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?

 

[Rikster]

For me, 11.4.3 seems a bit smoother overall than 11.4.2, but on a 20-minute drive today it kept trying to dart into a turning lane when it should have continued on straight. I happened like 6 times over the course of 10 miles on a 60 mph 4-lane divided highway. Nearly every turn lane to the right was too tempting for my car, it seems, and it would quickly turn signal and move over.

This has been problematic in the past, but has gotten much worse for me with 11.4.3. I reported each of these instances. Hope Tesla puts resources into fixing that problem! Otherwise, I really liked how 11.4.3 handled side streets, stops, turns, etc.

 

[AndrewZ]

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.

Probably been speculated about on here before but I wonder if it's determined to travel the leftmost lane just to reduce the risk of encountering vehicles pulled over and poking into the right lane

 

[Goose66]

Probably been speculated about on here before but I wonder if it's determined to travel the leftmost lane just to reduce the risk of encountering vehicles pulled over and poking into the right lane

Well, this was all on the interstate, where just riding in the left lane is illegal.

 

[kabin]

Beautiful clear weather today with relatively light non rush hour freeway traffic on 11.4.2 but still resulted in a near miss. FSDj attempted to make a left lane change while a vehicle two lanes over was attempting to make a right lane change. The other vehicle was slightly leading and in clear sight for me but FSDj was clueless to the happenings. I let it play out with the lead vehicle's rear bumper about 10ft in front of ego's front bumper and then I disengaged. FSDj never responded. It was as if the lead vehicle was invisible for those ~3 secs. Not sure why this is happening so frequently with 11.4.2.

11.4.3 is ready for download so we'll see if it's any better.

 

[Reddy Kilowatt]

For me, 11.4.3 seems a bit smoother overall than 11.4.2, but on a 20-minute drive today it kept trying to dart into a turning lane when it should have continued on straight. I happened like 6 times over the course of 10 miles on a 60 mph 4-lane divided highway. Nearly every turn lane to the right was too tempting for my car, it seems, and it would quickly turn signal and move over.

This has been problematic in the past, but has gotten much worse for me with 11.4.3. I reported each of these instances. Hope Tesla puts resources into fixing that problem! Otherwise, I really liked how 11.4.3 handled side streets, stops, turns, etc.

I am having the same issue. This problem had been long gone for me and now it is back in the last two updates.

I noticed in this update, my car is merging faster in heavier traffic. its not running the blinker for 15 seconds before deciding to merge. This morning it saw the slot and merged immediately in it.

 

[Electroman]

It's really a pleasure to not jiggle the handle all the time

Tip: Don't mess with the jiggling the steering wheel. Instead scroll up or down the left scroll wheel which is typically used for audio volume. I now habitually scroll that wheel up and down every now and then and that is good enough to keep the nags away

 

[bobsmy]

"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."

This could present a significant challenge with regard to achieving level 4 or 5 FSD as there needs to be control / standardization of map data.

 

[CharleyBC]

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.

Wow. This exact thing happened again two days ago. No idea why it's now doing this. A good left turn, immediately followed by a move into the two-way left-turn lane. And there is no further left turn coming up. Weird.

 

[honoraryorange]

For me, 11.4.3 seems a bit smoother overall than 11.4.2, but on a 20-minute drive today it kept trying to dart into a turning lane when it should have continued on straight. I happened like 6 times over the course of 10 miles on a 60 mph 4-lane divided highway. Nearly every turn lane to the right was too tempting for my car, it seems, and it would quickly turn signal and move over.

This has been problematic in the past, but has gotten much worse for me with 11.4.3. I reported each of these instances. Hope Tesla puts resources into fixing that problem! Otherwise, I really liked how 11.4.3 handled side streets, stops, turns, etc.

I wonder if the problem I posted is related - I've noticed the car REALLY wants to always be in the right most lane (if there's a right turn in the nav, even 5+ miles ahead). Even if I've enabled minimal lane changes. It just wants to be to the right, like all the time.

 

[Tronguy]

I wonder if the problem I posted is related - I've noticed the car REALLY wants to always be in the right most lane (if there's a right turn in the nav, even 5+ miles ahead). Even if I've enabled minimal lane changes. It just wants to be to the right, like all the time.

Odd. On two different sets of three-lane one-direction roads (one interstate, one "local", with stoplights and Jersey barriers down the middle), the car on 11.4.3 favors the center lane. On the interstate, in particular, it moves over to the center lane with a notification of, "moving out of right lane". Same thing happens on the local major highway.

Further, it definitely moves out of the lane that it's into a faster lane, and moves towards the right and dives in when there's an exit coming up.

So, I'm not seeing the behavior you're describing. Don't know why, but there it is.

