Got 11.4.3 last night. Unusually for me, after the download and before running around with it, gave the car a two scroll wheel reset, followed by a power down from the safety menu.
Interestingly, the car doesn’t stay powered down. Lights mostly go off, but the ones on the steering wheel stay on; and, after a few minutes, the car turns all the way back on again. Tried that three times and the car simply wouldn’t turn off and stay that way. Hmm.
So, left and made two runs: one all on local roads, the other on a mixture of local and interstates. Since it was late out without much traffic, let the car do its thing.
Car navigated out of the complex sans trouble. At the first left onto the main street, did it’s usual bit of sneaking out, slowly, while looking for traffic, the taking off. It works: but, when it’s got a good view up and down the road, why creep 3/4 of the way out, then take off?
Next intersection is an UPL onto a major two lane road. Snuck up to its self-made blue line, waited for traffic to clear, then took off cleanly.
Took this to a protected left. On the way, passed through an area where there was effectively two lanes going forward, without lane markers, and the car stuck closer to the double yellow on the left, an improvement.
At the protected left, which was red, the car abruptly slowed to a crawl 100’ short of the line, then picked up a bit more speed creeping up to the car ahead. Odd, but, while there wasn’t anything in the way of traffic, there were a bunch of traffic cones visible to the car elsewhere in the intersection. Special handling for cones? Light went green and the car made a smooth left, then picked the correct forward lane. Went slowly at 25 mph for an hundred yards until it saw the 50mph sign. Map problem?
Road is being worked on. A mile or so up there were cones lining all the lanes. The car abruptly braked and crept at 15-20 through the coned area. Suspect some special handling for construction zones. This wasn’t, apparently, helped by, after a couple hundred yards of this, running into a parade of largish construction vehicles with yellow flashing lights. They may have been there to get rid of the cones. They all did a slow-motion u-turn and cleared the road; at which point the car stopped its overly cautious driving and started going at normal speeds.
For the next two miles to the destination there were two lane roads that had one lane to the left or right at intersections, followed by one or two lanes straight ahead to the next light, and so on. Car never picked a wrong lane, unusual given all the comments here. Navigated to the destination and I parked the car.
So: unless one counts gassing it a bit here and there, made it with no interventions.
Next trip was from the first stop to a Staples some 8 miles away. First lighted intersection with a protected right was one of those with a stop line at the light (there was a car there already), a bit of a space, then a thick white line with a “Don’t Block Intersection” sign. There was room for the Tesla behind the other car, but the Tesla elected to wait at the thick secondary stop.
Light went green, the car successfully navigated the right turn, then navigated the road which turned and forked, the right fork becoming an on-ramp to a five lane interstate running at speed.
Car still waits to the end of the ramp to merge.
About a half mile up, this particular section of road has two lanes peeling off to the right, with the left of those two lanes forking. The car moved one lane to the left rather rapidly, stayed there, and properly took the left fork, sans problems. Two more lanes appeared on the right, then these degenerated into off ramps, leaving the car in the rightmost of a three straight ahead interstate. At which point the car got into the center travel lane on its own. All very smooth.
A few miles up there appeared my exit, a one-lane ramp which became two. The rightmost of these becomes a double right turn lane at a protected right; the leftmost stays single to a (sharp) protected left. Car stayed in the correct lane, no fuddling around, took the left, and promptly got into the correct rightmost lane, then shifted into an even more right lane, and did a semi-protected right. This was a right-on-red ramp, with zero cross traffic, but there were red lights for the straight-ahead double lanes. Which apparently confused the car; it kinda got stuck not wanting to go past all those red lights, and so had to gas it until it got further up in its own lane, at which point it got moving again.
A mile or so up it took the appropriate off-ramp, navigated a straight-through stop sign into the Staples parking lot (not too slowly), and stopped in front of the store.
One intervention if one counts gassing it through that right turn. No improper lane selections, period.
Rest of the way back home through multiple intersections, lane changes, and so on were pretty much without incident. However, it appears that Tesla may have slain a bug. I’ve been complaining that on 11.4.2 the car’s reacquired a nasty bug where it would slew right on a left turn on wideish roads. In some light traffic, going down a wide major two-lane road, it did an unprotected left onto a local road and stayed to the left before the turn. A bit jerky going through, but as good as 10.69 had been doing it. I’ll have to test this some more over the next couple days and confirm.
Conclusion: better than 11.4.2. Still not perfect. No improper lane selections noted, period. Three moderate distance drives with no safety interventions. Possible fix of a slew-right-on-left-red bug.
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