My experiences with AP as a new owner

[Erik The Red]

So I have a 2020 MS LR, with FSD. Here are a few quirks I’ve noticed with AP and I’m not sure what to do.

• When engaging AP early on the on-ramp to an interstate highway, it speeds up to the merge point at the end of the lane, regardless of any traffic in the nest lane and doesn’t seem to find a hole... I haven’t let it go to see what it does, I have to take control to merge safely. It just feels like it will either merge into the car in the next lane or will keep going, despite the lane ending.
• If the lane i’m merging into at the end of the on-ramp lane is empty, I notice it doesn’t put on a turn signal to indicate the merge. If I manually put on the turn signal, it jerks left and shoots across two lanes. Anyone seen this?
• Emergency slow/stop when an oncoming vehicle turns across the path is very slow to recover, even if there was plenty of room. It takes a long time to re-accelerate even after the vehicle is gone. By long time, I mean several seconds. This makes you look like an asshole.
• It doesn’t do well with staggered lanes, where traffic is redirected because of, for example, an oncoming turn lane on a road that wasn’t designed for it, so they shoehorn in third lane and push traffic around it. It sees this as an impending crash and stops.
  
• There doesn’t seem to be a good way to tell The navigation to use an alternate route, which is terrible when traffic causes the route it wants to take to be unusable.

 

[ucmndd]

Yup. Welcome to Tesla ownership!

The short answer that you’ll quickly arrive at on your own is to not use autopilot in most of the scenarios you describe. Particularly the whole freeway on-ramp and merging thing. Just asking for trouble and way more stressful than doing it yourself.

As for the slow to react/accelerate thing, feel free to nudge it along with the accelerator. This doesn’t disengage autopilot and is the best available solution.

 

[Battpower]

I hear exactly what you are saying, and with the same spec car I have similar issues. I just got back to the UK from a long drive in France, and AP gave me some pretty scarey moments to say the least.

Some of the worst included very hard braking as I went under an overhead gantry road sign and came out of tunnel (no blinding light). Both cases seemed to relate to shadows and poor definition of objects.

Where road markings include long direction arrows for off ramps etc, ap would often try to wrench the car off to the side somehow being effected by the extra white line.

Really bad was having set the speed to 50 mph in a construction zone that would otherwise be 70mph. Stays at 50 for ages until passing an off ramp. With no speed signs visible, max speed adjusts itself down to 45 then 40 just alongside the off ramp. As soon as off ramp ends, speed sets itself to 70mph (even though still in 50mph construction zone and car accelerates strongly.

Another bad one was lane changes. After overtaking, and in response to message to return back to original lane, I would acknowledge with the turn stalk. The car hangs around too long.... sometimes waiting for space, eventually starts the lane change move, then the lane change times out and the car slams itself back to the lane it had just started to move out off.

Other strange behaviour passing off ramps with message to move over one lane to continue your route, even though this makes no sense with road layout.

Car in front slows and pulls into slower traffic lane freeing up my lane. My car accelerates correctly, but as it draws nearly to the car that just moved aside, my car slows very suddenly. Completely without any sense or justification. This could be about reacting to adjacent lane traffic speeds, by in my cases, there was only a small difference in lane speeds (a coupe of mph) and if I had had a car behind, also speeding up as the slower car had freed up the lane ahead of me, that can would have most likely slammed in to the back of me.

Even with no AP or TACC engaged, I have had the car do crazy things. On a small rural road wide enough for two cars to pass, I moved into lane of oncoming traffic (no cars in site) to pass 2 cyclists. As I did aloud alarm sounded and the steering wrenched violently towards the cyclists.

The car has on several occasions proudly announced it took emergency corrective steering action without any reason for it doing so.

The worst thing is not having anywhere sensible to feed such info back to Tesla and get some kind of feedback with regards to the issue being addresssed.

I will post a link to a clip showing the speed change in construction zone. It was a repeatable behavior and when I videoed the issue it was the 3rd or 4th time that exactly the same thing happened. How the car can override a manually set cruise speed to random slower speeds then set a much higher speed all without the driver touching any controls at all was super worrying.

