Wiki MASTER THREAD: Actual FSD Beta downloads and experiences

[HighZ]

Here is a summary of my experiences so far:

Great review! Thanks

 

[HighZ]

My safety score has disappeared from my Tesla App the last 24 hours, does anyone know whats up?

If you have FSD Beta 10.2 installed, the Safety Score will no longer show in the app, as it is no longer needed for eligibility into the beta. However, you can still see the score calculated in TeslaFi if you subscribe there, so the car is still tracking the metrics.

 

[jebinc]

I've started a new thread to keep track of all the FSD Beta issues. The issues can be added in the spreadsheet. We can use the thread to discuss issues. We can use this thread to discuss FSD Beta rollout (as originally intended).

MASTER THREAD : FSD Beta Issues Tracking Spreadsheet

Hello Beta testers, we can track all the issues we see in this master list of FSD Beta issues. Feel free to add / update the spreadsheet. I'll request mods to turn into into a wiki to help us keep it updated...

teslamotorsclub.com

@EVNow Alternatively, you could also just add the new additional issues S/S to the OP, as "experiences" and "issues" can be one and the same. No need for yet another thread?

Edit: Or even better, just add an issues column, or two, to the existing tracking spreadsheet. Having all the information in one place might be better for all. This way, there will only be one "record" for each TMC userid.

@EVNow

 

[EVNow]

@EVNow Alternatively, you could also just add the new additional issues S/S to the OP, as "experiences" and "issues" can be one and the same. No need for yet another thread?

I was thinking its better to separate out the threads. Whenever new wave of people get added this thread will become chaotic with new beta testers talking about onboarding and others talking about older issues.

 

[jebinc]

I was thinking its better to separate out the threads. Whenever new wave of people get added this thread will become chaotic with new beta testers talking about onboarding and others talking about older issues.

@EVNow See edit above. Again, just a suggestion.

 

[EVNow]

Edit: Or even better, just add an issues column, or two, to the existing tracking spreadsheet. Having all the information in one place might be better for all. This way, there will only be one "record" for each TMC userid.

I expect users to be adding a large number of issues. I'm just trying to normalize.

 

[jabloomf1230]

LllllOK, after three full days and maybe 100 miles on FSD beta I'm starting to get used to how the car behaves. For what it's worth, I have a relatively early 2018 Model 3 dual motor which had the HW3 upgrade done about a year ago, VIN is just over 100K. (My newer 2021 Model Y does not have FSD). Here is a summary of my experiences so far:

This post also summarizes all the issues that I've experienced (and the workarounds).

 

[BLUBER]

No - it picks the speed from map data. The posted limits can override the map data ... if the map data has no speed, it might use some defaults.

I believe your comment is correct. There is a state highway that I drive on every couple months. The speed limit is 55, and my car knows that until it sees a road sign for county road 35. It thinks that is a speed limit sign (it looks quite a bit like one) and drops my speed for several miles until I get to the next actual speed limit sign where it once again realizes the correct speed limit.

 

[Phlier]

OK, after three full days and maybe 100 miles on FSD beta I'm starting to get used to how the car behaves. For what it's worth, I have a relatively early 2018 Model 3 dual motor which had the HW3 upgrade done about a year ago, VIN is just over 100K. (My newer 2021 Model Y does not have FSD). Here is a summary of my experiences so far:

First the most serious issues I have seen:

• Random lane change attempts in traffic. On a drive I took yesterday on a relatively busy 4-lane divided urban road, the car put its signal on several times trying to change into the wrong lane shortly before needing to turn from the lane that it was in. There were cases that occurred from both lanes. In all cases I disengaged and turned off the turn signal, sometimes momentarily signaling the opposite way briefly by mistake. I'm sure the people behind me thought I was nuts. Unfortunately I was short on time during that drive, but when I have more time I'm going to drive that stretch of road again, enter the same destination and just let it do what it wants to completion.
• Wandering into right turn lanes at high speed on multi-lane divided roads. In all but one case that this happened, the car corrected and darted back into the correct lane once it recognized it had drifted into the turn lane. In one case it just kept going at full speed, was about to run out of runway and I disengaged and got it back into the correct lane.
• School zones with temporary daily speed limits. It seems to correctly drive 20 mph if there is a fixed sign about the school zone (this is the case near an elementary school by my house), but if there is a sign that says "when flashing" the car never drops down to 20 mph and just tries to blow through at 40 mph (this is the case near a high school by my house).
• Speed bumps. It will happily try to fly over speed bumps way, way too fast.
• There is one turn in my neighborhood that I'm convinced will result in crashing my car if I let FSD do what it wants. It's basically a left turn from the main road onto a tee'd road, and for whatever dumb reason the intersection is built such that the tee'd road narrows to almost one lane where it connects to the main road (I think this was to throttle driver speed through our neighborhood, or maybe it was for aesthetics, but it's just dumb). The curbs are very high on all sides of the tee'd road, and several times the car tried to confidently drive straight into the curb without making the turn sharply enough. I flagged it a couple times already, and now I just don't bother letting it try because it's too stressful.

