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how safe do you feel with basic autopilot?
- Thread starter gflar
- Start date
E90alex
Active Member
I rarely use it because lane changes are annoying, it doesn’t let you bias towards one side of the lane (like to give more space when next to a semi), and the distance judging seems poor.
It always races up to a car then slams on the brakes then after that verrrry slowly accelerates again and keeps a massive distance between the car in front.
It always races up to a car then slams on the brakes then after that verrrry slowly accelerates again and keeps a massive distance between the car in front.
Those things are solved in FSD, mostly. Hopefully AP gets those improvements in the future.
Feel AP is easy for simple same lane drives
Also good on Highway
Biggest Highway benefit, after many hours of AP use you body and mind are not at the exhaustion level, much much less vs cruise control more exhausting
Summary, 10-12 hour drives are now not dreaded by using AP
You turn into co pilot doing monitoring, and deal with nags
Also good on Highway
Biggest Highway benefit, after many hours of AP use you body and mind are not at the exhaustion level, much much less vs cruise control more exhausting
Summary, 10-12 hour drives are now not dreaded by using AP
You turn into co pilot doing monitoring, and deal with nags
Basic AP, running older code, suffers from poor acceleration and deceleration curves, and over-reactions on cut-ins and cut-outs. There are also occasional phantom braking. It maintains the lane center very well, avoiding the ping-pong that plagues other MFGs. Unfortunately, it maintains the center too well, as this can cause issues when lanes widen at a merge - the car will move aggressively to maintain the center.
Alex's comment about lane changes was referring to NoA, not basic AP. There are no automatic lane changes with basic AP.
FSD Beta, which gives us Autosteer on City Streets, has a more advanced neural network for handling driving tasks. Recently, this FSD Beta code was brought over to AP, allowing FSD Beta to take over freeway AP driving. This is commonly referred to as "single stack", as the older code switched between the new FSD Beta code and the old AP code when entering/exiting freeways. This new FSD Beta code on freeways has dramatically improved the freeway AP experience. The car has a much more comfortable acceleration and deceleration curve, moves gently in the lane to bias trucks and give them more room, does not overreact to cut-ins and cut-outs, and reduces phantom braking (they still happen from time to time).
The FSD Beta group is testing this freeway feature, and hopefully we'll see the code move to basic AP cars in the near future.
Alex's comment about lane changes was referring to NoA, not basic AP. There are no automatic lane changes with basic AP.
FSD Beta, which gives us Autosteer on City Streets, has a more advanced neural network for handling driving tasks. Recently, this FSD Beta code was brought over to AP, allowing FSD Beta to take over freeway AP driving. This is commonly referred to as "single stack", as the older code switched between the new FSD Beta code and the old AP code when entering/exiting freeways. This new FSD Beta code on freeways has dramatically improved the freeway AP experience. The car has a much more comfortable acceleration and deceleration curve, moves gently in the lane to bias trucks and give them more room, does not overreact to cut-ins and cut-outs, and reduces phantom braking (they still happen from time to time).
The FSD Beta group is testing this freeway feature, and hopefully we'll see the code move to basic AP cars in the near future.
E90alex
Active Member
I was referring to basic AP. Manual lane changes are annoying because it requires cancelling Autosteer and then re-engaging Autosteer each time. It’s the only L2 ADAS I’ve seen that operates like that.
Lane ping-ponging is not a thing anymore with competitors updated systems that have active lane keep assist (not just lane departure assist). They will keep you centered but usually still allow some manual biasing until you hit the lane edge. Not hard locked to the center like basic AP.
KArnold
Active Member
It's kind of like the Windows BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) of 10 years ago. Didn't happen often - mostly during executive presentations mostly. So you used it every day. But now FSD is keeping people alive.
Highway is very capable and I use AP (I have FSDb) on all my trips of any length. In city, it actually works but I drive more aggressively than the car does so I tend to not use it. However, if there's not a ton of traffic, I'll turn it on and FSD works so much better than before. It's now quite capable but I think it's too timid.
Basic autopilot (stay between the lanes) works great.
Enhanced autopilot (change lanes/ on off ramps) works great.
I have FSD but when I am on a road trip I'm letting the car drive probably 98% of the time. There has been bugs come and go, but basically just stay alert and you'll be fine. I pay attention the most when there's construction, a car/people on the side of the road and getting on/off ramps.
Exactly. I use EAP on trips from SoCal to NorCal. It's fantastic on I-5.
I keep the spacing on max. I flip the scroll wheel to slow 5+ mph if I see I'm coming up quickly on a truck or other slower vehicle. (Better than waiting for the car to get on the truck's tail and then use regen to drop speed from ~75 to <65.
I wouldn’t bank on that. Had ping-ponging in the last 12 months with Volvo, Subaru and Ford systems.
E90alex
Active Member
Depends what exact version and tier of systems the cars had. It can be pretty confusing. Eg Ford Co-Pilot360 Assist 2.0 is only AEB and lane departure avoidance (eg “ping ponging”). Co-Pilot 360Active 2.0 is adaptive cruise with active lane centering.
Many upgraded systems have active lane centering, but not necessarily the basic systems. Point is, lane centering is not anything special or unique to Tesla, and in many cases others do the basic ADAS stuff (adaptive cruise and lane centering) better than basic Autopilot (not talking about EAP or FSDb, just basic Autopilot).
BitJam
Active Member
I feel much safer with AP. I use it for most of my driving. I credit it for saving the life of a young deer that ran in front of my car last year.
Yes, absolutely you have to stay alert. IMHO, it is much safer because two heads are better than one. I treat it like driver assist, not driver replacement. It's seldom mentioned but I think Tesla did a good job of integrating automatic driving with manual control.
