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My best autopilot commute ever after firmware update

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Yesterday I updated to the latest firmware (I think) of 7.1 (2.17.37) and it seems to have almost perfected the autopilot experience.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my previous update (the MarioKart rainbow road one), they had improved autopilot driving where the car was now near dead center of the lane when driving (versus previous right side bias). However I was still having issues with when I was use the turn signal to go into an adjacent lane (the car would often overshoot and encroach in the lane beyond the one I was going into (which made for some nervous encounters when almost playing bumper cars with a vehicle in the lane originally 2 lanes over).

Well I got the update and the car has behaved perfectly and I would say pretty much now drives the way I would drive it myself.

Another thing I have noticed, and I am hoping it is true, is that the nag feature has diminished considerably. Yesterday I drove home without my hands on the steering wheel the entire time on the highway (about 25 miles) and all I used was the turn signal to switch lanes. I'm hoping that the Tesla engineers have figured that if I am using the turn signal it means that I am paying attention to the road and it resets the internal nag clock. Today on my drive to work same thing, went the majority of the time without nagging, and only had one "hands on wheel" notice occur near end of commute when I happened to have been in the same lane for a long time without using the turn signal. Prior to this update, would expect at least 5 or more nags if I drove the way I did.

It is so much more pleasant to drive with Autopilot with just a hand near the turn signal (I term it turn signal driving) and using the indicator to switch lanes without having to periodically put hands on wheel to avoid the nagging.
 
Did any of you guys already AP-drive in heavy stop & go traffic with the latest update? For me, in that scenario, the latest update has become much more aggressive, i.e. late braking and pretty aggressive acceleration. Or is that just me?
 
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Did any of you guys already drive in heavy stop & go traffic with the latest update? For me, in that scenario, the latest update has become much more aggressive, i.e. late braking and pretty aggressive acceleration. Or is that just me?

Haven't had stop and go traffic to test it out, but I thought it followed the car in front of me a lot closer than previously (on same setting) but wasn't 100% positive on that.
 
Did any of you guys already AP-drive in heavy stop & go traffic with the latest update? For me, in that scenario, the latest update has become much more aggressive, i.e. late braking and pretty aggressive acceleration. Or is that just me?

Geez. I hope not. I spent an hour on 580 yesterday in completely stop and go traffic and it worked exactly like I want before todays software update....at least for stop and go. The only thing I would change is having it move over to the side slightly for motorcycles like I do manually. So I had to take over myself whenever bikes approached lane splitting. Some of them are big with hard luggage cases sticking out the sides.
 
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Did any of you guys already AP-drive in heavy stop & go traffic with the latest update? For me, in that scenario, the latest update has become much more aggressive, i.e. late braking and pretty aggressive acceleration. Or is that just me?

If it is more aggressive maybe you want to try to change the distance to 2 cars length settings (assuming it's on one?) to see if this smooths out the ride somewhat? I might actually like the more aggressive settings as there was sometimes a lot more room than I would have allowed in stop & go traffic...when almost stopped.
 
This morning, I drove with AP using 2.17.37 for the first time on my "lane-keeping torture test" road, which is a major freeway (4 lanes each direction) along a stretch that includes fairly tight, climbing turns and a curving approach into a tunnel. I was impressed. Planted dead-center in the lane through the turns, no overshoot at all, and no jerkiness going into the tunnel, where almost all previous versions of software had issues that had me taking control. (It wandered a bit towards the side of the lane when we exited the tunnel, but it caught itself at the edge and corrected. I am not sure how previous software would have done because I had always given up on AP and gone back to manual control long before that part of the road.) I never had any particular problems with lane-changing, but those worked well too.

Only one data point, but this was the best autosteer performance I've seen yet on this car. Nice job, Tesla engineering!

Traffic was light so I didn't get a chance to test the stop-and-go TACC performance. I was following another car going about the speed limit or slightly over, didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

Bruce.
 
If it is more aggressive maybe you want to try to change the distance to 2 cars length settings (assuming it's on one?) to see if this smooths out the ride somewhat? I might actually like the more aggressive settings as there was sometimes a lot more room than I would have allowed in stop & go traffic...when almost stopped.

I have it set to 3 - but it's a good point, I'll play around with it and set it higher just to see.
 
Did any of you guys already AP-drive in heavy stop & go traffic with the latest update? For me, in that scenario, the latest update has become much more aggressive, i.e. late braking and pretty aggressive acceleration. Or is that just me?

