what does the blue car in AP dash stand for?

[tescroft]

Sometimes when driving slowly, the car in front gets colored blue in Tesla AP1 Dashboard when Autopilot is on. What does that mean? I didn't figure it out. Also, it is not deterministic when it gets blue. Sometimes, the same car remains white when stopping in front, sometimes it gets blue. Any insights?

 

[Buddy]

Blue means the AP system is using that "blue" car to drive.

When the 2 lane lines are "blue", thr AP system is using the lane markings to drive on AP.

 

[tescroft]

Hmm, AP1 sometimes also follows a white colored car.

 

[daktari]

Ap2 almost never use the blue car in my experience.
But it also changes from a grey car (not activated) to a white car (activated).

 

[mitchellh3]

Ap2 almost never use the blue car in my experience.
But it also changes from a grey car (not activated) to a white car (activated).

Similar, I've never seen AP2 keep a car blue for longer than a split second (maybe a few hundred ms max).

I've wondered what AP2's capabilities are with regard to car following since it seems to try very heavily not to use it. Its been a long time but I remember with AP1 the car would be blue a lot more often (especially within intersections) and it seems to actually follow it decently well.

 

[mrkisskiss]

I was wondering about this recently as well... AP1 actually shows a blue car quite often; I imagine you'd see it at least once every drive. On AP2, I've seen it just a couple of times ever...

It seems like it's not really something that's linked specifically to Mobileye's chip, and you'd think AP2 would be able to do it - it's clearly seeing the car in front just fine, and the radar is all Tesla's stuff anyway... well, who knows.

 

[croman]

AP2, I've seen the blue car for a while. In fact, I just had my first blue car on the interstate (which wasn't good). Lane lines were clear, car just stopped following them and locked into follow the leader for car in front. It was unnerving at high speeds.

Blue car = radar/visual lock on car not lane lines (generally happens briefly in intersections or other areas were lane lines fails and AP was engaged already). It is also called "follow the leader" because your car will use the lead car as a guide instead of other things (like lane markers). AP1 and 2 use lots of information to determine travel path (lane markers, botts dots, curbs, road edge, etc.). AP2 should start using HD maps to really avoid the common issues in path planning.

 

[jlarmstr]

Blue cars in the instrument panel, as others have stated, means that the car has locked itself to the car ahead, and is using the car ahead as a guide for auto steer (to maintain a directional vector I suppose). This is invariable due to the system losing the lock on the lane markers as a auto-steering (i.e. I only see blue cars if it loses lane markers, so I am speculating here) and will only use it for moments until it finds the markers again, and if it does not, I have noticed, it will disengage auto-steer altogether.

 

[kort677]

as long as there isn't anything red you're ok

 

[mitchellh3]

Its been almost a week now that I've had 17.32.17 and there are a few observations I can make about this blue car:

This version will use the lead car for guidance much more than I've ever seen any prior version.

Likely related but also with a combination of other things: interchanges are a lot more stable on local roads with Autosteer. Still not very usable, but it went from completely unpredictable to whether Autosteer would turn into oncoming traffic in an intersection to most of the time being decent. Its still not good.

But related to interchanges: I've noticed it will use the lead car (highlight the car blue) much longer than any other version I've had.

My feeling is that the control algos are trying to get smarter about "follow the leader" now. They're still not good, but they appear to use it more than any other version.