How often do you use autopilot?

[Drew57]

I’ve fully stopped using AP since they’ve forced the useless autowipers when engaged.

I'm always baffled by this, the wipers rarely respond to spray but apart from that they have been fine, including when AP is engaged. This experience has been the same since last year with both the prior M3 & the current MY.

 

[Billbrown1982]

I use it every single day for a good 90% of my commute. Never lets me down. Very comfortable with it. No issues with it or the wipers, except for when its really cold out then sometimes the wipers will grind across the frozen screen.

 

[WannabeOwner]

just be honest folks, it's hugely underwhelming given all the hype

Might be for you ... it certainly wasn't underwhelming for me when I was doing 35K miles a year - I arrived significantly fresher, and appreciated the reduction in wear-and-tear on the driver. I've also had a couple of incidents where AP braked for a scenario that I hadn't reacted to (e.g. when a situation developed just as I was looking down at the dash). I would have looked back up, and reacted, in time but AP reacting earlier was better than my much later, heavier, braking would have been.

 

[WannabeOwner]

Never lets me down. Very comfortable with it. No issues with it or the wipers

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

And if Tesla knows what the cause is they are being very quiet about telling people - e,g, if calibration is the issue they could detect that a car is phantom braking often and tell the owner to book service

 

[Billbrown1982]

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

And if Tesla knows what the cause is they are being very quiet about telling people - e,g, if calibration is the issue they could detect that a car is phantom braking often and tell the owner to book service

Yeah I never quite understood it myself. I can guarantee a portion of it is user error but it can't all be that. Possibly its a build quality issue. How the cameras are mounted in cars giving some vehicles a better view than others but besides that?

I used to think the only reason my wipers worked well was because I had the windscreen coated but that was done 2 years ago so can write that theory off.

My auto headlights were garbage admittedly but the recent fix sorted that for the most part. They are no better or worse than my previous 5 cars.
Who knows. My car is 2 years old now and I can only compare it to the past where it is head and shoulders above any competition i've driven.

I've recently changed jobs and it will mean I have the option to get incredibly discounted vehicles made by them....so I'll have to start test driving to see if they match up but I can't see it honestly. They may do some things better sure but not enough.
Just as a more direct example. I had a 2019 Rav4 with all the bells and whistles on it. Lane assist cruise control etc. The idea being exactly the same as Tesla that you could take your hands off the wheel for a bit and it would sit in the middle of the lane.

The reality? I used to get car sick from the constant slight weave from left to right. It was pinballing off the lane markings.

No app control. I ended up paying a small fortune to get a 3rd party kit fitted so I could start it remotely and get it toasty warm. Map updates? Yeah good luck with that and you paid through the nose for them. Ah list goes on.

I think quite often the grass just isn't always greener and I'm getting to the point of checking the forums less and less these days because I am genuinely happy with my car.

 

[pgkevet]

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

And if Tesla knows what the cause is they are being very quiet about telling people - e,g, if calibration is the issue they could detect that a car is phantom braking often and tell the owner to book service

Any decent conspiracy theory would claim that updates aren't all the same .. that Tesla scatter slight variations throughout to find which ones perform better. And for reasons unknown they target me with a good mix of duds to test my patience...

 

[spdpsba]

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

And if Tesla knows what the cause is they are being very quiet about telling people - e,g, if calibration is the issue they could detect that a car is phantom braking often and tell the owner to book service

To an extent people do not give enough time to get used to AP experience and quirks. Once you learn some of the quirks you are more confident engaging AP. I remember the first day I engaged AP and was enjoying the AP experience without realising it doesn’t take roundabouts that well. The car literally went straight into the roundabout and luckily I was alert and got hold of the control otherwise would have had a major accident and blamed it on AP or may be even sold the car. I guess these kind of experiences set some expectations about AP.

 

[init6]

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

The AI became sentient some time ago and monitors this forum.
The more you moan the worse your experience gets

 

[spon88]

Might be for you ... it certainly wasn't underwhelming for me when I was doing 35K miles a year - I arrived significantly fresher, and appreciated the reduction in wear-and-tear on the driver. I've also had a couple of incidents where AP braked for a scenario that I hadn't reacted to (e.g. when a situation developed just as I was looking down at the dash). I would have looked back up, and reacted, in time but AP reacting earlier was better than my much later, heavier, braking would have been.

Yes completely underwhelming but then all depends on the individual expectation and experience I guess. Anything that requires me to be vigilant "just in case" is much less comfortable for me than driving a car which is very very straightforward anyway. But each to their own of course.

As for the rest of the car, very enjoyable. I recently took receipt of a second one having looked at and discounted other manufacturers. I knew what not to expect from the autonomous claims this time around so it wasn't really an issue for me. I had expected the visual parking replacement for USS to have dropped by now but other than that, very pleased.

So other than the hugely over-hyped self-driving claims and a few other manageable quirks, I'd recommend Tesla all the way.

 

[Empato]

Usually every trip on the motorway but was put off tonight when the car decided it wanted to take a slip road at the last minute at 70. Frightened the daylights out of my daughter as it was quite a violent swerve.

 

[Billbrown1982]

Usually every trip on the motorway but was put off tonight when the car decided it wanted to take a slip road at the last minute at 70. Frightened the daylights out of my daughter as it was quite a violent swerve.

Ok perfect example. Now I'm not going to say this is what happened to you but here's something very similar that happened to me sometime last year.

Was on the way home. M25. J28. My route home is coming off at 29.

All of a sudden "at the last minute" my car slams on and tries to come off at the end of the slip road. Did catch be my surprise. I corrected and carried on. I then realised that my sat nav had J28 as the planned route but because I did the same journey every single night I wasn't paying attention to the screen.

