Phantom braking so bad I want to return my car

[stopcrazypp]

Just did my first night time driving on rural non-divided state highway on software 2022.4.5.17 and it was just as good as the software the car came with 9 months ago when I purchased the car! There are still minor hesitations once in a while (day or night) but once a day or less rather than dozens of times each day!!!

I no longer use the "speed limit mode" work around on my daily commute. I may still use it on long trips if I know ahead of time that a large portion of a segment of the trip will be on rural highways where AP limits you to 5 mph over the limit (actually 3 mph due to the speedometer error) so I can use auto steering and drive 10 over the limit... or I may just relax and let everyone pass me... don't know yet

Keith

PS: Anyone know how to update the speed limit zones on the source maps that Tesla uses? It thinks one of the rural highways I drive has a 25 mph speed limit rather than the real limit of 55 mph... and it still has a temporary construction zone 45 mph limit in one section of my daily commute where the construction was finished over 2 years ago.

There is speculation Tomtom is the provider for the mapped speed limit data:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit
The thread has links where it may be possible to update it:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit
This post seems to "confirm" Tomtom:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit

It's not clear however how often the speed limits are updated (some have reported changes in tomtom not being reflected although it may not be talking solely about speed limits). The official full navigation map updates (NA-2021.44-13555) seem to take a while (once per year?), although I guess it doesn't hurt to try to update it so it's in the queue.

 

[Fourdoor]

There is speculation Tomtom is the provider for the mapped speed limit data:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit
The thread has links where it may be possible to update it:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit
This post seems to "confirm" Tomtom:
FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit

It's not clear however how often the speed limits are updated (some have reported changes in tomtom not being reflected although it may not be talking solely about speed limits). The official full navigation map updates (NA-2021.44-13555) seem to take a while (once per year?), although I guess it doesn't hurt to try to update it so it's in the queue.

Thanks so much for this!

I can confirm that the data in TomTom matches the data used by my MYP when driving on these local roads. I created a TomTom account and have updated the information in TomTom and just have to hope that it eventually filters down to the cars.

Keith

 

[drtimhill]

Just did my first night time driving on rural non-divided state highway on software 2022.4.5.17 and it was just as good as the software the car came with 9 months ago when I purchased the car! There are still minor hesitations once in a while (day or night) but once a day or less rather than dozens of times each day!!!

Well that's some good news at last! Of course, for all you know, it's totally broken in the daytime!

 

[Fourdoor]

Well that's some good news at last! Of course, for all you know, it's totally broken in the daytime!

Nope, same software that I cautiously said worked in the daytime a few days ago, but that I was not certain how it would react at night... I now have the night driving answer to go alone with the daylight driving.

I have to be honest here... my car drove like this when I first got it, on the software that was the same as the radar software but with speed and follow distance more restricted (at that time max was 70 mph and follow distance of 3) so I know how well the radar equipped cars drive... and if I had that driving experience on a daily basis I probably would have doubted the severity of the PB problem other drivers were having. I HOPE that I would have been more understanding of other peoples experience, but I can't guarantee it. This is what I expected from Tesla from the beginning. I am disappointed that I had a horrible AP and TACC driving experience for 9 months, but I am glad that that time of trouble is (seems to be?) over.

Keith

 

[WhiteWi]

Never bet against Tesla. Lesson learned.

 

[sleepydoc]

Thanks so much for this!

I can confirm that the data in TomTom matches the data used by my MYP when driving on these local roads. I created a TomTom account and have updated the information in TomTom and just have to hope that it eventually filters down to the cars.

Keith

How'd you do that? It keeps giving me an error that I'm on the UK site.

 

[sleepydoc]

Just did my first night time driving on rural non-divided state highway on software 2022.4.5.17 and it was just as good as the software the car came with 9 months ago when I purchased the car! There are still minor hesitations once in a while (day or night) but once a day or less rather than dozens of times each day!!!

I no longer use the "speed limit mode" work around on my daily commute. I may still use it on long trips if I know ahead of time that a large portion of a segment of the trip will be on rural highways where AP limits you to 5 mph over the limit (actually 3 mph due to the speedometer error) so I can use auto steering and drive 10 over the limit... or I may just relax and let everyone pass me... don't know yet

Keith

PS: Anyone know how to update the speed limit zones on the source maps that Tesla uses? It thinks one of the rural highways I drive has a 25 mph speed limit rather than the real limit of 55 mph... and it still has a temporary construction zone 45 mph limit in one section of my daily commute where the construction was finished over 2 years ago.