 

[honoraryorange]

Odd. On two different sets of three-lane one-direction roads (one interstate, one "local", with stoplights and Jersey barriers down the middle), the car on 11.4.3 favors the center lane. On the interstate, in particular, it moves over to the center lane with a notification of, "moving out of right lane". Same thing happens on the local major highway.

Further, it definitely moves out of the lane that it's into a faster lane, and moves towards the right and dives in when there's an exit coming up.

So, I'm not seeing the behavior you're describing. Don't know why, but there it is.

Crazy, so we're basically seeing polar opposite behavior. Do you drive with minimal lane changes on?

 

[Tronguy]

Crazy, so we're basically seeing polar opposite behavior. Do you drive with minimal lane changes on?

Nope. The aggressiveness is on medium, as is practically everything else.

And, interestingly: Quite a few posters on this thread and the 11.x thread complain bitterly about getting stuck in lanes. I get a bit of that, too:

• That three-lane "local highway" I mentioned? At one point, one gets onto it through an on-ramp, leading straight into a light, so there's four lanes straight ahead. But, immediately on the far side of the light, the rightmost lane ends. In heavy traffic, the car on FSDb (or any other car stuck in that lane) is more-or-less forced to go straight ahead. People do go straight ahead, then play silly buggers with the near non-existent breakdown lane on the right and the heavy traffic to move over one lane to the left. FSD-b gets confused, turns right (as if that's the only choice), and then it's fun and games getting out of the shopping district. But this is definitely a bug and, further, doesn't happen all the time.
• Say one is on an on-ramp to this local highway. Straight ahead it turns into an off-ramp that goes to an interstate. There's tons of traffic heading for the interstate, so there's cars (this is Jersey) dodging in from the right travel lane, occasionally the middle travel lane, and sometimes all the way from the far left lane heading for said interstate while poor old me is trying to get to the left one lane so I don't end up on the interstate. This isn't helped by tractor trailers and other trucks blocking off access to that shift-one-to-the-left attempt. People handle this intersection pretty well, eyeing up the maelstrom on the left while approaching it and figuring out how to sneak into a break. But even they sometimes get stuck and have to go into the breakdown lane. FSD-b handles it OK if a naturally occurring break appears (i.e., it gets lucky), or traffic gets light. Otherwise, it can head for the interstate, at which point I intervene.
• Likewise, getting onto certain off-ramps can get nasty in heavy traffic. Just to set the stage: Suppose one is approaching a traditional cloverleaf and wants to move one to the right to get onto the exit. If there's lots of traffic using that right-most on-ramp/off-ramp lane as an on-ramp, FSD-b (like humans) has an issue, sometimes, with getting over one. I will say that 11.X does a pretty decent job at this, but it can get stuck, whereas people generally don't.

The complainers (I'm not saying that their complaints aren't valid) seemingly are on, say, a two-forward-lanes local road. Say they're on the right lane; at the approaching intersection, the rightmost lane becomes a right-turn-only lane and the complainers (rightly) have to intervene and move one to the left, which their FSD-b won't do for some reason. I've been all over the place around here on roads like that where the left lane becomes a left-turn-only; or left and straight ahead; or splits into two and one or both are straight ahead or left; or the right lane plays similar games with right turns and/or straight-aheads. I'm a-telling you: In the two weeks or so since 11.4.3 showed on my doorstep (and the 11.3.x before that), FSD-b hasn't made a single error in that regard. Possibly I'm not living right and there's an intersection where FSD-b is going to get confused and croak, but I haven't run into one yet.

I've had issues where, at particular light-controlled intersections, FSD-b, if it's first in line, tries to run a steady red light straight ahead from a stop. But lane selection? That seems to work.

Kind of wonder if this is some kind of interaction between the mapping software and the car. Or if the people doing the development over at Tesla are sending out software loads with $RANDOM system variables set to different values or something, the better to get more testing done.

 

[Goose66]

I wonder if the problem I posted is related - I've noticed the car REALLY wants to always be in the right most lane (if there's a right turn in the nav, even 5+ miles ahead). Even if I've enabled minimal lane changes. It just wants to be to the right, like all the time.

Are you in Great Britain?

 

[jabloomf1230]

11.4.2 is more confident and lane choices seem better. I don't know if everyone is experiencing this, but when I was wearing dark sunglasses today, the hand nags were spaced at about 60 rather than 15 seconds, but only when driving at speeds less than 30 mph. I checked it a number of times on different routes and nag interval was consistent. It's really a pleasure to not jiggle the handle all the time. It's also a relief that the FSDb "whack a mole challenge" (flickering gray FSD wheel icon) is deceased.

I had a few urban and rural drives today and only one disengagement when the car decided to use the shoulder for a right turn. One bug that I did notice is that the navigation screen sometimes gets stuck when pressing the Navigate button. One has to go to the main screen and start again to clear the freeze. Else, this version is an improvement over 11.3.6.

