The big question. Nag or No Nag?

No nag. Autosteer and Auto Lane Change settings default to OFF. If you enable them, you get a pop-up. Once accepted, you're set.

IMHO, Tesla is doing the right thing emphasizing this Beta and requires hands-on attention from the driver -- from Elon's press pitch through the various documentation and into the settings, and keeping these settings off by default, requiring driver action to turn them on. Tesla has not gone overboard, like I've had in previous luxury vehicles to just allow the Nav to boot up every time I turned the ICE on for the many years I owned each one.

 

No nag. Just came back from a 98 mile round trip through Washington DC traffic - I-270, no less - and it worked great. It was confused on merges a time or two. Told me to take over in a very confusing construction zone area (267 to Dulles), and that was about it. It changed lanes fine, but had to keep the blinkers going until it is almost done crossing the lane change.

Overall, it is very capable. Only if I learn to relax and let it handle the road...

 

How come the early video reviews are so split on this topic? Some claim their cars nag them every few minutes, where others claim they drove for miles and miles without a nag. Is it possible the nags are more severe in some states/places than others? Like a kind of pre-emptive regulatory side-step which differs depending on which jurisdiction you're in? Because to me, it seems like the people in Texas and Florida are not having any of the nagging issues that I see happen with the Californians. But then again, maybe our roads just suck. (they do)

 

I just watched this vid that did appear to nag. Not sure if it was due to the surroundings though.

http://youtu.be/Mx4RjZRZon0

 

Maybe it's a definition of "nag"??

When I drove mine this morning and afternoon in Napa Valley, CA, I got no nagging. I don't know what you mean. 60 miles, hands touching wheel, but unnecessary. The car doesn't care if you are touching wheel.

ONE TIME when it couldn't see the road well, it asked that I take the wheel. I don't call that nagging.

It showed guard rails, bushes, cars, flatbed trucks nearby. Never dodged any of them. It followed cars to a complete stop at a signal, hands and feet free, and back up to speed.

It veered slightly at left turn lanes as the double yellow moved away, but it came right back to the proper lane. It veered slightly at a right lane exit. But it drives pretty darn good. On curvy two lanes, and on divided four lanes.

I noticed that I could see further down the road than the radar could see, so I knew of curves and would have gone into them more smoothly, but it was not designed to drive two lane curvy roads at 55 mph.

I LIKE IT!

 

No nag! It just says "I don't know, help!" In certain situations. It's a perfound experience, it totally changes the car. It's almost like the car's learning to drive and I have to help it sometimes. This is very well executed and a lot of fun to play around with.

 

There is most definitely nag. Not quite sure what triggers it... my guess at this point from what I have seen is a large curve that the car has to navigate (even though it has no trouble doing so) will prompt it to nag me to touch the wheel (done so twice). If I refuse, I get I think it is 2 more chances/nags... about 30 seconds apart. After that (if steering wheel is left untouched), the TACC will stop functioning (the icon still shows it enabled), the car will beep constantly, and a message will say something similar to "take control to resume speed". I drove a good 2 minutes in this state. The beeping is quite annoying. The car kept steering, but I had to modulate the accelerator to keep my speed up as I would without TACC. After ~2 minutes, when i got tired of the beeping (and it may have been less than 2 minutes, but it felt like a long while), I gave the steering wheel some pressure/torque, and everything was nice and happy again. This same situation happened twice on large curved sections of highway, with a car in front of me. I do not think it was because the car was having difficulty, rather I think it is a programming decision that on certain size bends, the driver is then asked to respond. For what reason, I'm not sure (given that I could then drive 20 minutes without a nag, so it isn't to keep my attention).

Also, while i understand the car wanting to, in some fashion, get the drivers attention, I am surprised that using the accelerator pedal and adjusting cruise speed via the stalk doesn't signal to the car "ok, driver isn't dead, carry on". I'm sure this will all be tweaked over time.

 

If these are posted somewhere else, I apologize, but I didn't see it. Definitely discuss the lack of timed nag and overall ability of the AP system.

Tesla Autopilot Self-Driving Autonomous First Test

Log In - The New York Times

 

I drove mine in Autopilot mode for about 60 miles today. I drove about 20 before it ever gave a nag. Then suddenly it nagged me 3 times in about 7-8 min. Then didn't again for a long way. It wasn't particularly well marked road, any of it. I really couldn't figure out what triggered the nag.

 

I agree with roblab, we are spinning here a bit on what "nag" is. My definitionS:

1. Traditionally, I have always known a "nag screen" as something that always pops up at the same time, e.g. earlier Navigation Systems on many, many non-Tesla vehicles forced you to push an "OK" button to acknowledge the driver was responsible to keep their eyes on the road, on the screen before the actual Nav function and display would become operational. Autosteer has no such thing beyond an initial acknowledgement when the driver turns the option ON in settings.