Thanks - at least there's hope. I haven't noticed appreciable changes in the 18 months since I got my car. :/

I have been doing some experimenting - I turned off AutoSteer, Navigate on AutoPilot, FSD Beta, Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control, Obstacle Aware Acceleration and Automatic Emergency Braking. I've been using TACC for the past week and a half after disabling all of that and phantom braking has been virtually eliminated. This tells me the problem is not actually with TACC but with one of the other systems. The next step is to start adding them back sequentially to see if I can figure out which one. My suspicion is it's primarily caused by the AEB system.

Functionally, I don't know that it matters. I don't really want to permanently disable the other systems. It's kind of like figuring out whether it's the headlights or windshield wipers that make your car stall. Good to know but in the end the problem still needs to be fixed.

 

[buddhafree]

When I got a car it had 2022.3 version. I tried to use AP and wasn't impressed. Abrupt speed changes (phantom brakes) required Ninja like reflexes to overwrite AP. It also made me feel like the system is driving the way that could infuriate other drivers and make passengers sick, Almost like constant break checks.

Yesterday I upgraded to version 2022.8. Way better now. The driving was more pleasant, most of slows down were for a good reason and not abrupt.

The system needs to improve:
a. Large incoming cars (light colors?) may scare AP until they get close enough for computer to properly predict their path. New version 2022.8 didn't break hard but AP behavior shows predictive path algorithm needs improvement for this type of vehicles.
b. It takes computer a second or two to realize that car that crossed the road in front of you is no longer there. In many cases the other car has completed the turn long before my car gets there, no need to slow down the vehicle if crossing car is no longer there.

If I worked for Tesla
I would add additional logic for car not to stay in another vehicle blind spot. Either reduce the following distance to get closer to the front of other car or increase the distance to stay behind to make sure the other driver can see my car.
Staying in the perfect middle of the lane is not always ideal. If the car in the next lane is too large and drives too close to the dividing line or having problems maintaining the lane then it would be safer if AP moves the car from the middle of the lane to increase the distance to other vehicle if road conditions permit it (it depends if the opposite lane is occupied or not).

I hope the car gets even smarter over time. My current impression that version 2022.8 is good enough and perfectly usable.

 

[drtimhill]

The system needs to improve:
a. Large incoming cars (light colors?) may scare AP until they get close enough for computer to properly predict their path. New version 2022.8 didn't break hard but AP behavior shows predictive path algorithm needs improvement for this type of vehicles.
b. It takes computer a second or two to realize that car that crossed the road in front of you is no longer there. In many cases the other car has completed the turn long before my car gets there, no need to slow down the vehicle if crossing car is no longer there.

I think you can expect these to get fixed. What you are seeing is "trickle down" from the FSD beta program, which (by definition) has to be much better at handling car movement predictions (and, in fact, is already). When the dust settles AP/TACC will be using the same basic vision stack as FSD, but just wont have the city driving abilities enabled.

 

[sleepydoc]

I think you can expect these to get fixed. What you are seeing is "trickle down" from the FSD beta program, which (by definition) has to be much better at handling car movement predictions (and, in fact, is already). When the dust settles AP/TACC will be using the same basic vision stack as FSD, but just wont have the city driving abilities enabled.

One specific example - FSD is much better at handling cars crossing your path. AP essentially sees an object and says ‘I have to brake now to stop in time!’ Whereas FSD does more what a human would do and says ‘there’s a car there but it’s moving forward and will be out of my way before I get there so I don’t need to do anything.’

 

[drtimhill]

One specific example - FSD is much better at handling cars crossing your path. AP essentially sees an object and says ‘I have to brake now to stop in time!’ Whereas FSD does more what a human would do and says ‘there’s a car there but it’s moving forward and will be out of my way before I get there so I don’t need to do anything.’

Exactly, by having to solve these kind of problems for FSD the entire stack of Tesla driver assists will get a big boost in reliability and sophistication. And its quite possible that this might be the most significant contribution of the FSD work, with city street driving and (the dubious) robotaxi stuff distant runners-up. Why? Because it benefits the entire fleet, even when driving manually.

 

[sleepydoc]

Thanks - at least there's hope. I haven't noticed appreciable changes in the 18 months since I got my car. :/

I have been doing some experimenting - I turned off AutoSteer, Navigate on AutoPilot, FSD Beta, Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control, Obstacle Aware Acceleration and Automatic Emergency Braking. I've been using TACC for the past week and a half after disabling all of that and phantom braking has been virtually eliminated. This tells me the problem is not actually with TACC but with one of the other systems. The next step is to start adding them back sequentially to see if I can figure out which one. My suspicion is it's primarily caused by the AEB system.

