Phantom braking (TACC/AP) [Not AEB]

[Rustybkts]

Last week my car phantom braked on a clear road with no traffic in front at all and no oncoming lane next to the road either.
It was on the M1 heading South at Leeds just as you reach the road coming from Leeds.
The car just braked hard. WTF is going on!

I have already documented that trucks jump from the inside lane to the middle lane when I am in the third lane which causes occasional braking but if I move from the third lane to the middle lane with a truck on the inside lane I even get a red truck and loud beep when manually driving!

Come on Tesla. The white lines are clearly displayed and must be seen in all the cameras so why do trucks jump from lane to lane?
Cars and vans transition smoothly but trucks are hopeless.

In future, instead of more games and video's, can we have a simplified TACC "cruise control only" as the existing one is not fit for purpose.

On another issue, with the radar being scrapped on new cars, how will the car know how far away the car in front is. I really cannot believe that the camera will ever have the intelligence and stereo vision to be competent enough to calculate distance accurately.

 

[TesTed]

I know that the new ones are using the Vision thing and that the FSD update is said to fix phantom braking - will we get the relevant code pushed to our cars, do you think, to help the issue this side of the pond?

 

[gangzoom]

On another issue, with the radar being scrapped on new cars, how will the car know how far away the car in front is. I really cannot believe that the camera will ever have the intelligence and stereo vision to be competent enough to calculate distance accurately.

The DVLA are happy for human drivers to drive with monocular vision, not forgetting the fact human drivers have very limited field of view at any one time anyways.

Am also not aware of any human drivers who need radar to drive?

Radar is often THE CAUSE of phantom braking, its one of the reasons Tesla has ditched it.

The key questions is if you believe computing software will become advanced enough to match our brains ability to analysis visual inputs and make decisions needed for driving.

When I was learning to drive the concept of Spotify and DropBox would have seemed like SciFi, my tiny camera phone can now take pictures that rival my DSLR using fancy software in post processing.....It really isn't about what any one of us believes is possible, its about what some very very clever people can do over the next few years.

 

[drtimhill]

Braking, not breaking please!

Perhaps he's a ghost hunter .. all those phantoms breaking things in the house?

 

[candida]

In future, instead of more games and video's, can we have a simplified TACC "cruise control only" as the existing one is not fit for purpose.

+1.

I'm pleased I have a Tesla because it's interesting and fun. I love the acceleration, I love the minimalist interior, I love not pumping out fumes in traffic (or at least the car not pumping out fumes). I can live with the wipers and I tell myself that I shouldnt expect >180 mile range from a "tank" in anything that does 0-60 in 3.2 (try getting the quoted 26.4 mpg in a McLaren 570). But the nervous cruise and oversensitive traffic awareness irritate me and scare my passengers.

I'd even settle for a dumb cruise. It's less stressful to keep a look out for things moving more slowly ahead than to be on edge for the anchors about to go on without warning.

I do have to be yet another to point out that this shouldn't be difficult: my 2014 Golf R managed a speed matching smart cruise on radar alone absolutely perfectly. That system must have been designed at least 10 years ago.

At least it's held its value over 12 months but if I wouldnt have to make a balancing payment on the tax break I'd be trading it in

 

[adsheff]

I've been thinking lately that phantom braking has been getting better (i.e. less frequent). My last long drive I noticed that it didn't step on the brakes when passing lorries once. May have been a coincidence, but I'm doing it again tomorrow so we'll see.

 

[adsheff]

As an update, yesterday the phantom braking seemed to be much worse. Car slammed on brakes hard for seemingly no reason at all at least three times. Looks like I spoke too soon. This is on 2021.24.5 and this is the worst I have experienced it. Shame because other aspects of autopilot have improved somewhat. Looks like they just can't fix this issue.

 

[tomorrowman]

As an update, yesterday the phantom braking seemed to be much worse. Car slammed on brakes hard for seemingly no reason at all at least three times. Looks like I spoke too soon. This is on 2021.24.5 and this is the worst I have experienced it. Shame because other aspects of autopilot have improved somewhat. Looks like they just can't fix this issue.

Ditto. I initially thought 2021.24.5 was behaving better with regards phantom braking until today when I experienced a hard brake despite no presence of the normal culprits i.e. bridges, lorries, cars waiting to join from side roads, oncoming traffic to far over etc etc.

Lets see what vision based AP/TACC does when we get it in the next year

 

[hgmichna]

As I have written before, phantom braking cannot be fixed. It can probably be greatly reduced, but every driver, machine or human, has phantom brakings. When you recognize something that could be a risk, you brake. When it turns out not to be a risk, it was a phantom braking event, for example from the point of view of the front passenger if she recognized earlier that there was no actual risk.

Since humans and autopilots differ in their perception, autopilots will perceive a risk in some cases where the human recognizes early that it is not a risk and will classify the autopilot's braking as phantom braking.

It is therefore impossible to eradicate phantom braking entirely.

However, I fully agree that it is highly desirable to reduce the frequency of phantom brakings.

 

[Adopado]

As an update, yesterday the phantom braking seemed to be much worse. Car slammed on brakes hard for seemingly no reason at all at least three times. Looks like I spoke too soon. This is on 2021.24.5 and this is the worst I have experienced it. Shame because other aspects of autopilot have improved somewhat. Looks like they just can't fix this issue.

