FSD 11.4.x experiences

I've been in the FSD Beta program since summer of last year, and while I've seen updates with significant improvements, so far my limited experience with 11.4.2 has shown more improvements than I've seen in any prior release.

(As always, YMMV).

We've all developed a feel for what FSD Beta can and can't do. And yes, experiences vary wildly, from "It works well and I use it a lot" to "I've cancelled my FSD subscription". We all have a personal list of situations and edge cases where it doesn't work well, or at all. So when I received the update, I took the car on a route I do frequently: my house to the gym and back. Prior FSD versions have handled this route with varying degrees of success, but the past several versions have demonstrated consistent problems at specific places that 11.4.2 seems to have resolved.

Improvement #1: The car must make two right-hand turns at stop signs to exit the housing division I live in. Visibility to the left is marginal on both turns. Heavy bushes block your view to the left of the first turn, and an uphill crest restricts visibility to the left on the second turn. Previous FSD iterations handled these turns by:

-- Stop well back of stop sign, confusing following drivers
-- Inching forward
-- Inching forward
-- "FSD creeping forward" notice on dash
-- Inching forward (car behind me honks)
-- Sudden, lunging acceleration into the turn.

With 11.4.2, the car pulls confidently up to the stop sign, makes a single, short forward motion to check traffic to the left, and then pulls smoothly and confidently through the turn.

Improvement #2: Lane choices are much better. Going to the gym, the car turns left onto a 3-lane street. In 2.5 blocks it will need to turn left to get onto the highway. With earlier FSD versions, the car would turn into the far left lane, then almost immediately move to the middle or right lane (which lanes seems to depend on traffic). Since traffic tends to back up at the freeway entrance, this often left the car in the wrong lane to get onto the highway, and it would miss the entrance since it couldn't merge into the existing line of cars.

With 11.4.2, the car turns into the left lane and stays there. A similar "wrong lane" situation occurs when I'm returning from the gym, with the car existing the highway to the right and moving into the far left lane when a right turn is coming up in 2 blocks. This also seems to have been resolved.

My experience has been limited so far but it's looking very good. The progress of FSD reminds me of the progress made in speech recognition: I was writing speech recognition software for the Apple ][ computers in the early 80s (yes, I'm that old). At the time you had to train the system on individual words, many repetitions of each word were involved, and the possible vocabulary was very small (10-15 words). Over the years the training sessions became faster and the vocabulary size increased. Sometime in the 90s we hit the point where you could dictate (Dragon Dictate, anyone?) as long as you paused..slightly...between..each..word. And you still had to read a few paragraphs to the computer first.

Now, my iPhone recognizes continuous speech in real time, completely on the device, with no training necessary. This wasn't heralded as a giant breakthrough; speech recognition just got incrementally better over time. FSD seems to be heading along the same path, but MUCH faster. I dunno if Elon will ever achieve L3 or above with the current setup, but 11.4.2 makes me optimistic it will at the least be a very useful feature.

I'm certain there will be people whose experiences are nowhere near as positive as mine. What's your experience with 11.4.x been?

 

[JohnB007]

FSD can do the worst thing at the worst time regardless of what model of car you have.

I'm aware of that, driving with it for about a year now...

Generally, my experience has been much more pleasant compare to you guys though. Yesterday, on the way back home, a 18km stretch with share of traffic lights and stop signs (but low traffic Sunday evening), it got me home with zero drama. No chance this could have happened a year ago....

Someone did theorize in the past that Model S owners had the worst experience with FSD, so I was curious with this release.

 

[golfcart]

I agree this latest update is a big improvement. Have been able to make a few trips without ever having to intervene in the last week which is unusual for me I typically get frustrated with it and take over after a few minutes. I have a few minor gripes like the way it handles right turns at stop lights or left turns across multiple lanes but all and all it is pretty solid at this point.

 

[BBTX]

I'm starting to take a pretty negative view of 11.4.2, actually. For me, 11.3.6 was a pretty big milestone. It still had a lot of old annoyances (e.g. lane choice vs upcoming nav directions, issues taking off promptly at the right time from a stop sign, etc), but it was markedly better than anything that came before it, and while I was on 11.3.6 I started using it on a lot more drives with far fewer disengagements than I ever had before. I would say that, during my 11.3.6 time, I was using FSD for the majority of the miles on the majority of my drives, and it wasn't terrible.

