WARNING: I rear-ended someone today while using Auto Pilot in my brand new P90D!

[brec]

In another thread, Reported autopilot accident :

I think what's most disturbing is that I was following the very car I struck for a few minutes, and everything was working normally. There was no indication of anything wrong. AP was engaged but it just stopped working. [emphasis added]

In this thread, the only evidence I can find of the OP's doubt as to which car TACC was following:

bhzmark, at the time it [that "the car tacc/AP was tracking didn't change lanes and go around the stopped car that you hit?"] didn't seem to be the case, but I can't be 100% sure. The beating I'm taking on this forum has made me doubt myself a bit.

N.B. I am not accusing anyone of anything. All I'm interested in is what actually happened, as best we may be able to ascertain.

 

[dhanson865]

Right... Or not. I'm not dramatic, I'm using this thing called logic. You know, the logic to not automatically take everything I read on the internet as fact. Good lord...

Jeff

Jeff

No what you are using is this thing call quantity over quality. You just keep being overbearing and rude to other posters as often as you can hoping to beat them into submission.

 

[sandstruck]

In another thread, Reported autopilot accident :


In this thread, the only evidence I can find of the OP's doubt as to which car TACC was following:


N.B. I am not accusing anyone of anything. All I'm interested in is what actually happened, as best we may be able to ascertain.

Sorry, but at this stage i can't even begin to remember how soon before the accident any car (s) swiched lanes in front of me. At this stage it would be fruitless to speculate on anything based on my recollections of the event.

I have asked the Service Manager for any data from the logs that might shed more light on what happened, including how fast i was going immediately before the alarm went off, and how soon before the alarm went off did the system begin tracking a car (though i'm not sure if the logs show such a thing). If the logs show i began tracking a car seconds before the alarm, then i essentially know that the system may have been tracking a different car than i thought it was, and once it picked up the correct car there wasn't enough time for it to stop the car.

 

[Andyw2100]

In this thread, the only evidence I can find of the OP's doubt as to which car TACC was following:

Below are two others, both from yesterday. I stopped looking after finding those two so quickly. I know there were more, from before yesterday.

Again, my intention in posting this to begin with (and to continue to post) is to try to warn people to not be complacent and to figure out what went wrong (besides not being careful enough and relying too much on the system). I could really care less if i'm criticized. I truly can"t remember if (or when) a car may have come into my lane or switched out of my lane preceeding the collision (sorry).

During the discussion i asked him numerous times if the logs would show if i'd inadvertantly switched off the TACC and he affirmed that it would (At one point i asked him what TACC stood for and he had to ask someone else). I proposed that perhaps the radar (or camera) temporarily lost the car in front of me, or maybe it was still tracking another car that had switched lanes and i didn't realize it until it was too late. He said those scenarios were plausible.

So my conclusion is that i must not have realized i wasn't tracking the car in front of me. The alarm that went off right before impact advised me that the car was in over its head and required me to intervene. The dilemma for me, is that cars coming into or leaving my lane have a bigger chance of confusing the system, but to minimize encroaching, i must set the time/distance lag at an unsafe interval.

 

[Jeff65]

While I love this feature, I always set the distance to 6 or 7 car lengths.

 

[SmartElectric]

The technology is still young. I wish I had it on my classic Model S, but can wait a few more years to see how things evolve.

Related:

 

[LetsGoFast]

I feel that in order to satisfy my natural curiosity about such matters, everyone should immediately purchase and install a camera. Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.

 

[CuriousG]

I've had experiences just yesterday with TACC that disagree.
On the IC, when a vehicle is halfway in/out of a lane, and there's another vehicle ahead, it will ghost both.
It reacts to the slower ghost (even if it's mostly out of your lane)

I had an incident yesterday where the auto emergency braking kicked in. I was on a slight curve in the fast lane with autopilot on. When looking at the instrument cluster an adjacent car slightly ahead looks like it's coming into your lane even though that is not what's happening. I was surprised when I felt the brakes kick in momentarily.

 

[JenniferQ]

Had the same thing happen several times. It never happened for me in 7.0. This needs a fix soon.

 

[Andyw2100]

I had an incident yesterday where the auto emergency braking kicked in. I was on a slight curve in the fast lane with autopilot on. When looking at the instrument cluster an adjacent car slightly ahead looks like it's coming into your lane even though that is not what's happening. I was surprised when I felt the brakes kick in momentarily.

Had the same thing happen several times. It never happened for me in 7.0. This needs a fix soon.

What makes you say Automatic Emergency Braking kicked in? Did you hear an alarm / chime? Did you see this alert?

If you can't answer "Yes" to both those questions, I think what you experienced was probably TACC slowing your car down, not AEB.

 

[msnow]

Had the same thing happen several times. It never happened for me in 7.0. This needs a fix soon.

Ditto, happened to me yesterday. I didn't know what was happening. It was on a neighborhood street and TACC wasn't on.

 

[Andyw2100]

Ditto, happened to me yesterday. I didn't know what was happening. It was on a neighborhood street and TACC wasn't on.