The above issues cropped up mainly with noap, and on freeways. The issue with the cyclists was without any automated driving specifically active.

Not quite the same, but a behavior I find very risky is that if ap drops out for some reason the car reverts to TACC which you really have to keep an eye on so that you don't suddenly find yourself accelerating hard towards a road junction, tight bend or other hazard.

 

[mswlogo]

Keep in mind AutoPilot is NOT supposed to be used off the highway (also called city streets) anything with cross traffic.

You didn’t mention Navigate On Autopilot which might handle some of you cases you had trouble with. Straight AutoPilot just maintains your lane and doesn’t do ramp merges etc. But it will do a “directed” lane change with the blinker (if you have EAP or FSD). It might kick in some evasive maneuvers if you ask it to do more than it’s intended to be used for.

NoA has its own issues though.

I never use it off highway. It can do amazing well but you are taking a big gamble.

 

[Erik The Red]

That is a legal disclaimer. If Tesla didn’t’ the think it was ready to auto steer on normal roads, it would disable the ability to do so. So saying that is like saying you’re not supposed to exceed the speed limit.

Still, it’s hard to see FSD being ready as early as EM says it will.

 

[ucmndd]

Keep in mind AutoPilot is NOT supposed to be used off the highway (also called city streets) anything with cross traffic.

Someone should tell Tesla that.

 

[mswlogo]

That is a legal disclaimer. If Tesla didn’t’ the think it was ready to auto steer on normal roads, it would disable the ability to do so. So saying that is like saying you’re not supposed to exceed the speed limit.

Still, it’s hard to see FSD being ready as early as EM says it will.

You can call it whatever you like. This is straight from the owners manual.

Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited-access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic. Do not use Autosteer on city streets, in construction zones, or in areas where bicyclists or pedestrians may be present. Never depend on Autosteer to determine an appropriate driving path. Always be prepared to take immediate action. Failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.

I'm not talking about "Beta".

 

[Battpower]

That is a legal disclaimer. If Tesla didn’t’ the think it was ready to auto steer on normal roads, it would disable the ability to do so. So saying that is like saying you’re not supposed to exceed the speed limit.

Still, it’s hard to see FSD being ready as early as EM says it will.

I'm inclined to take this view too, as if you used the car based on Tesla"s warranty statements, (eg claims void due to atmospheric gas exposure) then your car would sit in a hermetically sealed, temperature controlled vault.

What would be the point of a message coded to tell you to move into lane away from traffic cones if you should not have that feature enabled near traffic cones? Especially given the approach of disabling feature when sensors can't function or suspending noap in 'bad weather' which seems to be determined by if you manually turn wipers to a high speed.

Folling this approach, as soon as the car sees more than an odd couple of cones, it should turn off all auto control. If it can't automatically set TACC to any temporary reduced speed limit, then it should also turn off that too. I have been driving with TACC and entered road works / speed restricted zone. Traffic slows and usefully, TACC keeps me nicely spaced. When cars in front move out of my lane or go above the speed limit, so does my car.

In any case, it's clear enough already, as driver of your car, you must remain in control at all times, and frankly, having had the car randomly wrench the steering a few times in a couple of thousand miles with no AP engaged under the pretext of the car taking preventive action, I keep an iron grip on the wheel whenever I can see a possible risk to nearby traffic or pedestrians.

Having emergency brakes slammed on when passing parked cars in narrow streets where you pass into the flow of oncoming traffic is a recipe for disaster when there is a line of cars following close behind.

 

[Battpower]

Skip to 3 mins. Speed override set to 50mph manually to match limit in force. Car maintaining fixed distance aproaching off ramp / junction. First glitch is message to confirm lane change to follow set route. (does this every where even on normal highway - probably following US road layout conventions that don't work here). Then just as I'm passing off ramp, car adjusts max speed first to 45 then 40 mph. Just as I pass by off ramp, speed resets to what the car thinks is maximum allowed, ie: 70 mph. During that sequence, all I do is grip the wheel tightly in case the car pulls me towards the off ramp. I touch no other controls. This happened 3 times in a row at off ramps before this one, so not just a fluke.