Intermittent AP1 Problem: Reduced Visual, Seemingly No Radar Functionality. Root cause?

[robby]

I'm having a problem with Autopilot. Unfortunately because it is intermittent, Tesla has had trouble reproducing and troubleshooting it at the service center. I thought I'd post here in case others have dealt with it or at least seen it.

You can see in the photo that the camera is reading lane markings. The blue lines, while very short on the instrument cluster, will illuminate accurately when they are visible on the road.

This visualization is what I typically see after a prolonged (hundreds of miles) autopilot unavailability. It will stay like this for about 40-100 miles before Autopilot comes back again. During this phase, autopilot and cruise control are disabled, and other cars (as typically picked up by vision and radar) are not displayed.

My hypothesis is that my radar is regularly losing calibration (which explains why TACC is also disabled), and the car is trying to recalibrate the radar input against the visual input. What I don't understand is why this keeps happening. Camera housing and radar are clean, and the radar has been recalibrated at least once by Tesla service.

Has anyone dealt with this issue, or have any ideas why it would recur?

 

[RDoc]

Interesting, I just saw this for the first time today as well. I wonder if the cold weather we're having is somehow causing this.

 

[robby]

Interesting, I just saw this for the first time today as well. I wonder if the cold weather we're having is somehow causing this.

This problem has always been worse for me in the winter. Tesla swore up and down that temperature wouldn't cause these issues, but I wonder if there is some second order effect, like ice freezes around the radar and moves it when it expands, or condensation freezes on the camera lens.

If you just started seeing this, hopefully your AP comes back in 50 miles or so. In my experience it can be anywhere from 50-200. Please post back with how it goes; it'd be great to have more data points on this.

 

[Chaserr]

I see freezing cold in the photo, is the problem specific to this weather?

 

[robby]

I see freezing cold in the photo, is the problem specific to this weather?

My (very anecdotal) experience is that it is triggered during winter precipitation conditions. But once it's triggered, it persists regardless of how nice the day is, how clear the roads are, etc.

 

[Mango]

I had the same issue after 2017.50.2 update. A quick reboot of both screens and all went away.

 

[RDoc]

Update on this. I looked more carefully at the radar and noticed the bottom 2 corners had some salt build up on them. Not a lot, but after I cleaned it off, the message went away. I don't know if it was just coincidence, but I'll see what happens over the next few days.

At least for me, rebooting both displays didn't help.

 

[ev-now]

Had this in my first long journey with 'new' CPO last year. It persisted three days after snow and ice build on the radar. As with you, very carefully cleaning the front of the radar to remove built up crud (road salt) sorted it out. IO had previously cleared snow and ice off of the sensor - so it did not take much residual dirt to keep it inoperative. Seems a little like the tire pressure warning - once triggered it can take some effort to get rid of it (like having one wheel orange while reading the same as the others which never did dip below the recommended pressure).

Bright/low winter sun exacerbated this problem big time!

 

[robby]

Thanks for the feedback. I double checked and scrubbed the thing clean, but I'm still getting the message.

One question for others with AP1 hardware: is your radar unit tightly positioned in place, or does it have some give (not the rubber gasket, but the radar itself)? If I pry very lightly at mine with a plastic tool, I can easily nudge it up or down at a slight diagonal. I wonder if it moves over time, and that's why it keeps needing to recalibrate.

 

[SMSMD]

Had a similar experience driving down to Vancouver...took a car wash at Hope after supercharging and it went away.

 

[GWord]

My AP1 car started doing this and it turned out to be a camera failure in the MobilEye module.

 

[robby]

My AP1 car started doing this and it turned out to be a camera failure in the MobilEye module.

Did you see the little spec of blue to indicate line markings as is in the photo I posted, or was it completely missing but the same error message?