Things that work but could work better:

• Residential streets with no lane markings. Others on this thread have cited this as well, but the car sometimes drives right down the middle of the road, and other times it drives past parked cars with what feels like just inches of margin, unnecessarily. I have rarely been brave enough to let it keep going down the middle of the road as oncoming cars have approached, so I don't know if it will always correct as cars get closer. But it gets much too close to oncoming cars for my comfort.
• Roundabouts. In my neighborhood there are numerous roundabouts (traffic circles), some are singles lane and some are two-lane.
  • In all but one case the car stopped before entering the roundabout. It has always stopped when entering the left lane of a two-lane roundabout (this would be going 180 or 270 degrees through the roundabout). If you just let it take its time (I have only done with when there are no vehicles behind me) it eventually proceeds and drives sanely through the roundabout.
  • In one case I entered a two-lane roundabout in the right lane before making a 90 degree exit, no cars around, and the car proceeded confidently through the 90 degree turn without hesitation.
• Occasional hesitation turning left at busy intersections with no oncoming traffic.
• Turning left on residential streets, the turns are sometimes too tight across the left lane. If a car approached quickly in that lane this might be a problem - plus it just feels too cavalier to cut across the left lane when turning (I'd probably yell at my kid if he did that). Doesn't always happen, and the car seems to always turn properly when there is a car waiting in that lane on the road you are turning onto.
• Navigational issues. You're basically at the mercy of the navigational route chosen, and in some cases this would result in taking an undesired route to your destination. There is also a relatively new (like 5 years old, but still) connection between my neighborhood and another neighborhood, and the stupid nav system does not comprehend that these neighborhoods are connected and prefers to take very long routes out to major arteries to get to destinations in the other neighborhood. In another case there is a new exit off the interstate near my neighborhood, and FSD misses the exit every time because it is not yet mapped properly. There is also a gated community near my house, and it tries to navigate through the gated community instead of around it. These are not really FSD problems, but I wish there was a way to manually influence the routes in some way.

Helpful hints I have figured out:

• Using the accelerator to encourage the car forward. In all of the cases where hesitation is a problem (roundabouts, left turns), you can nudge the car forward by pressing the accelerator, and the result works just fine. That ability alone has allowed me to drive many miles without interventions, because I'm generally not willing to let the car take all the time it wants if there are cars behind me.
• Monitoring and tweaking the speed periodically using the right thumbwheel. I think this helps you feel like the car is driving more normally and is still under your control. In some cases like school zones I have had to manually crank the speed down significantly.
• Hands gently touching the wheel at all times. The wheel is definitely more sensitive to disengagements when operating in FSD compared with autopilot, as others here have mentioned. I have found that keeping both ends gently touching each side of the wheel and letting the wheel slide past my fingers is the best way to keep it from disengaging. If I rest a hand on the bottom of the wheel like I do with autopilot, it typically disengages from the pressure of my hand whenever it needs to turn. You can also tweak the volume knob to reset the disengagement timer, but that's kind of a pain to keep remembering to do.
• Use the stalk to disengage instead of grabbing the wheel, if possible. I have noticed that if you grab the wheel as the form of disengagement - which I typically do when the car drives to close to parked vehicles - the automatic speed control stays engaged, similar to the way autopilot behaves if you do this on highways. This was very disorienting the first few times it happened to me, and now I have gotten into the habit of disengaging with the stalk (or brake, if you need to stop quickly) to avoid this. I guess it makes sense; if you grab the wheel to avoid something, you probably don't want the car abruptly stopping as well, but it's still hard to get used to grabbing the wheel and having the car continue proceeding forward automatically.

