Roundabouts and FSD

[InventEd]

Does anyone know the status of FSD and roundabouts?

I am pretty sure middle of last year when I started looking at the model 3 the blurb about FSD on Tesla website mentioned that roundabouts would be a feature they would be adding. Looking today it says;


“Coming later this year:

• Recognise and respond to traffic lights and stop signs.
• Automatic driving on city streets.
• Enhanced Summon — your parked car will come find you in a car park.”

No mention of roundabouts any more. Anybody know anything about that? I am assuming they can’t do them already!

I have a 1.5 hour commute each morning and evening and would love to have the car drive me, but my journey (Brighton to Portsmouth including round Chichester) has about 13+ roundabouts. Do you think the Tesla will ever be able to manage them?

 

[TomD]

I haven't got FSD but considering how reliable most of the autopilot features are at the moment i would guess roundabouts are a long way off!

 

[InventEd]

I haven't got FSD but considering how reliable most of the autopilot features are at the moment i would guess roundabouts are a long way off!

Excuse my ignorance but what is it actually capable of doing in the uk today?

 

[JupiterMan]

according to this tweet from Elon, they have been testing roundabouts in development versions for over a year now..

Elon Musk on Twitter

I know a few roundabouts near me which are hard for humans to decipher... will be interesting to see how it copes with them on eventual release.

 

[AndrewGR]

In my experience, auto steer has problems going round simple bends on country roads so I think roundabouts are a long way off! Doesn’t help that, on M3 at least, you can’t go directly from indicating right as you are going round a roundabout to going left before you leave it. Or that TACC wants to drive at what it thinks is the speed limit regardless of whether it is appropriate, and doesn’t slow down when the speed limit changes... FSD looks years away to me - if ever! I hope we’ll at least see the M3 reading speed limit signs soon.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

Expect roundabouts to be WAY down their priority list. If you visit california (or frankly most places in the US) you will notice they just...
do not have roundabouts. None. Zero. Nada. Nil.
Most US drivers I know say they never encounter them.
From an AI POV they are a nightmare. cars coming towards then past you on a curve, and you have to anticipate a gap, pull out, and maybe change lanes whilst going round a circle before picking an exit.... yikes.

 

[JCremonini]

Expect roundabouts to be WAY down their priority list. If you visit california (or frankly most places in the US) you will notice they just...
do not have roundabouts. None. Zero. Nada. Nil.
Most US drivers I know say they never encounter them.
From an AI POV they are a nightmare. cars coming towards then past you on a curve, and you have to anticipate a gap, pull out, and maybe change lanes whilst going round a circle before picking an exit.... yikes.

It’s incorrect to say there are no roundabouts in CA. Actually, there are and they are on the increase. The US have acknowledged that roundabouts have multiple benefits, hence why they are building more of them.

 

[Ant M3]

In my experience, auto steer has problems going round simple bends on country roads so I think roundabouts are a long way off! Doesn’t help that, on M3 at least, you can’t go directly from indicating right as you are going round a roundabout to going left before you leave it. Or that TACC wants to drive at what it thinks is the speed limit regardless of whether it is appropriate, and doesn’t slow down when the speed limit changes... FSD looks years away to me - if ever! I hope we’ll at least see the M3 reading speed limit signs soon.

Must admit ... I’m beginning to think that my FSD option was a bit of a waste of money ...

 

[dc121gw]

When we say the US has no roundabouts, we mean in comparison to somewhere like England, where they are as common as a Starbucks or McDonald's. The Atlanta metro area has about a dozen that I know about, certainly there could be more. Roundabouts here are used in lieu of signals on very lightly traveled cross streets. I can't think of a major intersection here that employs a roundabout, controlled access with signals is the norm.

 

[Mark_T]

Pretty much anywhere you see a 4-way stop in the USA, the UK would have a roundabout, they are even more common than Starbucks & McDonald's put together

 

[Rooster6655]

Pretty much anywhere you see a 4-way stop in the USA, the UK would have a roundabout, they are even more common than Starbucks & McDonald's put together

About 1 McDonald’s to 20 roundabouts

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Expect roundabouts to be WAY down their priority list. If you visit california (or frankly most places in the US) you will notice they just...
do not have roundabouts. None. Zero. Nada. Nil.
Most US drivers I know say they never encounter them.
From an AI POV they are a nightmare. cars coming towards then past you on a curve, and you have to anticipate a gap, pull out, and maybe change lanes whilst going round a circle before picking an exit.... yikes.

Mapping America's Resistance to Traffic Roundabouts - CityLab

 

[LukeT]

About 1 McDonald’s to 20 roundabouts

... which is still a lot of McDonald's.

Bleurgh!

 

[nightowl]

From an AI POV they are a nightmare. cars coming towards then past you on a curve, and you have to anticipate a gap, pull out, and maybe change lanes whilst going round a circle before picking an exit.... yikes.

Not to mention that the car would have to differentiate between a roundabout and a junction (thinking of those larger roundabouts where it's not quite as sharp a curve). It'd need to be able to spot the roundabout signs, I guess.

