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Why allow roll back on a hill ?

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I use 2 pedal operation during slow speed negotiations and find having 'gravity pull' available at all times is a needed feature. Hold the accel while you are waiting with the brake ON until the coast is clear. Then let off the brake and LAUNCH. Do not mind the nanny chimes!!
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My bad. At a certain steepness touching the brake will KILL accel, forcing you to start over again with the accel pedal. I run into this driving up (steep) trailer ramps. The proper way to drive up trailer ramps is *never* hit the brake until all 4 wheels are up on deck. If you chicken out and hit the brake the car coasts back and you have to start all over. So this is what the OP has on his driveway, just not as steep. He should try just not using the brake at all.

My MS has creep ON (when did that happen?).
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Now that i have trained myself to not use the brakes when parking on a hill, the Assist function isn't bad. It still doesn't always do the hold, so it's a kind of guess. As to why it doesn't just hold until you press the accelerator pedal--I have no idea. It shouldn't use any more energy than holding the brakes with your foot. Maybe this is just a step to hill hold. (e.g. We'll try it this way and if it works without problems we'll make it hold longer.)

I hear what Johan says about safety, but I'm not convinced as there is a warning beep when you open the door and the gear selector is not in park. It would be very rare to have both the hill assist and the door alarm fail at the same time.

+1
It took me a while to get use to when and how the hill assist works, but now that I am getting use to it, it is second nature to me. Still haven't figured out why it works sometimes, and not others. (So I always prepare for it not to work).
I have driven both AT and MT. CREEP is off in my car.
 
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@wycolo -- How easy is it to hold position on very steep hills using only the accelerator pedal? Nothing steep enough out here to try out...

I know you asked wycolo but there is a parking deck here with a very steep exit ramp. Have no issues holding car in place with accelerator although I do like the hill hold better.
 
If you have creep ON, it will perform a 1 second hill assist. If you don't, it'll just roll backwards -- I have no idea why that's the case, but I agree with you.

This isn't correct. The 1 second hill assist is unrelated to the creep setting, at least on my Model S running 5.9. I never use creep but I get the 1 second hill assist (which has a separate setting anyway) benefit.

More on creep here:
Clutches and Creep | Tesla Living
 
I just drove my MS in stop-and-go traffic on a hilly road this afternoon. What a pain!
With all of the convenient-but-in-no-way-"necessary" things this car can do, it seems
silly that there isn't an anti-rollback option (which I can only imagine a tiny minority of drivers
not turning on once and never thinking about it again). The "vehicle hold" is better than
nothing (wish I'd known about it earlier today...), but it still requires switching your foot
from the accelerator pedal to the break pedal before you start rolling backward. I think
most people think that when a car is in a forward gear the only time you should need the
break is to reduce your (non-negative) forward velocity. But, due the wonders of software,
we don't need a one-size-fits-all solution here and this can be an option.
 
Just for the record, I've driven manual cars for 20+ years and never once used the handbrake to hold the car from rolling back on a hill during a takeoff. 99.5% of the time on hills, once you've learned to drive a manual, your switch from brakes to take off is so quick that there is almost no roll back and the roll back that does occur is insignificant. The other 0.5% of the time where the person or obstacle behind you is close enough to lick your bumper, I did more of a heel/toe approach to take off.

Using the parking brake is an interesting technique, though certainly not required, and there's a few cars out there with parking brakes where it wouldn't work (like the foot operated parking brakes).
 
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