A bit more on sunglasses and hand nags. Today I used Canserver to monitor in real time the car's variable AutoPilotHands. It has a value of 2 when driving and 1 when you jiggle or slightly resist the wheel. It has a value of 3 when it shows the hand nag message.

When wearing dark sunglasses the car will sometimes not hand nag for several minutes and the variable stays equal to 2.There appears to be either:

1. A bug in the eye tracking and hand nag logic or
2. The color of one's eyes or the perceived eye size causes counterintuitive results. with hand nags.

Any one else notice this?

 

[bimmer88]

Just went for a half hour drive in 11.4.4. Gotta say that I'm impressed. Seemed pretty smooth. 11.4.2 was terrible. 11.4.3 was an improvement and 11.4.4 was more improvement. I'm still having some issues on a particular road though. As I've posted before and it's still not fixed in this version, while going down this road with no cars behind or in front of me, the car will keep acting like it wants to pull over to the side of the road. It will swerve past the white line on the right side of the road like it wants to go to the shoulder. It goes past about a foot then it corrects itself and centers back into the lane. It did this about 4 times. One after another. Then it just went straight afterwards. With no other traffic around me, I'm not sure what in the world is causing it to do this. Also, at the same road, where it ends at a T-intersection and where there is a stop sign, it just slams on the brakes WAYYYY before the stop sign and just VERY slowly creeps up to the stop sign. Then after it makes a right at the stop sign, it does not speed up. It just rolls slowly on the road with no other cars around. Not sure why it slams on the brakes so far back at this particular stop sign. It handled several other stop signs i passed by almost flawlessly(aside from braking a little hard). This has been going on the last few releases so it's not something new. Just not fixed yet.

 

[hybridbear]

Also, at the same road, where it ends at a T-intersection and where there is a stop sign, it just slams on the brakes WAYYYY before the stop sign and just VERY slowly creeps up to the stop sign. Then after it makes a right at the stop sign, it does not speed up. It just rolls slowly on the road with no other cars around. Not sure why it slams on the brakes so far back at this particular stop sign. It handled several other stop signs i passed by almost flawlessly(aside from braking a little hard). This has been going on the last few releases so it's not something new. Just not fixed yet.

Is the stop sign larger than a normal stop sign? I've noticed that with larger stop signs it will do this because it's like it thinks it's super close when it's still far away because it's trained on stop signs of a certain size. So when the stop sign is larger it struggles with depth perception. My biggest complain with 11.4.2 & 11.4.3 is that it's still extremely aggressive with the brakes & does not slow down gradually like a human. I cancel FSD Beta before almost every stop so that I can stop more gradually that it will.

 

[bimmer88]

Is the stop sign larger than a normal stop sign? I've noticed that with larger stop signs it will do this because it's like it thinks it's super close when it's still far away because it's trained on stop signs of a certain size. So when the stop sign is larger it struggles with depth perception. My biggest complain with 11.4.2 & 11.4.3 is that it's still extremely aggressive with the brakes & does not slow down gradually like a human. I cancel FSD Beta before almost every stop so that I can stop more gradually that it will.

It’s a normal sized stop sign…

 

[bimmer88]

hmmm... so I went for another drive with 11.4.4 today during daylight hours when there are more cars. Some things I noticed. I had a left turn coming up at a light. Shortly before that turn is another left turn lane to turn into a shopping plaza. Instead of making a left where it should've, it went into the left turn lane that would have turned into a plaza instead. Also, this version seems to have backtracked from being confident to cautious again. I've noticed it braking kind of hard several times when I was driving by an intersection and another car pulled up at the perpendicular street. The cars weren't even creeping. They were just stopping at the line before the intersection. Also noticed it braking a few times with pedestrians on the side of the road on the sidewalk....

 

[Supcom]

hmmm... so I went for another drive today during daylight hours when there are more cars. Some things I noticed. I had a left turn coming up at a light. Shortly before that turn is another left turn lane to turn into a shopping plaza. Instead of making a left where it should've, it went into the left turn lane that would have turned into a plaza instead. Also, this version seems to have backtracked from being confident to cautious again. I've noticed it braking kind of hard several times when I was driving by an intersection and another car pulled up at the perpendicular street. The cars weren't even creeping. They were just stopping at the line before the intersection. Also noticed it braking a few times with pedestrians on the side of the road on the sidewalk....

The premature turn lane is an old issue that just won't die.

 

[Twiglett]

My car is (was) still running 11.4.2 and was mostly pretty good, until today.
For the very first time for my commute, the car drove from getting on the highway and the rest of the 25 mile commute drive to my home driveway without need to disengage. That has never happened to me before.
All of the stupid decisions it used to make just didn't happen.
For the first time on a double left traffic light, it stayed in the right hand lane and smoothly got round the junction.
I kept wanting to disengage just so I could tell them how amazing the drive was.
Then got home and it started downloading 11.4.4 - now waiting for that to install