Sorry but this is false. You are making a lot of assumptions here.
I am one of the unlucky who are stricken by phantom braking. It all depends on your driving conditions. In my case, I drive rural highways every day to and from work. When there's lots of traffic or anywhere in the city it's actually fine. When I have a wide open highway ahead of me, the slow rolling terrain combined with mirages means it hits the brakes at the top of these rises (it must think the road just ends or is driving into a lake or something). 75% are "slow-downs" of 5-10, the other 25% are hard enough stops to send things flying - and again, these tend to occur when there's nothing ahead. It's not a case of not paying attention and missing something in front of you. There are certain things that "trigger" the braking, I happen to live in an area with lots of them.
I'm glad you don't see it. But don't assume those of us who do are lying / not paying attention / just right out of it. It's a real problem.
NOTE: I am NOT defending the failings of Autopilot. I just read that a lot of people expectations of Autopilot to be close to perfect. Autopilots fail miserably in multimillion dollars airliners, and in Billion dollar Boeing spaceships that have a dedicated team of real-time human monitors.
To clarify my Autopilot experiences:
I do 3-4 x 170-mile trips a month, on the freeway and country lanes, over mountain passes. I have had only a few "phantom braking" events where I am at a loss to as why or what may have caused it. Yes, like you say, these are hard enough to make my phone slide off the center armrest. and the speed reduction is surprisingly only about 5-7 miles an hour (I always expect to see 10-20 mph reductions but it is not true). However, most of these braking events are mistaking the distance of another vehicle (like when the vehicle ahead turns off to a side road, or a car crosses in front of me but is clearly far enough away to not be a collision concern). When braking occurs and I can clearly not see a problem, I just push the accelerator, like you would in a regular car.
A persistent "phantom" event is what I call "phantom lane changing" - the freeway lanes ahead are clear for at least one mile, the car decides to switch lanes, and then switches back after 30-60 seconds. It can't be obstructions or traffic - is it seeing a phantom pedestrian/bike?)
I also noticed Autopilot braking when the car behind me is too close and the car ahead is slowing but not using the brakes (distance is closing). This is actually an advance driving technique used to create a front buffer zone. This extra distance allows you to accelerate forward without colliding with the car ahead if the car behind you or in the next lane decides to crash into you for whatever reason.
Tesla has already acknowledged that pedestrians/bikes also cause an issue because of software issues that only see them as blocks with no direction vector. So the car cannot tell if the pedestrian is walking to or from the road even though the graphics depict their direction accurately on screen. I actually took my car in for servicing over these issues. They say the hardware is fine, so it is a software problem. They recommend making those verbal "bug reports", and hopefully the software team will eventually fix them.
TBH, I think the Tesla AI training team needs real professional limo drivers bc Autopilot drives like a drunk. If I drive like Autopilot, I would never pass an advanced driver course. I tend to not use autopilot with backseat passengers for these reasons.
A dangerous thing that Autopilot does is not slowing down at hairpin curves. When the road is clear, I let it go as far as my nerves hold out or till Autopilot just gives up and dumps the car and I have to save it. This is likely a software issue bc it is not recognizing an obvious hairpin turn and slowing down for it - this occurs 100% of the time!
Another potentially hazardous thing is getting so close to parked cars! On several occasions, I take control. On other occasions, bc the parked cars are on the right side, I hear my front passenger gasp thinking we are going to hit them. I estimate about 6" of clear space. This doesn't make sense bc there is about 5 feet of clear space on the other side of my car. A normal driver would have just moved over by a foot or two from the parked cars.
But I reiterate, MOST of these "phantom brake" events can be "countered" by guarding the accelerator pedal, and using it like in any ordinary car. That has been my experience.