And it would need to anticipate what the vehicle approaching from the right intends to do - does its trajectory suggest it's leaving the roundabout so you can go? Can't rely on indicators to give a definitive answer. But then again the positioning varies from driver to driver. What if someone decides to straight-line the roundabout, etc.?

Then yes, you have multi lane roundabouts, ones where 2 or 3 lanes go to one exit and you then have to move across by that much if you're not taking that exit. I don't encounter many of these so when I am going somewhere that involves them, a bit of preparation via satellite view on Google Maps takes place. Good luck trying to work all that out and sniff out what's going on from the road markings, car!

Add traffic lights whilst you're on the roundabout into the mix and it becomes even more fun.

 

[pdk42]

I lived in the US for a few years at the end of the 90s. It was in Massachusetts and there was exactly one roundabout in the vicinity where I lived. It was hilarious watching the Americans try to use it. I even had a row with a guy one day who got very abusive because I stopped before entering to let a car already on the roundabout go past. He kept repeating "You don't stop at a Yield"!

 

[AndrewGR]

A few simple questions to those who have had a Tesla for a while:

When do you think Teslas in the UK will read speed limit signs, including variable ones?
When do you think they will stop at stop lines and give way at give way lines when TACC is engaged?
When do you think TACC will have the ability to adhere to speed limits as they change?

The ability to report map errors with a button press would be good - TomTom had this years ago! However the advertising puff suggested this wouldn’t be needed in a Tesla because it would be picked up from camera data being fed back to ‘HQ”!

 

[tsh2]

I think one of the big problems with roundabouts will be the current vision sensors. I've not actually checked the camera feeds, but I keep noticing situations where there is no really clear line of sight, and I rely to some extent on inference to decide when to enter a roundabout. I'm less worried about the physical navigation, merging vision and route information with design rules should fairly trivially result in a good estimate of the roundabout layout.

By inference, I mean knowing that there is entry, visible section, blind exit, and a short visible tangent. 2 sec after the point I can see is clear, the obscured section will also be clear - even if i can only guarantee this once I start to pull forward.

French style merging will be fun too (where you don't yield if the car already on the roundabout can easily make way for you).

 

[MrBadger]

Excuse my ignorance but what is it actually capable of doing in the uk today?

Its basically the previous Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) package which was £5000(?).

Over and above that

• Recognise and respond to traffic lights and stop signs.
  • Recognise traffic lights and stop signs in US only from 2019.40.50 (Late Dec 2019)
• Automatic driving on city streets.
  • No sign of this
• Enhanced Summon — your parked car will come find you in a car park.
  • Available in very limited form due to regulatory restrictions. Party trick only even in non restricted form. Also part of EAP

As for roundabouts (and many junctions), they need to fix the B post cameras fogging up before it can be handle those. One thing having lane change restricted, nut not being able to see cross vehicles at a junction will be a significant loss of functionality.

 

[Battpower]

In the UK we have a different product from the US. I didn't realize (whoops, realise) this at first. The paint colors (whoops, colours) may be the same between markets, but the software is a different beast entirely. I believe it was developed by the same team that coded the Entertainment pack in order to balance out the workload. Its obviously a bug that the UK software controls for our version of FSD were not moved to the Enertainment menu. For any that haven't yet read about it, in the UK our cars get a feature set known as Fun Steering Distractions. The split between US and UK releases is rumored (or rumoured) to have come about when UK programmers were brought in to the software development team to try and add awareness and handling of UK specific road features.

Reading through the code they realised they had been given a game development project because of the references to driving on the 'pavement', assuming it must be points per pedestrian hit etc.

I was sure I had Fun Steering Distractions option when I first encountered a row of parked cars with AP engaged and discovered the aim was to try and stop my car smashing their door mirrors. Self Parking is part of the same FSD package in the UK where I found out the aim is to try and avoid letting the car drive itself onto grass or get itself stuck in positions you can't get out of (especially in corners of parking lots {car parks}) and between closely positioned rows of parked cars. (Reminds me of the sofa in Hitchhikers Guide if anyone remembers that.)

In-Lane ping pong was left for UK and Europe the same as in US market cars.

My personal favourite / favorite is the addition of 'Patience' that brings all the drivers of the cars behind you into the game when FSD comes up behind a cyclist and just sits there to see who cracks first and can no longer hold back from overtaking.

'Concentration' could present problems for insurance companies with huge numbers of rear-end collisions although it also brings a multi-player dimension to gameplay. It's perhaps too much for most UK drivers when FSD Teslas randomly slam on the brakes for no obvious reason.

I'm not a fan of 'guess your next speed' under the TACC section. Especially in Construction Zones (road works) on freeways (motorways) where it's just too dangerous imo to be jetted up to 70mph without warning in a 50mph zone.

To maintain parity of value offering, the US development team have been keeping a close eye on UK enhancements. They have decided that they can't see any justification for adding Carousel (or should that be Carosel?) mode to US cars just to keep pace with the new Roundabout mode mooted for UK buyers.

I guess that's just how it goes when you buy an American car.

 

[AndrewGR]

Ouch battpower! An entertaining slant on auto features. I relaxed my grip on the wheel recently when auto steering in a traffic jam. Car stopped abruptly from 5mph and put on the hazard lights. Driver behind wasn’t amused and kept a big gap after that!