FSDb, OTOH, was a royal pain in my small rural New Mexico town. It was a big relief to get back to basic AP after I let the FSD subscription expire. FSD was fun but it was usually doing something stupid and/or dangerous every couple of miles. There are very few Teslas here so getting FSD to work properly in this area is probably a very low priority, which makes sense.
I imagine there are large swathes of the US where FSD is more trouble than it's worth. ISTM the usual suspects on YT judge FSD by where it works best but judge Waymo by where it works worst (outside of the geofence).
For those who don't know me:
1. I hate my tesla for a whole host of reasons.
2. We have FSD but don't use it in the city.
I did find AP (not NoA and no stop light nonsense) improving. My solo 3500km trip in June 2022 was a disaster where it simply refused to work a lot of the time. But the regular hour-long drives to our son's have shown a lot of improvement. FSDbeta over the winter (but in proper conditions) was actually worse because it was so unpredictable. So I refused to use FSDb (and hated my husband using it, partly because the frequent takeovers were so jerky that I was getting car sick.)
Then came FSDbeta 11.4.2 and it has improved so much it is like night and day from last autumn. On our recent 3500km trip (mostly the same route):
1. I didn't get to drive at all (which sucked because it was boring just sitting in the car) because my husband was enjoying the drive with FSDb so much, and,
2. the car was most often smoother on FSDbeta than when my husband was driving. The car still had a few failures but also hit the identical rain conditions I had hit the year before and managed to cope much, much, better, making it more of a co-pilot than a distraction (which had been my problem with AP on my solo drive.)
Today I experimented in my home city's highway with AP on the way to an errand and FSDb on the way home. I have grown used to FSDb and its solid lane handling and found I was more nervous with just AP.
I have had two profiles set up for myself so I could swap back and forth but I'm seriously considering deleting the second profile and just keeping FSDb one. The only thing that is holding me back is I have the ability to use AP without NoA but there's no equivalent option for that in FSDb (aside from not setting a destination.) There are definitely times when I want FSDb helping with the driving and I want my destination in the system but I don't want to have to worry about FSDb trying to "change lanes to continue on route." or exiting the highway without warning me (the last time I tested it before 11.4.2, it tried to exit for no reason, but worse, at an exit closed for construction.)
All that said, we still don't use FSDb for city streets, instead we use it as a glorified AP. Any time we have tested it off the highway (including coming off highway interchanges and 'driving' to the superchargers) it was too unreliable. We still don't trust it fully on highways, either, we've had enough hiccups with it, but at least on highways there are fewer dangers (aside from deer which FSDb missed seeing entirely but a fast takeover by my husband meant we missed it by a whisker, or more accurately a tail - we both were convinced we had to have at least hit the tail but the side camera footage shows no sign the deer was hit.)
I truly look forward to the unified stack since then I'll be able to revert to using AP (and also get all the UI features that others not on the FSD update branch currently have.)
1. I hate my tesla for a whole host of reasons.
2. We have FSD but don't use it in the city.
I did find AP (not NoA and no stop light nonsense) improving. My solo 3500km trip in June 2022 was a disaster where it simply refused to work a lot of the time. But the regular hour-long drives to our son's have shown a lot of improvement. FSDbeta over the winter (but in proper conditions) was actually worse because it was so unpredictable. So I refused to use FSDb (and hated my husband using it, partly because the frequent takeovers were so jerky that I was getting car sick.)
Then came FSDbeta 11.4.2 and it has improved so much it is like night and day from last autumn. On our recent 3500km trip (mostly the same route):
1. I didn't get to drive at all (which sucked because it was boring just sitting in the car) because my husband was enjoying the drive with FSDb so much, and,
2. the car was most often smoother on FSDbeta than when my husband was driving. The car still had a few failures but also hit the identical rain conditions I had hit the year before and managed to cope much, much, better, making it more of a co-pilot than a distraction (which had been my problem with AP on my solo drive.)
Today I experimented in my home city's highway with AP on the way to an errand and FSDb on the way home. I have grown used to FSDb and its solid lane handling and found I was more nervous with just AP.
I have had two profiles set up for myself so I could swap back and forth but I'm seriously considering deleting the second profile and just keeping FSDb one. The only thing that is holding me back is I have the ability to use AP without NoA but there's no equivalent option for that in FSDb (aside from not setting a destination.) There are definitely times when I want FSDb helping with the driving and I want my destination in the system but I don't want to have to worry about FSDb trying to "change lanes to continue on route." or exiting the highway without warning me (the last time I tested it before 11.4.2, it tried to exit for no reason, but worse, at an exit closed for construction.)
All that said, we still don't use FSDb for city streets, instead we use it as a glorified AP. Any time we have tested it off the highway (including coming off highway interchanges and 'driving' to the superchargers) it was too unreliable. We still don't trust it fully on highways, either, we've had enough hiccups with it, but at least on highways there are fewer dangers (aside from deer which FSDb missed seeing entirely but a fast takeover by my husband meant we missed it by a whisker, or more accurately a tail - we both were convinced we had to have at least hit the tail but the side camera footage shows no sign the deer was hit.)
I truly look forward to the unified stack since then I'll be able to revert to using AP (and also get all the UI features that others not on the FSD update branch currently have.)
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With basic AP, you always have the option to press the accelerator if needed, which I do sometimes. I also actively control the following distance, although to be honest in stop and go traffic I rarely need to do anything. I think I have only had 2 PB this year, which is 2 too many of course, but I think it is getting better. For me the best thing it does is maintain the lane center even when the lanes get squiggly or the pavement is bad, like in a pesistent construction zone near the end of my commute. The worst thing is way overreacts when two lanes merge and the dividing line stops, that feels really dangerous on a particular on-ramp near my house. Except for that last part, it is fairly magical. My big wish is too change lanes without disengaging it.
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