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?

 

[JB47394]

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

Thanks for doing that work. Now I understand what you're facing. It seems like the sort of thing that would be solved with proper map data.

I was curious, so I brought up that location in Google maps to see what it would show, and I also put a driving route along Generals Highway. Right in the area where you're seeing a problem, Google maps is showing a weird misalignment between route and road with little dogleg adjustments at two points. I'm showing one of the doglegs here (it's right at the end of the label "Generals Hwy"). I wonder if some underlying dataset used by map services screwed up this location.

I guess all you can do is report it and hope that Tesla will fix the data.

 

[BBTX]

I'll share another frustration while I'm venting here, about narrow two-way roads (often with no painted divider) in the <=35mph range. This is not new to 11.4, but it's something 11.3.6 seemed to improve a bit, and then 11.4.2 regressed it back to worse than I've seen in a while. Basically two related things about offsetting/sharing the limited space:

1) It hogs the middle as a default, often putting a whole wheel past the center. It only dodges off to its own side to avoid oncoming cars, but it does too late for comfort/courtesy for me or the other driver, and then immediately swings back into the middle.

2) Even worse than playing chicken on this when moving, though, is that if it comes to a stop while not actively dodging another car (at a stop sign/light, or lined up behind behind other such cars), it stops in the lane-hogging position, blocking safe navigation by opposite-lane traffic. This is especially dumb as the lead/only car at a stop sign intersecting a faster street, where others may suddenly try to turn right into the opposing lane at speed while you're waiting, and find they have little room to do so!

 

[imstevenp]

I’m seeing mostly praise about this update, but here’s my experience going from 11.3.6 to 11.4.2.

1. Phantom braking happens about every half mile on streets with 35mph speed limit. Doesn’t seem to be a problem for other speeds.
2. Phantom stopping is now a thing where it will stop hard in the middle of every intersection that has a green light. This happens even if there are no cars around. I tested this at 4am when there were no cars and it came to a complete stop and stayed in the intersection until I intervened.
3. Phantom braking on the freeway has lessened in intensity, but increased in frequency.
4. At stop signs where it’s going to make a left turn, it now starts the maneuver before getting to the stop sign, leading it to blocking the left side of the road until it proceeds through.
5. About a quarter mile before any turn, it will move to the opposite lane needed (if I’m in the right lane and I have a right turn coming up, it will switch to the left lane) then swerve to the correct lane.

Should I recalibrate my cameras or something? I’ve disabled fsd for now because it’s unusable for my drives.

 

[eli_]

I don't think Tesla ever addressed the NHTSA recall for FSD Beta that was complaining about it making illegal maneuvers and not following turn restrictions. On 11.4.2, lets say I'm in a right-turn only lane, sitting at the stop line, and I enable a nav route that requires a left turn, what will happen? Most likely the car will try to turn left from the right turn lane, it could be prevented by traffic, but it will still attempt it in this jerky/indecisive way. If you set it up for failure like that, or it sets itself up for failure... it does not handle failure gracefully. It's basically like... "must path-find to nav route at all costs". The right thing of course is you disobey the navigation and turn right anyway, causing a route re-calculation, cause obviously you can't turn left legally with such a short deadline.

 

[bobsmy]

Since the performance of FSD is very dependent on training, I am starting to think the significant improvements that some ( OG) users are seeing vs others may be due to the fact that Tesla is focusing on their data for improvements. FSD has made significant improvements since I started using it two years ago, however there are a few situations where I seen almost no improvements. Most are lane selection related. It is possible that some of it is due to poor map data, however in order to be fully functional these issues need to be resolved.

 

[Goose66]

FSDb v11.4.2 is an absolute menace on the highway now.

Like others I am seeing varying levels of success on surface streets. Lane selection remains the achilles heel on my work commute (and every test drive, really). But I really don't see much utility in Autosteer on City Streets anyway, so I just test it to be testing it.

The real disappointment is NoA. I've taken three long trips (16 hours round trip for the first two and 4 hours for the third) on Interstates and limited-access highways in the last three weeks. Phantom braking and poor speed sign reading aside, the real problem now is a clash between changes in aggressiveness for lane changing and larger following distance. Like 11.3.6, FSDb wants to get into the left-most lane and stay there except under the most specific circumstances. While "just driving" down the left-most lane is annoying to other drivers (and has always been a pet peeve of mine), it's not per se dangerous. Where the "menace" part comes in is when there is a line of cars on the left passing ego, and ego comes upon a car that it wants to pass. It now very aggressively chooses a gap in the line of cars in the left lane to move into (sometimes like three car lengths). It will initially accelerate to comfortably fit the car into this gap, but then it opens up a ridiculously large following distance with the car in front of it. This obviously is extremely frustrating to the guy(s) we just cutoff to get into the left lane to begin with. Even when the cars ahead of ego start to increase speed, ego takes a long time to accelerate and "catch up" to the cars ahead (while maintaining the large following distance). And its propensity to stay in the left lane just exacerbates the situation. Now the cars behind are themselves aggressively popping out into the right lane as soon as they have a chance and going around the car, cutting in front to return to the left lane. And the car just falls back, and falls back, and continues to fall back further contributing to the problem.