Functionally, I don't know that it matters. I don't really want to permanently disable the other systems. It's kind of like figuring out whether it's the headlights or windshield wipers that make your car stall. Good to know but in the end the problem still needs to be fixed.

Ok, I spoke too soon. Just got back from a trip. I drove the first leg on a state highway in northern Wisconsin. 2 lanes, mid afternoon, completely clear with excellent visibility, clear roads with clearly visible lines and edges.

Before starting I turned off Auto steer, NoA, FSD beta, Traffic light/stop sign control, Obstacle aware acceleration, and automatic emergency braking.

The first 20-30 minutes went fairly well with just a couple 'hiccoughs' where the speed varied only slightly (maybe 1-2 MPH.) Then in the next half hour I had 3 phantom braking events. All of them were on completely straight, flat stretches of roads, clear visibility, no cars visible. The car suddenly slowed down from 59 to 53 MPH once, then to 49 MPH another time. The second time might have gone lower but I had a car behind me so I pressed the accelerator because I didn't want to block the road. Another episode slowed down to about 50. In the 3rd one I remembered to look at the energy bar and it was all the way to the left/green meaning it was using maximal regenerative braking.

After this I turned on AEB and the phantom braking got perhaps slightly worse but not noticeably.

At this point, the only conclusion I can reach is that Tesla's TACC algorithm downright sucks. Unless the other systems that I disabled in the autopilot menu were still active in the background and causing issues the only thing left to slow the car down was TACC. What's the point of having cruise control if you have to keep your foot over the accelerator? As I've said 100 times before: My 2020 Model Y has a worse adaptive cruise than any other car I've driven, including on 8 years older. Shame, Tesla.

 

[DrGriz]

Ok, I spoke too soon. Just got back from a trip. I drove the first leg on a state highway in northern Wisconsin. 2 lanes, mid afternoon, completely clear with excellent visibility, clear roads with clearly visible lines and edges.

Before starting I turned off Auto steer, NoA, FSD beta, Traffic light/stop sign control, Obstacle aware acceleration, and automatic emergency braking.

The first 20-30 minutes went fairly well with just a couple 'hiccoughs' where the speed varied only slightly (maybe 1-2 MPH.) Then in the next half hour I had 3 phantom braking events. All of them were on completely straight, flat stretches of roads, clear visibility, no cars visible. The car suddenly slowed down from 59 to 53 MPH once, then to 49 MPH another time. The second time might have gone lower but I had a car behind me so I pressed the accelerator because I didn't want to block the road. Another episode slowed down to about 50. In the 3rd one I remembered to look at the energy bar and it was all the way to the left/green meaning it was using maximal regenerative braking.

After this I turned on AEB and the phantom braking got perhaps slightly worse but not noticeably.

At this point, the only conclusion I can reach is that Tesla's TACC algorithm downright sucks. Unless the other systems that I disabled in the autopilot menu were still active in the background and causing issues the only thing left to slow the car down was TACC. What's the point of having cruise control if you have to keep your foot over the accelerator? As I've said 100 times before: My 2020 Model Y has a worse adaptive cruise than any other car I've driven, including on 8 years older. Shame, Tesla.

If you are not using TACC, do you have decels like that at all? If you did, you would think that those would be AEB (I know you said it was off) and true phantoms.

If not, you would have to wonder what TACC thinks it is seeing. Does it have too wide a field of view (what I thought for us when we saw vast improvement from planting the passenger tires on the fog line)? Too much depth? Is it just glitchy?

 

[TheTheocracy]

I think Tesla uses the same stack for TACC as for FSD, so if there are false positives, that would leave a lasting blip in the spatial RNN. In computer vision, there are false detections that would never make sense. This image is from Google AI Blog, where adding noise or images that seems random changes classification of the image.

There is probably a weird interaction with the path planning of the algorithm as well, as it tries to find the best path out of several possible paths. If there is a false positive, it would automatically find a best path around or to avoid the detection, which I think usually manifests itself in phantom braking.

 

[Fourdoor]

How'd you do that? It keeps giving me an error that I'm on the UK site.

I just went to the TomTom website (perhaps there is a US and a UK version of the website?) created an account and started giving it updated data on my local roads.

Keith

 

[Fourdoor]

Ok, I spoke too soon. Just got back from a trip. I drove the first leg on a state highway in northern Wisconsin. 2 lanes, mid afternoon, completely clear with excellent visibility, clear roads with clearly visible lines and edges.

Before starting I turned off Auto steer, NoA, FSD beta, Traffic light/stop sign control, Obstacle aware acceleration, and automatic emergency braking.