I've had 11.4.2 for almost a week now. Some aspects are markedly better: there's a general improvement in smoothness of maneuvers, several issues related to how it approaches and leaves some stop-sign intersections have really cleared up, etc. Overall, when it's doing the right thing, it feels even "righter" than 11.3.6 was. However, I've had to disengaged far more often than 11.3.6, and some of them have been really scary WTF moments that I rarely experienced over the previous few FSD versions I had. It's gotten to the point where I'm no longer engaging it even half as often as I did on 11.3.6, because it keeps doing really novel, stupid things, and much more often than it did before. Among these repeated new+scary 11.4.2 disengages (which I did not have on 11.3.6) are issues such as:

* On the highway, going around full speed curves at ~70+ with no lane changes involved, it's tending to get /way/ too close to the slower car one lane to the right of me on left curves, to where I disengage out of fear that it's going to sway right into them, or that the margin is so small that I won't have time to react to anything bone-headed the other driver does. It seems like it's mis-estimating its own lane position and steering corrections and just ending up further to the right (outside) than it intended and then not correcting in time.
* On smaller ~35mph city streets, I'm experiencing far more phantom braking incidents than I have with /any/ prior FSD version, all the way back to about a year ago. They're not full panic stops, just really dumb slowdowns. e.g. pulling down fairly aggressively from ~35 to ~30 for no apparent reason at all (and I'm pretty vigilant at finding "excuses" for why FSD did a thing. There's no excuses in these!). It will do this in no-traffic scenarios or heavy-traffic ones, daytime, night, whenever. It annoys the *sugar* out of my usually-cooperative family members and the drivers around me, and usually after 2-3 of these in a row on the same road, I just have to give up and disengage.
* While /most/ lane-guidance choices are ok-ish, some of them on city streets have been dangerously terrible. Before it was at least predictable and consistent, and all I had to do was use the turn stalk to guide it over towards where it needed to be a bit earlier. Example scenario from yesterday: 45mph street, 3 lanes each direction, with ~1 lane wide concrete islands in middle, with those little one-side-at-a-time short left/u-turn lanes in them. My car was in the middle lane and doing fine in medium-dense daytime traffic. I had turn coming up, into a parking lot on the right, ~1.5 miles down the road. The car put on the left blinker with the message "changing lanes to follow route" (makes no sense at all - all 3 lanes continue straight towards my destination, which is on the right). Initially I was going to just let it go, figuring it (or I) had plenty of time to get back to the right later. However, the moment it completed the change to the left-most driving lane, it rapidly signaled a second "changing lanes to follow route" with a left blinker and hit the brakes hard and tried to enter one of those left/u-turn lanes in the concrete island very suddenly. There were cars all around me, and it was a near miss getting rear-ended for that. I had to yank the wheel back and stomp the gas to correct. It made absolutely no sense at all. Why on earth is it dive-bombing towards a left/u-turn -only lane for routing reasons when I have an upcoming right, which is too far down the road to matter yet anyways? The only semi-plausible explanation I can think of is that it completely lost track of which lane it was in at all, e.g. that the routing part thought I was 1-2 lanes to the right of where I actually was, and thought the second lane change was to a driving lane, until it suddenly realized it was turning into a concrete island u-turn lane and started reacting with brakes.

There's always both improvements and regressions with new releases, but the bottom line is: my overall experience is markedly worse with 11.4 than how 11.3 was. I'm engaging less often and disengaging more often than before, and the disengages aren't just for annoyances or basic lane-guidance. They're fear/panic/stupidity disengages.

 

[Ramphex]

It’s Junk in my Refresh Model S. Apparently 3/Y are seeing better experiences though.

@WilliamG @jebinc @PACEMD @FSDtester#1 @Pdubs

 

[Genie]

11.4.2 has been very frustrating- random and unpredictable lunges to bus stops, crossing the yellow line on a straight stretch of 2 lane highway, and today all kinds of crazy attempts to turn on random streets 50 miles from my destination. I don’t know if I can continue engaging fsdb on this version,

 

[Dewg]

11.4.2 has been very frustrating- random and unpredictable lunges to bus stops, crossing the yellow line on a straight stretch of 2 lane highway, and today all kinds of crazy attempts to turn on random streets 50 miles from my destination. I don’t know if I can continue engaging fsdb on this version,

This feels like a GPS issue, especially with the turns down random streets.

 

[Genie]

This feels like a GPS issue, especially with the turns down random streets.

Maybe, the nav did some strange new things today that had never happened before. I just got back from a 200 mile errand, I made that post about 1/2 way through. After I posted I switched from FSDb to Autosteer beta for 10-20 miles but that has different problems, I ended up just using TACC for the last 90 miles.