I do wonder if software versions are a red herring. I did some motorway driving using AP for the first time in a while ... and though it was a bit of a pain to be switching it on and off when changing lanes it generally did better than it's done in the past ... no phantom braking and a bit smoother when backing off approaching slower vehicles. Yet I was on the same software as you. This leads me to suspect that the inconsistency remains just that ... it's inconsistent ... no matter the software version.

 

[Mr H]

Whilst negotiating the narrow streets of Benidorm earlier there was a woman walking along the road down a row of cars, i was going very slowly and there was more than enough room but as i approached her the car just beeped and slammed on - jeez i nearly headbutted the steering wheel, must have been doing less than 10 mph but it still panicked

 

[hgmichna]

Whilst negotiating the narrow streets of Benidorm earlier there was a woman walking along the road down a row of cars, i was going very slowly and there was more than enough room but as i approached her the car just beeped and slammed on - jeez i nearly headbutted the steering wheel, must have been doing less than 10 mph but it still panicked

I'm certain that it avoids accidents that way. It seems to be overly careful and easily frightened, but I, for one, prefer that.

 

[Avendit]

As an update, yesterday the phantom braking seemed to be much worse. Car slammed on brakes hard for seemingly no reason at all at least three times. Looks like I spoke too soon. This is on 2021.24.5 and this is the worst I have experienced it. Shame because other aspects of autopilot have improved somewhat. Looks like they just can't fix this issue.

After 2 years of pretty faithful service I had horrendous phantom braking over the weekend. Up and down the M74/M6, a route I have done many times before with little to no problems, and in general I've not had problems with the car slamming on brakes. Way back (early 2020) there were some places I could guarantee a problem, but these have all got better with time.

This weekend I was having all kinds of problems - as others above noticed, lorries in the left lane jumping all over the place, and this some times triggering a warning or the brakes being slammed on. None were full on emergency stops, pretty sure I could have braked harder if I had wanted, but close to full out emergency stops. 4 times in ~200 miles. Plus a few rather nervous overtakes of lorries too.

I also had the full suite of warning and 'corrective steering' applied once when deliberately and while signalling changing lane. Overall not a very relaxing ride, when usually, on my car and the roads I travel, AP is.

Has anyone else noticed a regression with 2021.24.5?

 

[Dilly]

I found 24.5 a bit sharp. Definitely not my favourite update. 32.10 has proved much better. That said, others will undoubtedly disagree. There seems to be no consistency between different cars on the same software. Perhaps some of that is location. My 300 mile round trip last weekend was mostly on AP/NoA and a really relaxing drive.

 

[Mr Miserable]

I'm just back from 3000 miles of continental driving with no phantom braking occurrences until last night heading back from the Chunnel along the M20 passing a tall curtain sided trailer - WHAM! To make matters worse it was Mrs M doing the driving - she was not impressed and a discussion ensued on getting rid of the Tesla. I'm just grateful that the car behind managed to avoid us.

 

[adsheff]

Yeah I don't get how it randomly gets worse. I wish they'd give detailed release notes with the updates so we could see what they were changing. That would give us more confidence in it. I just wish someone at Tesla would address the issue and give us an explanation - like why to the lorries in the left hand lane jump around so much on the display?

With regards to being rear-ended as a result - this is always the fault of the driver behind. Everyone should leave a big enough gap to be able to stop in time, and it's something I always make a point of doing. However, driving standards being on a seemingly terminal decline in the UK, the minute you leave a 3-4 car gap in front you you, some chump decides to undertake and squeeze in. So many people are driving too close together on the motorways, its a wonder there aren't more pile ups.

 

[Tony Hoyle]

It's not even consistent, for some it gets better.. I suspect the code isn't any different, just that the conditions change and we don't know what the triggering condition is.

I doubt there's any work going on with AP at the moment - Tesla is planning to ditch that entire software stack for the rewritten one eventually.

 

[TesTed]

My car arrives next week and I'm following the thread with interest (and trepidation!) Is there a theme of whether a person's TACC/AP settings are more/less likely to encourage/discourage it?

 

[Avendit]

Mainly I've found it to be version dependant. Obviously there is a lot of moaning in this thread, but most people find it works mostly fine most of the time. I've 15k miles on mine, and other than when using it out side the designed spec (well marked motorways) it's been pretty solid.

Around last Xmas there was a release that didn't sit well on my car, updated 2 weeks later and it's been great. Fingers crossed for the same this time. Probably someone forgot to run the regression tests or something, but there are reports of the next version both being pushed out pretty rapidly, and addressing this problem.

Overall, although I wished there were some ways it works were different, there is no way I'd trade it to go back to dumb control like the old car.

But then that's me driving. Early adopter, IT person, done some research in AI and enjoy reverse engineering things. If the Mrs had problems like @Mr Miserable, it may be a different story.

 

[hgmichna]

For the moment our mitigating method is to step on the accelerator when you are sure that the braking is not desired.

The other mitigating method is to disable TACC or the autopilot in situations where phantom braking is known to occur.

All other discussions are probably pointless until we get the new autopilot version that is currently being beta-tested.