OK, now the things that have blown me away:

• Construction zones. I feel like I've read that other people have had problems in construction zones, but so far my experience has been flawless and even mind blowing.
  • In one case there were workers who blocked off the left turn lane with cones at an intersection where I needed to turn left, and they were actively working in the intersection laying down markings while the light was red. The car cautiously directed itself into the left through-lane adjacent to the turn lane, waited patiently for one of the workers to finish up in front of the car (and believe me, I had both ends on the wheel and my foot a millimeter off the brake while I observed it), and then it slowly proceeded and completed its left turn from the lane that it was forced into by the blockage in the turn lane. Amazing.
  • In another case there was a large flashing construction arrow sign in front of a blocked lane, and the car confidently changed lanes well in advance of the arrow, proceeded through the construction zone at a sane speed, and then got back into the lane it wanted after passing the construction zone.
• Merging on and off the highway. I have to admit, I haven't used NoA to merge onto a highway in quite a long time due to issues it had early on which made me nervous merging onto highways so I don't know if it works better now, but FSD handled all of four or five highway merges that I have done absolutely perfectly. In one case, while I was on the interstate driving in the right lane and numerous vehicles were coming onto the highway to merge around me, the car gently braked to give a merging car just a little more room. The driver waved to thank me! Mind blowing. I have also noticed that FSD seems content to stay in the same lane on the highway, while NoA always wants to get into a faster lane even if our exit is coming up soon, which is a welcome difference to me but could also be related to how I have NoA configured.
• Left turns at busy intersections. These will probably scare the daylights out of me for a long time to come, but I have seen numerous cases where the car pulled out, waited patiently and then confidently turned after oncoming traffic passed.
• Right turns at red lights. Similarly, I have seen the car several times stop, then inch forward, "look" for cross traffic and then confidently make its turn just like a human would.
• Residential driving. If there are no other cars around making me worry about the car hugging the center of the road - and no parked cars that it drives too close to - driving in residential zones is smooth and confident. Puts its turn signal on at the correct time, slows for turns, turns confidently and accelerates gently through the back half of the turn, just amazing. I have to think that the vehicle positioning issues on unmarked residential streets will improve in future updates.

I just want to reiterate how historic this is. I just hope that we all get through this without any major incidents that slow down Tesla's development trajectory. Good luck to all. I'll update occasionally with interesting findings.

That was a fantastic post, and exactly what I would've written myself if I weren't so lazy.

But touching on the "is Tesla really benefiting form this?", "How do we test?", etc. subject...

Let's imagine a scenario where there is a small, pre-defined set of rules that must be followed when streets are built. ALL of the specs of the road, from the width of each lane, the type of asphalt used, the color of the paints used, the markings.... ALL of it are preset rules that must be followed.

Programming the navigation of these streets would be fairly straight forward. But the part that isn't so easy, is the "what is the other driver going to do?" problem. That's hard.

Now add the fact that streets aren't vanilla. There are so many variations that you just can't go by a pre-programmed set of rules. What do you do for these instances? Elon, et al, refer to this as "chasing the nines" or "chasing the long tail." Programming for 99% of circumstances is easy. Programming for 99.999999999999% of circumstances is hard.

The solution to the "what is the other guy going to do?" problem and the navigation problem? AI/NN.

But how do you program an AI? One of the Tesla AI guys (sorry I don't remember his name), used a great example of training an AI to recognize pictures of dogs. The best way to do this is to show the AI as many different, varied pictures of dogs as possible. And the more dogs you show it, the better it becomes at recognizing dogs.

Tesla is using this approach for training the AI about driving; showing it as many variances to every day occurrences as possible so that it becomes better at recognizing its world.

This same thing can be used to help with "what is the other driver going to do?" Show it many instances of that situation, and look at the outcome of what the other driver did. And repeat this millions of times. You end up with a pretty good idea of how the average human is going to react in a given driving situation.

This approach requires mind boggling amounts of data.

Your car isn't wasting bandwidth when it spends the whole night uploading gigabytes of information to the Mothership. It really is needed to teach the AI about the world it sees, and how to interpret it.

And as others have mentioned, Tesla can set triggers for the car to automatically send video clips of things they are currently working on.

So really, the "best way to test" is to just drive the car as much as you can, in as many varied instances as you can find. No need to take my word for it, Tesla has actually said this several times. I'd find an instance of it, but I'm too lazy. Go look for yourself if you're interested, I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find.

Let the car and Tesla determine what they need.

But you are not wasting your time. You really are helping, one gigabyte at a time.

One guy mentioned that there is no way they could have enough engineers to manually watch all of these clips, and mark/catalog them all. That's completely correct... they can't. So they have developed a machine to teach the machine. And how accurately the teaching machine can label all this stuff correctly is, once again, dependent on showing it millions of examples.

