it's been over a year now since we had an update that matters here in Oz. Disney+ and games do not matter... sorry folks. An update that matters addresses the following nags, in no particular order:
- traffic light detection that works. 3 lights are green, one compound light with a right turn arrow is red. Car attempts to do an emergency stop. What's up with that? It's repeatable at the same lights (yes, plural) every time.
- when a speed sign stating 40 is moving with traffic, it's on a bloody bus. And it does not apply when the bus is moving. Nor does it apply when its lights aren't flashing. How hard is it to program that?
- 60 AHEAD means 60 AHEAD, not 60 NOW. Replace 60 with any other number, rinse and repeat.
- When the car does something unexpected (such as phantom braking, indicating the wrong way when merging lanes while on AP), we need a mechanism to tag when it happens combined with the ability to then read out what exactly happened and why. Not via service personnel, but via a software, a web interface, something we have access to. Essentially a blackbox readout. And no, "bug report" doesn't work, it doesn't understand me 90% of the time. Something like a quick double press of both wheels.
- Tesla need to learn that they are software company, not a car company. We need a trouble ticket system with visibility of what's being done about the software bug reports we send. Many of us spend an inordinate amount of effort to collect and provide detailed feedback on unexpected (and sometimes outright stupid) things our cars do.
And a few really trivial to implement ones:
- all camera feeds need to be recorded, including the B pillar cams, wide and narrow angle front. We're missing about 90 degrees from the field of view. This is really critical when trying to figure out where that bicycle I didn't see and almost ran over came from because its angular velocity matched that of the right hand A-pillar (and it was hidden from view by it) as I was turning left. Wife's frantic shouting saved him. I'm 99% sure he ran a red (must have as I did have a green) but can't conclusively proof it based on the footage.
- and on the topic of cameras: stop overwriting clips older than an hour. If I attach a 4TB SSD to the USB port, keep writing to it until it reaches the limit I should be able to manually specify, e.g. "leave 20GB for sentry/manual record trigger". Until that limit is reached, keep writing the clips.
After two years, I can say this car is still better than any other car I've ever owned and I wouldn't buy anything else, at least for now, but Tesla as a company is as shitty to deal with as your average sleazy bogan dealer around the corner.