As it turns out, J29 was closed and the "correct" route home was 28.

Do I immediately start a post that autopilot is dangerous? That my car broke suddenly or swerved at the last minute?

Or do I give myself a shake and say pay better attention to the bloody screen.

 

[Drew57]

There surely MUST be a reason why some folk rarely have the "snags" and other folks have them all the time.

I've always felt that it may be something to do with the settings that we choose. Most of mine have always been set to 'warn' rather than 'react'. For instance 'Lane Departure Avoidance', where you can set it to off, 'warning' only, or 'assist' (I use 'warning').

My Cloud Profile ported all settings across from the 3 to the Y & from the moment I drove away from the Trafford Centre collection the new car has behaved exactly as the previous one including when using AP. So rather than just feeling I was 'lucky' with my first car, I'm now more convinced that settings might be a factor in the different experiences many seem to have.

Of course it's equally possible that I am wrong in this as I have no tangible evidence. Maybe lucky twice?

 

[aq42]

Usually every trip on the motorway but was put off tonight when the car decided it wanted to take a slip road at the last minute at 70. Frightened the daylights out of my daughter as it was quite a violent swerve.

I had the reverse experience last week. I was coming north on the M6 and needed to turn onto the M62 towards Manchester. In case you don't know the junction, there are 4 lanes at that point. First there is a slip road to go towards Liverpool, and then the inside lane peels off to go towards Manchester. At the moment the whole thing is in a terrible state because of the never-ending work to turn it into a (not very) 'smart motorway'. Everything is a bit tight and there's a 50 limit which makes it difficult to pass anything.

The car, as usual, starts moving me leftwards across the lanes, but the inside lane is bumper to bumper trucks and it looks like there's no way in. I am just at the point of taking over when it brakes really hard and requests a lane change into a gap that it has seen opening up behind it! The braking was a bit scary but it knew what it was doing. And it showed chevrons a la FSDb 11.

 

[M1tch]

Use it almost exclusively on decent A-roads, duel carriageways and motorways. Absolutely love it

 

[interbear]

On a motorway I will mainly use TACC. I find Autopilot annoying when having to chop and change lanes frequently, it disengages each time and has to be rengaged. Accompanied by the bong noises of course. Not for me. If I had a long journey where I could remain in a single lane I’d perhaps use it more often. I also happen to think that the very regular AP nag to nudge the steering wheel before getting the warnings means that I’m as well steering myself anyway. Another more recent annoyance is the auto high beam headlights that now seem mandatory when AP is engaged. In my experience that doesn’t work well on a motorway. No issues recently with phantom braking though, that seems to be an issue that is definitely improved.

On A and B roads I don’t use any of the driver assists, prefer to drive myself on those.

 

[Nosken]

I have used all three versions (AP1, AP2 and FSD Beta) since the day it was first released as AP1 in October 2015.
I use it over 90% of the time which is over 100,000 miles.
Those of us from the early days, know to trust but verify. We saw all the severe "warts" that showed up in each version.
FSD Beta is great, but like the disclaimer states, expect it to do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Last Saturday I did a straight, 21 hour, 1100 mile trip from Breckenridge, CO to Lincoln, CA. FSD was used except in the two white out blizzard conditions, where 20 MPH was overdriving the road conditions. In the times with fog and sleet, FSD (Actually NOA on the freeway, since I don't have version 11) it saw through the inclement conditions better than I could. I was there, ever vigilant, but vision performed very well.
Driving for 21 hours straight, with minimal fatigue was due to FSD.

 

[Sparkeur]

I live in France and AP is just about acceptable on the autoroute but not when it is busy or around approaches to towns and cities as speed limits change regularly and traffic increases. On my quarterly drives to Spain across the emptiness of the road from Bayonne to Valencia via Zaragoza it's reasonably OK but still needs concentration when negotiating slower trucks.
Bottom line is, when I use our Discovery with 'dumb' cruise control I don't even think about driving but when I am using AP in the Tesla, I am always 'standing by' which hardly makes for a comfortable drive.

 

[kelvin 660]

I use AP on motorways, dual carriage ways and straight A roads. Most of the time it is flawless.
On a few occasions, after changing lanes I didn't re-enable AP (waiting to pull back into slower lane when there is a gap available) and then all of a sudden, I realise that the car is not self steering and is drifting in its lane!
Tesla needs to change how the car changes lane because I can imagine that I'm not the only person to get confused and think the car is steering when it's not, because this could lead to a nasty accident!

 

[Empato]

Ok perfect example. Now I'm not going to say this is what happened to you but here's something very similar that happened to me sometime last year.

Was on the way home. M25. J28. My route home is coming off at 29.

All of a sudden "at the last minute" my car slams on and tries to come off at the end of the slip road. Did catch be my surprise. I corrected and carried on. I then realised that my sat nav had J28 as the planned route but because I did the same journey every single night I wasn't paying attention to the screen.

As it turns out, J29 was closed and the "correct" route home was 28.

Do I immediately start a post that autopilot is dangerous? That my car broke suddenly or swerved at the last minute?

Or do I give myself a shake and say pay better attention to the bloody screen.

Was your incident with the route set in the sat nav? I had no route set, so don’t know why the car decided to try and take the slip road.

 

[interbear]

Bottom line is, when I use our Discovery with 'dumb' cruise control I don't even think about driving but when I am using AP in the Tesla, I am always 'standing by' which hardly makes for a comfortable drive.

Our other vehicle is a VW Transporter campervan. It has VW’s version of TACC and in my experience it works better than the Tesla implementation. Speeds up when indicating to overtake, very smooth and no phantom braking. All round a more relaxing drive, I don’t have to keep my foot hovering over the accelerator and it just seems a more grown up implementation.