Frightening experience with AutoPilot on the freeway...

[HX_Guy]

I was driving on the freeway at night, with AutoPilot set to 75MPH when all of a sudden an alert came up on the main screen (not the instrument cluster) which said "Take control immediately" and a picture showing hands on the steering wheel.

I took control, but the instrument cluster still showed AutoPilot as being active which was confusing because I didn't know if I was in control or if the car was...my wife is freaking out next to me...then the instrument cluster starts to fade out to a completely white screen and turns off. I'm not driving on the freeway with no instrument cluster showing speed of anything else. I start to move over to catch an exit when everything came back online about several seconds.

The rest of the drive was fine and everything seemed to work normal again, but it was an uneasy drive monitoring the car to make sure it didn't act up again.

Anyone else every experience this?

 

[Tam]

...fade out to a completely white screen...

Sounded like a software problem and the system rebooted itself to correct it.

At least, your propulsion, braking and steering are still good while the system resetting itself.

Your car is a computer on wheel so I don't doubt there will be instances like this.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Haven’t seen this, but I’ve had several times where the loud rapid beeps for early collision detection went off with nothing around and, oddly, no warnings or anything on either screen. Each time was scary, but went away after a couple seconds.

 

[Blissedout]

I was driving on the freeway at night, with AutoPilot set to 75MPH when all of a sudden an alert came up on the main screen (not the instrument cluster) which said "Take control immediately" and a picture showing hands on the steering wheel.

I took control, but the instrument cluster still showed AutoPilot as being active which was confusing because I didn't know if I was in control or if the car was...my wife is freaking out next to me...then the instrument cluster starts to fade out to a completely white screen and turns off. I'm not driving on the freeway with no instrument cluster showing speed of anything else. I start to move over to catch an exit when everything came back online about several seconds.

The rest of the drive was fine and everything seemed to work normal again, but it was an uneasy drive monitoring the car to make sure it didn't act up again.

Anyone else every experience this?

When weird stuff happens, I suggest you email National Service and tell them the time. They will get it to the proper people who are working on it and who will check your logs to see what happened.

 

[cybergates]

I was driving on the freeway at night, with AutoPilot set to 75MPH when all of a sudden an alert came up on the main screen (not the instrument cluster) which said "Take control immediately" and a picture showing hands on the steering wheel.

I took control, but the instrument cluster still showed AutoPilot as being active which was confusing because I didn't know if I was in control or if the car was...my wife is freaking out next to me...then the instrument cluster starts to fade out to a completely white screen and turns off. I'm not driving on the freeway with no instrument cluster showing speed of anything else. I start to move over to catch an exit when everything came back online about several seconds.

The rest of the drive was fine and everything seemed to work normal again, but it was an uneasy drive monitoring the car to make sure it didn't act up again.

Anyone else every experience this?

First of all remember to tap the brake slightly always disengages the system. The take control immediately I have seen in rare circumstances.

The screen and dash going dark at the same time - I would definitely have the car checked out and have them evaluate the logs. I have time to time seen the main large screen crash and reboot (maybe 3 x in the past 6 months spontaneously) but never the dashboard.

 

[TexLaw]

Keep in mind that you ALWAYS are in control. Acceleration, braking, and steering always are at your command, even while autosteer is active. As mentioned above, braking deactivates all EAP, and a bit of steering deactivates autosteer.

 

[JHWJR]

I have had this perhaps 10 times now. I attribute it to the car saying -- "Right now, at this moment, I have lost confidence that I know what to do. I will keep trying, but for a moment, I'm counting on you, the driver. OK. I have this again." -- whether it is computational error, bad or confusing road information, a software reboot (goes away too fast for this I think) or something else. But I never got those a few months ago, and I get them often enough now. On the other hand, I drive over 1,000 miles a week, so how often you see it may just be a function of how many miles are driven.

 

[Qbenjamin]

This has happened to me several times while using AP and not using it. The entire screen goes blank and it just reboots. I don't lose control of the vehicle of anything like that, but it's still annoying when this happens.

 

[tls]

I've had the "red hands" on my main screen -- while the instrument cluster showed AP was still on and, in fact, it was. Was preceded by weird nav issues, media player problems, and other strangeness. Finally turned out to be a symptom of the SD card having gone bad. They replaced the whole unit, fixing all the issues at once.

Seemed to have nothing to do with the AP conditions that legitimately cause red hands on the IC.

I assume other causes involving filesystem corruption or, really anything that feeds enough bad data to the Linux kernel are possible, including software bugs, transient hardware failures, etc. Garbage in, garbage out!