Part III of III
FWIW, I'm just back from a 5-day trip, about 650 miles, perhaps 95%+ Freeway driving (AP's sweet spot today?), and 14 hours behind the wheel with 8.0. For those that are interested, I'm concluding my Initial Observations started in this thread here: Part I:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/1750998/ and Part II:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/1751370/
AP
- I know it's subjective, but:
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Autosteer/TACC seems much more human-like slowing for a vehicle ahead. Great improvement.
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Autosteer does not seem to search and act like a drunk as much as with 7.1. Great improvement.
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Nags. I had far less than I've ever had before -- primarily IMHO because I chose to purposely drive the entire trip with my right hand a little more firmly exerting light pressure down at the 3-o'clock position with elbow on the armrest vs my hand at the 5-o'clock position and arm resting on my right leg as I have almost always done on open stretches until now. I purposely made this change based on some TMC discussion (TU
@Ingineer and others) about more torque being needed for MS to sense you are "touching" your wheel. I decided to adapt to what Tesla seems to have designed vs complain, and it paid dividends for me -- only 2 true nags in perhaps 500 miles of Autosteer (perhaps those were valid, IDK
), and a small handful of the new "white flashing boarder" pre-alert (which is another "Well done, Tesla")
- I can't remember many situations where I encountered the
"2 cars ahead" situation on the IC -- perhaps because both were traveling at the same speed...
- I still turned Autosteer off through most construction zones of any substance. AP just can't confidently handle a combination of multiple uneven surfaces and sometimes not-the-best lane markings as of yet, especially at higher speeds.
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BUG REPORT: I encountered some
Unusual Autosteer Situations at night, at freeway speed, on good roads with clearly marked lanes. I took control of the wheel to bring MS back into the lane which triggered Autosteer OFF, so hopefully the exceptional situations were captured by Tesla for their analysis.
- I'm in right lane with primary road turning to the left. Offramp to another freeway to the right along that curve. AP was clearly lost as the road from it's POV began to widen, then it chose to take the offramp before I took control. Autosteer appears to bias towards the right in situation like this, when bias to the left when there is a clear lane marking but the distance to the right is expanding.
- Traveling a very straight and monotonous stretch in generally flat desert terrain. No other vehicles around me. MS all of a sudden decided to quickly veer to the right towards I think, a bunch of tall bushes that were sitting all alone on the side of the road.
- I had multiple occurrences where I was in the left or center lane, and MS would start to veer right towards a Big Rig in the right lane. This happened both as I approached multiple Big Rigs from the rear, and at least once as I was alongside it. In the latter situation, the Semi was open underneath the trailer. This morning very early, I had the same situation occur with MS wanting to turn right into a very large SUV in my right lane as I was approaching it from the rear. I'm frankly a bit paranoid about this behavior because of the multiple occurrences.
- Autosteer did not correctly recognize the position of a Semi with a low empty trailer designed for hauling heavy equipment and goods (like rolls of steel). While the Rig was clearly ahead within its lane to my right, the IC showed the Rig crossing my right line AND as I kept driving forward at full speed, MS steered more closely to my left lane line -- apparently because (radar) falsely sensed the semi being in my lane when it wasn't. (It was a good thing it steered to the left -- well done, but just the same, it is an odd thing!)
Nav
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REQUIREMENT: I really wish Tesla would add the
Supercharger Lightning Bolt to the bottom of the "Navigate Favorite/Recent Places" Pop-up. Now that most everything disappears from Nav during normal operation, at least once I wanted to override my Nav Route and go to a specific Supercharger along the route. While trying to keep my eyes on the road, and in a Senior Moment perhaps, I forgot I needed to touch the Nav screen for the SpC icon to appear. Rather than playing with Voice Activation trying to understand me (it finally did), I would have found what I was after a whole lot faster if the icon were located as I suggest or even in both places.
- I really like the new
Auto Zoom/UnZoom function after living with it through all sort of situations and many miles of use. IMHO, it's well done.
Media Player
- Subjectively, I suppose I can learn to live with the new streaming-biased UI. It is what it is. The real problem is I'm not sure some of the design considers AM/FM/SiriusXM/Phone (aka "Bluetooth")/USB as much as it should for usability by owners that prefer listening to those sources. For the non-streaming sources, the large icons and how those either become confusing with Album Art that may be displayed or how the icons take away from the text-only information, figuring out what to press to access what, etc are not as intuitive as they really could and should be.
- I know I just spend too much time looking at this interface to accomplish whatever I want to do compared to the old one, and if I were to guess, a larger percentage of the Autosteer nags and pre-alerts happened when I was focused on "how do I do that" when i shouldn't have been. I could be the exception, but I suggest probably not for users of non streaming sources.
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BUG REPORT: Switching between a USB playing song with
Album Art to Slacker OR reverse will at times cause the Album Art of the former source to remain once the new media source is playing. Clearly a bug.
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Equalizer settings have been pervasive for me. (I have UHFS if that makes any difference.) I've not had any issue with them changing as some others have reported since I've been away.
- USB
- BUG REPORT or NEED FOR DOCUMENTED SPECIFICATION: New Album Art display is problematic. I have 100% of my tracks with art that displays in iTunes, iOS devices and macOS Finder correctly. What I found though is that not all albums will display the art in the 8.0 interface, as if nothing were imbedded. I'm suspecting there is some problem or restriction related to the size of the art -- too big, and Media Player 8.0 simply ignores it -- VS the more user-friendly thing would be to scale it down to what Media Player wants to use.
- While not USB-specific, on a related note is even Bluetooth playback of podcasts via my iPhone have Album Art problems with 8.0. Some display the podcast art in Media Player 8.0, while others display the default grey music note symbol -- even though album art all show up natively on the iPhone.
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Shuffle On/Off and Repeat are not 100% pervasive. I've not figured out the exact scenarios that cause them to be forgotten.
- Again, as others have have reported, there remain issues with
Media Player not always remembering the location within a track when it comes time to start playing again. It does sometimes, while not at others. The exact pattern elludes me.
As I have said before, I still believe 8.0 is an overall advancement forward, but Media Player, specifically USB is an unfortunate step back for those of us that care about Infotainment and USB being a necessary feature we use all the time in our luxury vehicles. Media Player was clearly either not QA'd sufficiently, or had a design focused on only more casual users and did not consider broad-enough real owner use cases as it should. THAT for me (and others) remains unacceptable.
Tesla, if you're reading this, please help sooner than later -- and not make us wait for 8.1 AP improvements! TU!
