Weird thing. I've been punting around with 11.4.4 for the past two weeks: Interstates, major local roads (4+ lanes, two each direction); local roads with stripes and controlled intersections with lights; local roads with 4-way stops, 2-way stops; and local roads with a certain distinct lack of any kind of control whatsoever and not much in the way of stripes at all. And, usually, congestion, congestion, and, did I mention? Congestion. This is Central Jersey. Home of roads designed from the pre-Revolutionary Days to the present. Which means all sorts of strange angles on intersections, not to mention places where five+ roads come together at funny angles.
According to the Worst Complaints on this thread, I should have Really White Hair, Numerous near-crashes, Attempts at Crossing three lanes to hit a left (or right) failing, and all that jazz. And be ready to dump the car, dump FSD-b, request to run far away, regret the $6k I spent (I was early) on the software, and all that.
Weird, that: Yep, FSD-b's got its bugs. For me it's mainly swinging wide right on a left turn. And I occasionally have to goose it through a turn that it seems kind of slow going. And there's the occasional busted car creeping its way down the right shoulder that FSD-b doesn't quite know how to handle.
But those are bugs and, well, in my experience, they're not common. I can reliably make it twelve to twenty miles sans intervention, loads better than last year. It's not particularly scary at all. I've been bunting my way up and down I-95 and related roads between NJ and MA sans real problems, and that includes areas that range from city downtowns to pretty darn rural. (Although not in the same class of rural as, say, Texas or Central Ohio.)
I'll admit that FSD-b isn't quite ready for Prime Time. But what's all this, "It's terrible! Run for your lives!" vibe?
I get some things. People have different sensitivities to a non-human driver. The wheel does jerk sometimes (again, vastly reduced from last year) and, on this thread, certain people have
really complained about that. My reaction is, "It's a Beta, dammit. What do you expect?" But the.. vitriol.. seems more than a little over the top. And, frankly, makes me wonder about the people, or perhaps, the cars involved.
In my life at work I've had the unenviable job of taking customer complaints about multi-million dollar piles of random electronics and doing a buck-stops-here act: Finding out what
really happened. Interestingly, I've generally found that the customers have been generally truthful: If they said that they saw X, Y, and Z, they generally truly did. (There have been the
very rare case of, say, the customer field tech pulling the wrong module at the wrong time; but that usually can be detected by looking in the logs.) What usually has happened is some bug: In installation; in use; in the hardware design; in the software design; and, most commonly, in a combination of hardware and software operation that would put Rube Goldberg's comics to shame.
So, let's do a Fishbone on the problem. (A Fishbone is the general practice of coming up with as many possible faults as one can think of of $RANDOM reasonableness. Then, one pares off various paths, Sherlock Holmes style, and, with luck, one will have narrowed things down to the one or several likely suspects.)
So, around here we've got people Really Complaining about the car that they're driving and how horrible it's been acting with FSD-b. But.. you got maniacs like me who aren't being scared out of their gourd by the beast, and I'm not the only one. And the people who haven't been complaining bitterly are running the same software as the ones who have.
That, in my mind, leads to serious questions about the hardware. And latent, undetected faults.
I'm driving a 2018 M3, LR, RWD that came with HW2.5 and has since been updated to HW3.0.
I've been reading the threads and forum in general and, well, have kind of been looking for magic bullets. There's been some hints. Most recently, a poster reported that his
cabin camera was replaced and
that fixed a GPS problem that was making TACC/LK unusable. The claim from the Service Center that fixed the issue was that there was some kind of RF interference between the camera hardware (!) and the GPS antenna that, apparently, is located up there on the windshield.
A bit older hint has been that calibrating the cameras on the car has sometimes improved matters.
And an even older hint has people resetting the car, either through:
- Double scroll-wheel reset;
- Turning off the car through the Safety screen;
- or Disconnecting the HV battery by lifting up the rear seat and having a go at the contactor cable.
I've had decent results from the "reset" trick, but that fix worked mainly last year, not this. And, in that case, it was that FSD-b wouldn't even start, never mind malfunction badly.
I'm still not convinced, one way or the other, whether we're talking SW or HW. I suppose that we take some path that a killer complainer talks about that fails regularly - then get somebody else, with a car that, presumably, hasn't been giving the driver the fits, and is running the same software load, and see how that car performs: Same time of day. Maybe in tandem, with one car or the other running through the area, say, one minute apart. If they both act the same, then I'd guess software. If they're different.. Then life gets interesting.
Comments?
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