This seems to happen whether the level is set to "average" or "aggressive" (on "chill" the car pretty much just sits in its own lane) and no matter how many times I tell the car to move over to the right, it just returns to the left-most lane as soon as it gets a chance. The most dangerous situations are in traffic at speeds between 70 and 80 mph - at lower speeds the following distance does not appear to be as extreme and in light or no traffic the riding in the left lane is just not as big of a problem.

Hopefully this is something that will get fixed soon, because NoA is the best (and really only) feature of FSD that has any value to me. I wish there was a way to get this kind of detailed information into Tesla software development hands.

 

[JB47394]

Since the performance of FSD is very dependent on training, I am starting to think the significant improvements that some ( OG) users are seeing vs others may be due to the fact that Tesla is focusing on their data for improvements.

Absolutely. The YouTubers just shine a spotlight on particular flaws, and that gives Tesla an incentive to prioritize those fixes. Chuck Cook's unprotected left is the poster child for this. If Tesla didn't respond to these spotlighted flaws then somebody else would be ranting at Tesla because they don't listen to their customers.

What would bug me would be Tesla updating map data specific to a YouTuber's roads. That's obviously only going to kick the can down the road a bit, and it would be a deceptive practice. Sure, it suggests that the car can handle that scenario with the right data, but if the data isn't correct for everyone, then it's misleading in suggesting that I'm going to see that level of performance.

 

[EVNow]

Chuck Cook's unprotected left is the poster child for this. If Tesla didn't respond to these spotlighted flaws then somebody else would be ranting at Tesla because they don't listen to their customers.

I was one of the vociferous complainers of Tesla prioritizing CULT. But since then, we see that ALL unprotected left turns have become better.

So, I think as long as they don't "hack" the solution for that one situation - but make broad changes that would handle that situation as well as a lot of similar or even simpler situations, we are good.

I hope they similarly address specific issues about roundabouts and narrow roads.

 

[eli_]

I had this new bad encounter today, car was in the middle lane on the highway and the left adjacent lane is an express toll lane that you can only enter/exit at certain points. The car pops up the notice "Changing out of rightmost lane away from merging traffic" or something like that, and it starts crossing the double line on the left into the toll lanes. This is doubly-bad because it wasn't in the rightmost lane to begin with (no traffic is merging), and it's an illegal lane change anyway because of the lane markings. And there's like zero time to react before it starts changing lanes, it was just so abrupt I had to tug on the wheel to cancel.

Maybe it had a stroke and was localizing itself into the right lane when it was really in the center lane, like it mis-classified the right lane as a road shoulder or something, no idea. It's one of those things where I've used it 100 times before on a daily commute and the one time out of 100 it does something super dumb.

 

[Dewg]

I had this new bad encounter today, car was in the middle lane on the highway and the left adjacent lane is an express toll lane that you can only enter/exit at certain points. The car pops up the notice "Changing out of rightmost lane away from merging traffic" or something like that, and it starts crossing the double line on the left into the toll lanes. This is doubly-bad because it wasn't in the rightmost lane to begin with (no traffic is merging), and it's an illegal lane change anyway because of the lane markings. And there's like zero time to react before it starts changing lanes, it was just so abrupt I had to tug on the wheel to cancel.

Maybe it had a stroke and was localizing itself into the right lane when it was really in the center lane, like it mis-classified the right lane as a road shoulder or something, no idea. It's one of those things where I've used it 100 times before on a daily commute and the one time out of 100 it does something super dumb.

This morning I had the "Changing lanes to avoid a merge", but there was no approaching merge. I just disengaged and reported it, then reengaged it

 

[UserAnon99]

I’m seeing mostly praise about this update, but here’s my experience going from 11.3.6 to 11.4.2.