 

[CharleyBC]

Yesterday I drove to Bend, OR and back (to the Tesla service center for a new windshield). That's 184 miles each way. I used FSD about 95% of the drive. It involves neighborhood, small highway, freeway, lots of mountain road, and more--good variety. 11.4.2 did pretty well with most of it, with a few exceptions. Details:

• Leaving my neighborhood, there's an unprotected left at a T onto OR 99. I've done this exact intersection with FSD many, many times. For a change, it handled the left pretty well--confidently executing the turn and landing in the correct lane. Then immediately after settling in the new lane, it turned on the left blinker and scooted into the "suicide lane" (two-way left-turn lane). There was no left turn planned--in fact the next turn was a right about a mile ahead. It's never done that before, and I can't even imagine what it was thinking.
• A crow flew across our path, at about two feet of altitude above the ground. It was pretty close, but I think the crow would have made it safely. But the car braked hard to be sure. I'd say it was an over-reaction, but I was impressed it processed the crow at all. (My eyes were on the road, so no idea what it visualized, if anything.)
• Cruising along a one-lane-each-way highway at 50 or 55, it abruptly veered into one of those small self-serve weigh stations we have in Oregon. Angst about body image, I suppose. I yanked it back and didn't get a weight.
• On a very straight 65-mph stretch of one-lane-each-way road, it did something weird three times in about five minutes. It turned on the left blinker, and started to move across the dashed yellow center line into oncoming traffic. This was so scary, that my focus was not the screen, of course, yet one time I caught a bit of a message before it went away: something about "Moving away from breakage". I wish I'd caught it exactly. Anyone seen this message?
• When there were two lanes on my side, a few times it said, "Moving out of rightmost lane". I've seen this before on large freeways when there are at least three lanes, so it scoots to the second one. That's fine. But here there were only two, and I've never seen it make that choice before. What's more, it's a stretch of road that's marked "Keep right except to pass," not that I expect it to read that sign yet.
• One nice thing in recent releases is how it cheats to one side of its lane when passing something huge like a truck in the next lane. I like that on a freeway. On a two-lanes-each-way high-speed highway, it's a bit frightening. There was only a double yellow separating north and south traffic, and it was cheating right up against the yellow line, frighteningly close to traffic with a closing speed of about 130mph.
• Bunches of times when a turn indicator comes on for a few seconds, and goes away again. I think this is when the AI gets bored, falls asleep and starts dreaming.
• It did the best I've ever seen in windy mountain roads. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. Handling the curves smoothly, slowing for the sharper ones, and so on. High marks!

 

[JB47394]

One nice thing in recent releases is how it cheats to one side of its lane when passing something huge like a truck in the next lane.

This is a feature that many have gushed over. I hate it. I don't want to crowd traffic on my left, and I especially don't want a quick shift in my lane at the beginning and end of that move. It looks too much like the start of a lane change without signaling. Mostly, nobody drives that way, so other drivers are going to be distracted by it.

 

[Brolan]

Ok, after my disappointing last drive I tried another one. But before I did that I performed all the suggested fixes. I recalibrated the cameras, I reformatted the USB drive, and I rebooted the screen.

Things were mixed. On the two-lane road that widened to a left and right turn lane, it did follow the center lane this time and did not drive in the left turn lane. But it did again drive in the right turnout lane again even though there was no reason to do so. I was watching the screen and I could see it plotting the path on the screen before it did so. It did one right blinker entering the lane and none coming left out of it.

I tried it merging on the highway and it never used the blinker, following the merge lane until it was forced out of it.

Bottom line is it still scares me and I'm going to wait for another release before trying it again. If you use this release please be extra alert and careful.

 

[tivoboy]

We were on a small street crossing a multilane bigger street. The light turned red as we approached the intersection, and the car stopped well. All good so far.

Then after a minute or so waiting at the red light, the car suddenly accelerated forward. The light was still red! There is no other light for another lane for it to have been confused about. Just a plain--unchanging--red light.

I posted this in another thread, but yes this type of behaviour has occurred randomly for a while..I first started to see it probably over 18 months ago and had hoped it would be gone completely, but now with 11.4.2 I have it actually in places where i did NOT have it before. Full red (three lights all red), in car NAV UX showing solid red, lights solid, no apparent blinking at all, and the car tried to accelerate through a RED light intersection. Fortunately at 05:00 in the am.. I disabled, quick voice note, re-enabled FSDb and car started to proceed AGAIN through the full RED light intersection. At that point I gave up for the morning.

May 2018 M3 LR RWD

 

[eli_]

This is a feature that many have gushed over. I hate it. I don't want to crowd traffic on my left, and I especially don't want a quick shift in my lane at the beginning and end of that move. It looks too much like the start of a lane change without signaling. Mostly, nobody drives that way, so other drivers are going to be distracted by it.