The first 20-30 minutes went fairly well with just a couple 'hiccoughs' where the speed varied only slightly (maybe 1-2 MPH.) Then in the next half hour I had 3 phantom braking events. All of them were on completely straight, flat stretches of roads, clear visibility, no cars visible. The car suddenly slowed down from 59 to 53 MPH once, then to 49 MPH another time. The second time might have gone lower but I had a car behind me so I pressed the accelerator because I didn't want to block the road. Another episode slowed down to about 50. In the 3rd one I remembered to look at the energy bar and it was all the way to the left/green meaning it was using maximal regenerative braking.

After this I turned on AEB and the phantom braking got perhaps slightly worse but not noticeably.

At this point, the only conclusion I can reach is that Tesla's TACC algorithm downright sucks. Unless the other systems that I disabled in the autopilot menu were still active in the background and causing issues the only thing left to slow the car down was TACC. What's the point of having cruise control if you have to keep your foot over the accelerator? As I've said 100 times before: My 2020 Model Y has a worse adaptive cruise than any other car I've driven, including on 8 years older. Shame, Tesla.

Please, can we standardize on stating what software you are on when we make complaints about AP and TACC? I am still having great results on 2022.4.5.17 but I don't know what software you are on unless you tell us. For me turning off sub systems like lane departure warning (or whatever) was good for reducing beeping in the car, but never had any effect on TACC or AP behavior.

Keith

 

[sleepydoc]

Please, can we standardize on stating what software you are on when we make complaints about AP and TACC? I am still having great results on 2022.4.5.17 but I don't know what software you are on unless you tell us. For me turning off sub systems like lane departure warning (or whatever) was good for reducing beeping in the car, but never had any effect on TACC or AP behavior.

Keith

Sorry - I’m on 2021.44.30.21 (FSD 10.10.2) It looks like Tesla’s starting to push out FSD 10.11.1 via 2022.4.5.20 so presumably that would be similar feature-wise to 4.5.17. Hopefully I’ll get that update and can re-test.

If you are not using TACC, do you have decels like that at all? If you did, you would think that those would be AEB (I know you said it was off) and true phantoms.

If not, you would have to wonder what TACC thinks it is seeing. Does it have too wide a field of view (what I thought for us when we saw vast improvement from planting the passenger tires on the fog line)? Too much depth? Is it just glitchy?

? I’m not sure what you mean. If I’m not using TACC then I’m driving myself and have my foot on the accelerator so it behaves like a ‘normal’ car.

If I’m using FSD or AP (technically TACC + Auto Steer) then yes, I have similar random slowdowns.

That’s my question, too - what is TACC seeing? With the slowdowns I had today there was nothing. No cars, no cones, no snowbanks, no shadows. The odd thing was it really didn’t seem to care about oncoming cars in the other lane. There weren’t a lot of semis as it was Sunday afternoon, so I couldn’t really check that.

I can’t say for sure that it wasn’t AEB or some other interaction with another system, but I had everything off that could be turned off, so if it was AEB then it’s a part of AEB that can’t be disabled and it really doesn’t matter.

 

[DrGriz]

if it was AEB then it’s a part of AEB that can’t be disabled and it really doesn’t matter.

Yes, that is exactly what I am getting at. I don't know whether or not that is a thing, but if it is then why wouldn't it matter?

 

[TheTheocracy]

That’s my question, too - what is TACC seeing?

I wish explainable AI was a thing that was available for Tesla's, but unfortunately the tech is still in its infancy. It's always those fringe cases that pop up which don't make sense. Especially on the consumer-side, I'd imagine not much 'explanation' in the way of human-machine interaction, since it's marketed as more self-driving.

Given that Tesla is heavily invested in more training data, I would think their solution is more data-driven, hence investment in Tesla Dojo. If the solution is data-driven, my guess is that some areas across the country will probably work much better than others due to training data bias and possibly the inability of the system to really generalize to other unknown environments.

 

[SpaceKat]

I can’t say for sure that it wasn’t AEB or some other interaction with another system, but I had everything off that could be turned off, so if it was AEB then it’s a part of AEB that can’t be disabled and it really doesn’t matter.

I would think that AEB would be applying the brakes hard to avoid an imminent collision. That is, your 10-20% regen speed drops were probably not AEB.

My guess is that TACC is primarily concerned with following, but Autosteer (beta) forces the system to take more information (or misinformation) into account.

It is great the FSD enhancements can trickle down to non-FSD functions like TACC, but the problem is that the FSD failures trickle down, too.

For my part, I am on 2022.4.5.3 and after disabling Autosteer (beta), my TACC has been performing pretty well. Only a couple of minor slowdowns. (I have been driving mostly 2-lane roads and suburban arteries.)