1. Phantom braking happens about every half mile on streets with 35mph speed limit. Doesn’t seem to be a problem for other speeds.
2. Phantom stopping is now a thing where it will stop hard in the middle of every intersection that has a green light. This happens even if there are no cars around. I tested this at 4am when there were no cars and it came to a complete stop and stayed in the intersection until I intervened.
3. Phantom braking on the freeway has lessened in intensity, but increased in frequency.
4. At stop signs where it’s going to make a left turn, it now starts the maneuver before getting to the stop sign, leading it to blocking the left side of the road until it proceeds through.
5. About a quarter mile before any turn, it will move to the opposite lane needed (if I’m in the right lane and I have a right turn coming up, it will switch to the left lane) then swerve to the correct lane.

Should I recalibrate my cameras or something? I’ve disabled fsd for now because it’s unusable for my drives.

Same thing here. I am very sorry I updated. The release notes sounded very promising but the car is straight up dangerous now. Massive phantom breaking on open highway at 65-80 mph is quite frequent now. I am also driving on 3 lane highways that are 60 mph but have traffic lights. It slows down for EVERY light, green signal be damned, alarming the hell out of drivers behind me. I'm done, I turned it off, too unsafe. VERY bad timing as I'm on a 2,500 mile road trip the thought of having to manually drive the rest of the way makes me sad. I hope there is a way to revert to a prior version.

 

[Goose66]

I'm done, I turned it off, too unsafe. VERY bad timing as I'm on a 2,500 mile road trip the thought of having to manually drive the rest of the way makes me sad. I hope there is a way to revert to a prior version.

There’s no way to revert versions, but production Autopilot and NoA are still in the software. I have a driver profile with FSDb enabled and a driver profile with it disabled. When I feel like “testing” FSDb, I select my “FSD Tester” profile. Otherwise I am driving on regular, old EAP with NoA in my default driver profile. It even still uses the radar, I think.

 

[DrChaos]

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 timeView attachment 944313

Internally there were many important technical breakthroughs with multiple generations of fundamental algorithms. In particular Geoff Hinton worked on the first really good speaker independent natural recognition for Google with deep learning, including the techniques to enable end-point use on power limited phones.

 

[honoraryorange]

Has anyone noticed it changing lanes to follow the route way, way, way too early with 11.4.3? I don't remember this in the previous version.

Scenario: City driving, 2 lanes each direction + turn lane. The outer lanes are fairly busy with people entering/leaving the road and most through traffic sticks to the center lanes which move along nicely. Minimal Lane Changes is set to on.

5 miles before the next turn, it moves into the right lane, behind traffic going under the speed limit even, and sits there plodding along with all the stops and goes. 5 miles before the turn, on a 30mph street. In the past it'd stay in whichever lane it was in when engaged (with minimal lane changes on) and not move over until much, much closer to the needed turn.

 

[Reddy Kilowatt]

Downloading 14.3 now

 

[Reddy Kilowatt]

After the last update I have to wonder. Do you feel like with each update our cars FSD preforms great, then after a couple weeks it defaults back into its bad habits. I had to stop using the last version on one particular road when the car tried to exit at EVERY turn lane, right or left.

 

[jabloomf1230]

After the last update I have to wonder. Do you feel like with each update our cars FSD preforms great, then after a couple weeks it defaults back into its bad habits. I had to stop using the last version on one particular road when the car tried to exit at EVERY turn lane, right or left.

As has been discussed before, this "phenomenon" is related to both human perception (mistakes are more easily remembered than correct behavior) and increasing sample size.

 

[eli_]

After the last update I have to wonder. Do you feel like with each update our cars FSD preforms great, then after a couple weeks it defaults back into its bad habits. I had to stop using the last version on one particular road when the car tried to exit at EVERY turn lane, right or left.

It's too probabilistic, like I could have different results with different traffic conditions or just by random chance. Plus there are crowdsourced map updates that are potentially different every time you enter a new nav route (downloaded from Tesla servers) and that could affect lane selection easily.

 

[eli_]

I did a drive on 11.14.3 and haven't noticed any changes in behavior yet. I feel it's allergic to entering the right turn lane after taking a highway exit, I had to disengage it twice because it was going to move over very late or not at all.

 

[DrChaos]

After the last update I have to wonder. Do you feel like with each update our cars FSD preforms great, then after a couple weeks it defaults back into its bad habits. I had to stop using the last version on one particular road when the car tried to exit at EVERY turn lane, right or left.

That could be GPS calibration getting off. There could be some bugs and performance degradation with memory leaks or other problems, and the full power-off and re-init on each update improves things?

Try (a) reformatting USB drive for camera (b) full power off from menu, wait 2 minutes in the seat, and turn back on.

My 11.4.3 works great, but again it's been only a few days.