Same, it's a little less jerky in 11.4.x (there was actually a release note about it), but I've never done this when manually driving. The idea is you want to get out of a semi-truck's shadow as quickly as possible by moving longitudinally, not laterally. I.e. either pass the truck if you can or don't go alongside it, but never keep pace with it.

I wonder if they originally added this because of weaknesses in the vision system. Like they've always been bad at predicting the range of large adjacent vehicles that don't fit in the frame, so better to give them a wide berth in case it's really closer than predicted.

 

[dramsey]

Like they've always been bad at predicting the range of large adjacent vehicles that don't fit in the frame, so better to give them a wide berth in case it's really closer than predicted.

If only there were some kind of reliable short range distance sensor they can use. Maybe something with high frequency sound waves?

 

[DWtsn]

If only there were some kind of reliable short range distance sensor they can use. Maybe something with high frequency sound waves?

I wonder if they could invent/use some sort of radiolocation system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (ranging), angle (azimuth), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site?

 

[Tronguy]

I wonder if they could invent/use some sort of radiolocation system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (ranging), angle (azimuth), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site?

Look, you: I distinctly remember chugging down I-95 in Maryland at speed and coming up on a traffic jam with stopped cars.

Guess what? With RADAR, a Tesla (or any RADAR-equipped car) can't actually see cars whose velocity is more than 40 mph or so than the car one is in.

The reason turns out to be issues with clutter (a term meaning, "reflections one is not interested in") interfering with the reflections one is interested in, when those interesting reflections are from a hundred yards or so away. The clutter overwhelms the interesting signals and, at speed, by the time the signal strength finally does come up, there's not enough time to stop or slow down. The solution to getting rid of clutter was to use a low-pass filter to kill the doppler-shifted clutter returns; but doing that means that anything moving +-40 mph or so from the car's speed doesn't get detected. Period. Cue Teslas, Volvos, Toyotas and such running into emergency vehicles and other stopped vehicles at speed.

So: Visual doesn't have that problem. Granted, precise range might be more of a problem: But compare that to running into a stopped car in front of one.

Count your blessings.

 

[DWtsn]

Look, you: I distinctly remember chugging down I-95 in Maryland at speed and coming up on a traffic jam with stopped cars.

Guess what? With RADAR, a Tesla (or any RADAR-equipped car) can't actually see cars whose velocity is more than 40 mph or so than the car one is in.

The reason turns out to be issues with clutter (a term meaning, "reflections one is not interested in") interfering with the reflections one is interested in, when those interesting reflections are from a hundred yards or so away. The clutter overwhelms the interesting signals and, at speed, by the time the signal strength finally does come up, there's not enough time to stop or slow down. The solution to getting rid of clutter was to use a low-pass filter to kill the doppler-shifted clutter returns; but doing that means that anything moving +-40 mph or so from the car's speed doesn't get detected. Period. Cue Teslas, Volvos, Toyotas and such running into emergency vehicles and other stopped vehicles at speed.

So: Visual doesn't have that problem. Granted, precise range might be more of a problem: But compare that to running into a stopped car in front of one.

Count your blessings.

Sooooo, you're a fan of reinstituting the radar? Getting mixed messages here.

 

[Tronguy]

Sooooo, you're a fan of reinstituting the radar? Getting mixed messages here.

Nope, RADAR is worse than visual. With RADAR and Not Paying Attention When Driving On TACC, one will eventually go Splat!

With Visual and on TACC, one may not hold a steady distance, but there is no Splat! in one's future.

 

[bobsmy]

Lane selection in 11.4.2 for added turn and entrance on secondary roads is worse for me than previous versions. Ego turns on turn signal moves into added right turn lane runs to the other end ( entrance lane) then turns back into the correct straight lane. In several cases I had to stop hard as the vehicle behind me accelerated as it assumed I was turning right only to have my slide back into the straight travel lane.

 

[JB47394]

Lane selection in 11.4.2 for added turn and entrance on secondary roads is worse for me than previous versions. Ego turns on turn signal moves into added right turn lane runs to the other end ( entrance lane) then turns back into the correct straight lane. In several cases I had to stop hard as the vehicle behind me accelerated as it assumed I was turning right only to have my slide back into the straight travel lane.

Can you show us the intersection on Google Maps? Preferably including a course line for reference.

For example:

 

[bobsmy]

Not as fancy as yours, but here are two examples. Green is route shown on display. Red is track of EGO.