2. Autosteer will also present a pop-up (I don't call it a "nag" to avoid confusion, but fine if you want to), when the driver has initiated Autosteer with a double pull of the stalk and then only when MS needs the driver to take control. From reading hundreds of V7 posts in the past 24 hours, it seems that pop-up occurs when Autosteer is not sure what it should be doing, dependent upon the situation of the road, traffic, your speed and conditions, and how the sensors on your particular vehicle are reacting at that moment in time. Unlike what I call a "traditional nag screen", my experience with Autosteer thus far does not present a pop-up every time I initiate it, every few minutes, or necessarily at the same road location every time (I've gone over same section 3 times and only once had a pop-up in that similar area), which is just how I would want it to operate. In theory, Autosteer uses the physical situation going on with and around your MS at the moment, but it also uses crowd-sourced data to hopefully improve the way it causes all our MS to drive in similar conditions and/or locations, so pop-ups should again, in theory, reduce in their frequency somewhat as more MS go over the same sections of road (and perhaps in similar conditions) and Tesla refines their algorithms.

 

Greg, I agree with you fully, until your last sentence. To be clear, if the car was having issues in any way I could see/expect, and then prompted me to take over, as BertL said, sure, lets not call that a nag, lets call it a pop up. That has happened to me, infrequently to be sure, and I had some idea why it popped up.

As I stated up thread, I have also had it 'nag' me. Same pop up, however, different circumstance, where the car doesn't exhibit any odd behavior, yet wants my input, and 'shuts down' (by slowing down) if I don't give it the input it wants. It is interesting that I seem to be on the minority with this 'issue' (and in the scheme of things, I admit it isn't a big issue, there are certainly more pressing problems for the AP team to work on, like apparently lane markings in Vegas). I would just love to understand why I am getting the prompt. It happened again this morning at the same curve. Comments were made (by Elon? can't recall) that different areas have different Autopilot behaviors due to legislation (or that is how i understood it). Perhaps my city/province/country has something causing Tesla to nag/prompt on large curves lol.

 

On several occasions mine has prompted "hold steering wheel". I'm not sure if that is a nag or a "be ready to take over" alert. One time I didn't do it and it started slowing my car down.

 

I consider it "be ready to take over" in your terms. It wasn't nagging you on something inconsequential or repetitive like those stupid Nav Screen must-respond-to's I've had for years on previous luxury brands every time I turned my car on before I could see the Nav map (IMHO those nag screens were there as much to try and make sure the driver knew they were still in charge, as the auto mfgr's lawyers had that required feedback message there to head-off possible litigation). When that message pops-up on your MS, Autosteer for some reason isn't confident enough to deal with the situation itself and wants the driver to take full control. As a documented design point, MS will slow down to a stop if you don't heed that pop-up -- IMHO in case something happened to it's driver (like you passed out). It's probably the best last resort option programming-wise Tesla could choose when both the program's logic can't decide what is the best course of action to take with reasonable confidence AND the driver elects not to respond by taking back complete control of the wheel. IMHO, its a very good basic design premise by Tesla for these early years with AutoPilot as we all learn a whole lot more.

IMHO, we just need to move on... If we want to use Autopilot as it is now moving out into real-world use (Thank you Tesla), when we see the "hold the steering wheel" pop-up, we just need to take control, and for me, from a x-programmer perspective, it would be of interest what are the conditions one was in why we may think that pop-up may have presented itself (fog, lack of right or left or both lines, what?)... Then one day, if you go through the same area and similar conditions again, does the pop-up occur or not? Knowing that may start to give us on this forum a glimpse as to how far the general crowd-sourcing data Tesla is collecting can actually improve Autosteer logic, opposed to if a new drop of code has occurred to our MS where programming logic has been changed. I suspect there is some combination of the two taking place, but the reality is, Autosteer can function if our LTE connection is out, so how the crowd-sourcing data is really used and then distributed back to each of our MS with AutoPilot is something only Tesla Engineers probably really understand today... That data may just be collected by Tesla and analyzed for programmers to improve algorithms in future drops of Autosteer code to our MS -- hard to say if it's real-time or not. Maybe one day we out here in the WWW will have some appreciation for at least a little more of the underlying detail how that all happens, but I suspect we'll be guessing at it for a long time. Lots of semantics that can be understood a zillion-ways-from-Sunday unless you get down in the bowels of the implementation. If I were Elon and Tesla, I'd keep that sort of detail very proprietary in these early years and try to use it to my business advantage longer-term. You can bet Google is doing that with how they manage their autonomous cars, as will every other auto company out there until the day comes for cars from different mfgrs that have to communicate to one-another when standards need to be created, or one company or the other decides they can sell their "self-driving logic" to others...

 

I don't think you're using nag the way everyone else is. You were on a curve and the car wasn't confident so it asked you to put your hands on the wheel. That isn't a nag.


A nag nag is a constant times action to keep the system active.

 

I have been nagged several times in almost this exact fashion. On a perfect road with no issues. And I will get randomly nagged. The car clearly had a good lock on the road and did not need any input. It isn't a consistently timed thing but it certainly want occasional input, even when not needed.