So you were driving along, with TACC off, and the car just sounded an alert, braked, and displayed this for no apparent reason?

If that's what any or all of you are saying, I think that this is a discussion that warrants its own thread.

 

[msnow]

So you were driving along, with TACC off, and the car just sounded an alert, braked, and displayed this for no apparent reason?

View attachment 108389

If that's what any or all of you are saying, I think that this is a discussion that warrants its own thread.

To be honest I don't remember seeing that message but I wasn't looking at the IC. It was sudden and very hard braking. What I saw in front of me was the car directly in front moving into another lane. My speed was about 25-30 mph (guessing) and I couldn't understand what triggered it because that hadn't ever happened before.

 

[Andyw2100]

To be honest I don't remember seeing that message but I wasn't looking at the IC. It was sudden and very hard braking. What I saw in front of me was the car directly in front moving into another lane. My speed was about 25-30 mph (guessing) and I couldn't understand what triggered it because that hadn't ever happened before.

Do you have Forward Collision Warning enabled? If so, did it alert? (Loud sound, image below.)

You could not miss the sound of the Forward Collision Warning alerting!

 

[NoMoGas]

It very much sounds as though AEB failed to operate for you,.

Based on what? AEB is NOT designed to avoid a collision. It is designed to LESSEN THE IMPACT of an unavoidable collision, (I think this is dumb but hey, I didn't write the manual) which based on the minor damage looks to be exactly what happened.

WAY to many assumptions on this thread.

 

[bhzmark]

It cld be they tried design aeb to prevent collisions, but it may not be perfect so lets just say to lessons the impact.

But aeb isnt relevant to this incident.

Andy, accepting your vocabulary: ok, tacc only tracks one target car at a time. But ap/tacc also tracks other cars too. See the display. At some point it has to decide if a non-target car is now the new target car. It cld have gotten that wrong.

Also I think tacc does sometimes see car in your lane and thimk you will drive around it. See th3 blue prius video. Where tracked car changes lanes to go into a turning lane revealing a stopped car in front of it. The tacc has to decide will the tesla follow the tracked car thus going around the stopped car? Or will it stay in this lane and thus need to stopbehind the stopped car? When the driver who is still steering and tacc make different decisions that can be a probelm. But with autosteer doing the steering, it should coordinate with tacc to either steer and follow the tracked car, or stay in the same lane and stop behind the new car.

 

[msnow]

Do you have Forward Collision Warning enabled? If so, did it alert? (Loud sound, image below.)

View attachment 108390

You could not miss the sound of the Forward Collision Warning alerting!

Yes it did and I always have FC on. My wife reminded me of a similar situation the day after I updated to 7.1 but this time TACC was enabled. The car I was following and tracking slowed down to make a left turn and after it was in the left turn lane and I was about to pass it my car brakes hard even though no one was in front of me. I don't think there was any sound from the car. At the time I thought it was odd that TACC kept tracking the wrong car but brushed it off and forgot about until now.

 

[jeffro01]

No what you are using is this thing call quantity over quality. You just keep being overbearing and rude to other posters as often as you can hoping to beat them into submission.

Overbearing and rude? Interesting accusation. So you would prefer I simply just nod along with the rest of the sheep, believe everything I read on the internet as fact, and demand Tesla right this egregious wrong? Yeah... No... I can think for myself and will continue to do so. If you don't like it you have a few options, you could put me on ignore, stop reading my posts, stop replying to them, otherwise I'm sorry to say that I'm not going to stop posting because you seem to have issues with my posting style.

Given you've added nothing to this thread, nothing but insults towards me, perhaps you should go either provide something of substance or opt not to reply.

Jeff

 

[green1]

Maybe we can stop discussing who should, and should not, be allowed to talk in this thread, and move on to the subject of the thread itself...

 

[Andyw2100]

Andy, accepting your vocabulary: ok, tacc only tracks one target car at a time. But ap/tacc also tracks other cars too. See the display. At some point it has to decide if a non-target car is now the new target car. It cld have gotten that wrong.

My point is that it just takes a little time to pick up a new target, and in this situation something could have caused it to take even longer than the standard amount of time.

Also I think tacc does sometimes see car in your lane and thimk you will drive around it. See th3 blue prius video. Where tracked car changes lanes to go into a turning lane revealing a stopped car in front of it. The tacc has to decide will the tesla follow the tracked car thus going around the stopped car? Or will it stay in this lane and thus need to stopbehind the stopped car?

TACC just doesn't work that way. TACC never assumes you are going to change lanes. In the video you are talking about TACC did not pick up the new target car that was stopped in the lane the Model S was travelling in, as the old target car was turning.

Yes it did and I always have FC on. My wife reminded me of a similar situation the day after I updated to 7.1 but this time TACC was enabled. The car I was following and tracking slowed down to make a left turn and after it was in the left turn lane and I was about to pass it my car brakes hard even though no one was in front of me. I don't think there was any sound from the car. At the time I thought it was odd that TACC kept tracking the wrong car but brushed it off and forgot about until now.

Hard to say, but this sounds like a situation where TACC thought the target car was still at least partially in your lane, so braked to avoid contact with it.