Nope, I've got that too. It brakes too late and accelerates too briskly for my taste and I have distance set on 4 or more. I'd feel better if TACC was a little more conservative. Also, after the latest update, my front parking sensors are much much less effective. I actually bumped the back tire of my motorcycle before they recognized it. The bike hasn't moved at all and they used to pick it up at 27" or so. Hope that gets fixed.
 
In addition to fiddling with the follow distance setting to abate some of the aggressive acceleration (in either direction) I've also noticed that when in stop and go traffic the car will accelerate more gently if the TACC speed is lowered. Typically I have it set to [REDACTED] on my 55MPH highway I take into work. If the stop and go traffic is only moving at a combined 15MPH with pockets of 0MPH and 30MPH then with the speed set up high (and Follow distance below 3) the car will attempt to obtain the set speed as quickly as possible. I think that was even an update way back when TACC was introduced because folks were unhappy with how slowly the cars were re-obtaining the set speed.

Increasing the follow distance (and inviting lane-hoppers) will give the car more time to establish the 4 or higher cushion before it starts to accelerate. Typically, by the time that cushion is created, Mario Andretti in front of you has had to apply his brakes again for the next squish of the traffic accordion. This means the car will stop accelerating and begin drawing down to diminish the cushion in accordance with the follow distance setting.

Coupling that with cranking down the TACC speed setting means that you have both the follow distance cushion and the lower speed target to acquire working towards the car being smoother in stop and go.

One of my chief complaints with Autopilot is that because the car uses traffic directly in front of you for speed it doesn't bring in the full context of the traffic for its calculus of acceleration curve. Put plainly, if the guy in front of you is driving in traffic aggressively (staying on the tail of the car in front of him, slamming on the brakes when traffic stops) then so will your Tesla. The TACC is only as smooth as the radar target in front of it at speeds below your setting.
 
One of my chief complaints with Autopilot is that because the car uses traffic directly in front of you for speed it doesn't bring in the full context of the traffic for its calculus of acceleration curve. Put plainly, if the guy in front of you is driving in traffic aggressively (staying on the tail of the car in front of him, slamming on the brakes when traffic stops) then so will your Tesla. The TACC is only as smooth as the radar target in front of it at speeds below your setting.
Related to this is its tendency to accelerate toward a stopped or slowing car in the distance, just to have to brake again once it
gets "too" close. I'd rather it looked farther ahead and concluded "by the time I accelerate to my target speed I'll be close enough
to want to decelerate, so don't bother (or, at least, don't accelerate as much)".
 
Related to this is its tendency to accelerate toward a stopped or slowing car in the distance, just to have to brake again once it
gets "too" close. I'd rather it looked farther ahead and concluded "by the time I accelerate to my target speed I'll be close enough
to want to decelerate, so don't bother (or, at least, don't accelerate as much)".

YES! That would be a fantastic improvement that I feel is obtainable with the current hardware.
 
obtainable with the current hardware
Absolutely -- seems like pure software. Which is why I'm cautiously hopeful we might actually see this.
That, of course, depends on what priority Tesla gives to the "smoothness" and "naturalness" of the AP
(or, in this case, just TACC) experience. Putting on my marketing hat, I would think people would be really
impressed by a car that "reasons" about such things similarly to an experienced driver.
 
tendency to accelerate toward a stopped or slowing car
Perhaps this will be addressed as a side effect of implementing the Holy Grail of stop light and stop sign detection. You'd think
they'd figure out pretty quickly that accelerating toward a stop sign or light, just to have to hard-brake into it, was pretty silly
(and annoying). Once that's clear they'd probably generalize that conclusion to other "future upcoming causes for deceleration".
 
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Install complete and after a drive on surface streets across the river and back, TACC works fine. I have been using a setting of 5 and left it there with a speed cap of 30 mph and had no issues. Coming up behind stopped cars from 100 yards away, the slow down and stop was pretty smooth. With a 5 setting, the space at crawl speed is comfortable yet no one tried to jump in front of me. At a stop, I had about a car length of room which is fine with me. Perhaps our Portland drivers are not as aggressive as drivers elsewhere.

Lane keeping on freeways has not been an issue in the past but we have only 260 miles on the car. Maybe some change will be apparent the next time on the freeways. Per the update, creep mode is now part of the driver profile. I checked the Controls screen and creep option is now grayed over.
 
Fair point regarding the target speed! I had it set to usual 55mph + x% add on. However, I did that in the past as well, and the car seemed to behave differently.

It's just these things which make me doubt about that full "autonomy availability in 2 years" claim by our favorite CEO...