wipers, which turn on for no reason in the sun and won't stop until you disable them.

I may end up ditching Tesla insurance for this reason. I just don't want to be put in a bad mood every time that stupid thing goes off and costs me $10.

 

[MarkZeroOne]

Safety Score Beta | Tesla Support

The Safety Score Beta is an assessment of your driving behavior based on several metrics called Safety Factors. These are combined to estimate the likelihood that your driving could result in a future collision. We combine your daily Safety Scores (up to 30 days) to calculate the aggregated...

www.tesla.com

Telsa actually does a good job of explaining how each item contributes to your score. It says FCW is based on the “medium” trigger.

I agree that I think the FCW is too sensitive even at the medium setting. I get the “bad mood” feeling every time I hear that alarm. It’s the thing I get dinged for the most. Maybe it’s 1-2 a month. And it’s usually a car that just slows down quickly when making a turn in from of me.

You definitely trade being monitored for cost of insurance. For me it’s less than half the cost of every other insurance quote. But if they tweak the SS as the did with 1.2 and it leads to lower scores and higher premiums. The advantage disappears and I’d switch to something that doesn’t monitor everything.

 

[dave999z]

Based on my own anecdotal experience, I am convinced that if you set FCW to "early" it registers more dings on your safety score. For several weeks I had it set to early on the thought that when the alert went off I'd have time to slow down before it would register a ding on my safety score. It went off all the time, and not once was I able to avoid a ding by slowing down in time.

I've now changed it to medium, and it's not going off all the time, and I'm getting no dings on my safety score. Much better.

I know Tesla says the dings are based on the medium threshold regardless of your setting. I don't think that's how it's actually implemented. I'm on version 1.0.

 

[MarkZeroOne]

Anecdotally, before I had Tesla insurance, I had FCW setting set to “late” because I found medium too sensitive. The alarm would not go off but my safety score would be dinged so it certainly doesn’t happen the other way.

I have a feeling human reaction times between early, medium, late might not be fast enough to materially effect it. I might experiment with this myself. Because if it’s indeed possible to prevent FCW dings by breaking on an “early” warning. It would save me money.