I'm no expert by any means, but IMO, this is going to require YEARS worth of both data and manual labor. There's going to need to be a person manually teaching until the machine becomes accurate enough to label stuff without a human's help. Once that goal is reached, things will really take off, as (obviously) a machine can scrub through videos and label stuff far, far faster than a person could.

All of the above is taken from things that Tesla has already stated. This is just a TL/DR version of all of it.

 

[mxnym]

@EVNow Alternatively, you could also just add the new additional issues S/S to the OP, as "experiences" and "issues" can be one and the same. No need for yet another thread?

Edit: Or even better, just add an issues column, or two, to the existing tracking spreadsheet. Having all the information in one place might be better for all. This way, there will only be one "record" for each TMC userid.

@EVNow

Barring that, maybe you can link to that thread in your OP? Not sure if the wiki tag means the OP is still editable or not. Personally, I won't be following the issue until/unless I get FSD beta, and I don't think I'll remember that the link to that master thread is around page 89 of this master thread.

 

[jebinc]

I expect users to be adding a large number of issues. I'm just trying to normalize.

@EVNow Collecting the long list of issues, by region, is a good idea; but having folks reentering the same info, like TMC "userid," may not be. Being a relational database programming guy in my youth, I would prefer one record, indexed on "userid"....

I suspect one or both of these S/S may not be kept current by users, as it starts to become a PITA going to multiple S/S to enter data. I created this thread originally to track the beta FSD downloads, and follow-on "experiences". Issues are experiences. Okay, I'll get off the soapbox now as members will ultimately vote with their fingers!

 

[karbomusic]

put some air in that tire...my OCD would be off the chain about now...

I knew I'd get dinged for that. The weather cooled yesterday, so that's why the one tire went a pound or so under the threshold.

 

[Nakk]

Just another heads up not to get complacent. I was in a traffic circle yesterday that Beta had navigated successfully many times. A bit jerky with the wheel, but nothing unsafe. Then 90 degrees through, it needed to drive 180 degrees around, the car accelerated and the wheel spun to the right--the car would have gone up on the curb had I not intervened. The reaction time required was quite short and significant force was required as I had to yank the wheel back to the left hard.

 

[qdeathstar]

Just another heads up not to get complacent. I was in a traffic circle yesterday that Beta had navigated successfully many times. A bit jerky with the wheel, but nothing unsafe. Then 90 degrees through, it needed to drive 180 degrees around, the car accelerated and the wheel spun to the right--the car would have gone up on the curb had I not intervened. The reaction time required was quite short and significant force was required as I had to yank the wheel back to the left hard.

I just follow the steering wheel with my hands and if they two get out of sync my hand takes over.

 

[jabloomf1230]

I don't want prolong this argument but Fred and the other members of the Tesla clickbait club have consistently stated that speed limit recognition is map based augmented by vision. There's a location near me where the state highway has a 55 mph limit and a connecting residential road has a 30 mph limit. The 30 mph sign is easily 50 feet from the intersection with the state highway. FSD beta happily makes the turn and then accelerates rapidly past 30 mph and only slows down when it reaches the sign. I seriously doubt that the initial 50 feet of the residential road is mapped at 55 mph. Just as an aside, OSM has no speed limit tag for the road, but I added the tag. The OSM node starts at the intersection. Note, I'm aware that OSM may not be used for speed limits.

 

[Nakk]

I just follow the steering wheel with my hands and if they two get out of sync my hand takes over.

I do that as well, but the speed with which the wheel spun to the right almost caught me off guard. It was a sudden and fast spin of the wheel to the right with no warning that it was going to do that. Just saying to be ready for anything at any time.

 

[EVNow]

Being a relational database programming guy in my youth, I would prefer one record, indexed on "userid"....

In this case, TMC User name = User Id. Thats the only commonality between the two sheets. Think of the two sheets as two separate tables, linked by the FK, user id.

DB design is still part of my day job

 

[jebinc]

In this case, TMC User name = User Id. Thats the only commonality between the two sheets. Think of the two sheets as two separate tables, linked by the FK, user id.

DB design is still part of my day job

@EVNow Yeah, but the link between the two "DB tables" you're are proposing here is not managed by code (or program) and a CPU, but rather by the "Hu-mons" here, otherwise known as the TMC membership!

 

[Nakk]

I have to add to those mentioning the increase in phantom braking. For me, where I drive, phantom braking was a rare phenomenon pre-beta. It's now a multiple times per drive occurrence. What's weird is that the first few days of beta it wasn't really an issue. It is now. I'm going to have to do some more night driving to see if that's the difference.

 

[qdeathstar]