I have found that I had to learn how to use it because it is definitely different than regular driving not that it’s a steep learning curve.
My drives from Santa Barbara to Hollywood in horrible traffic and then my drives back after midnight are significantly easier.
IIRC … you’re in a Tesla, correct? And you were a nervous / anxious conventional manual driver?
I am Tesla as of March of this year.
You know how 80% of drivers think that they are above average? I am in the 20% who know that they aren’t good drivers. I am not even close to a reckless driver. I suck at it so I am careful. Anxious is probably overstating it though. Mainly though I hate driving. Also I am a horribly parallel parker and FSD does that for me. FSD has been a godsend on par with GPS.
People who hate it the most are actual good drivers and people who love to drive. It doesn’t behave the way they expect it to behave.
Has anyone suggested moving the latest Tesla software revision reviews to their own thread? I’m sure they are interesting for Tesla owners or those that want to research Teslas.
It was suggested a ways back and declined.
I’m completely uninterested when someone posts something like “v.12.q.xmark3 update tonight, I hope!”
But I’m very interested when someone posts “v.12.q.xmark3 updated two days ago, here’s the progress or lack of progress on autonomous driving!” And I definitely consider the latter thread-appropriate.
Agree w @Maserschmidt in general. But now that we’re almost 7 years and 2100+ posts in, a certain amount of self-driving-adjacent banter is sorta par for the course.
That’s fair.
Appreciate the long review.
Do you know offhand who makes the system? I think it’s Mobileye but I’m not certain.
That’s surprisingly bad. Even the Kia system I used didn’t do that. It stayed centered reasonably well. The danger from that system is that even mild events could disengage it and there was little notification that this had happened.
Tesla of course never has any problem at all, even with highly degraded lines, highway or surface streets, traffic or not, pedestrians or not, etc. It’s very rare that it ever loses track, and then only in cases which would be a challenge for a human.
I’m not sure where the sarcasm starts and ends there!
No sarcasm at all: The Tesla system does an amazing job sometimes, and a terrible job other times. It seem to depend on the exact nature of the visual issue that causes the problem.
It can see the lines perfectly when driving into the sun or with rain and glare. These are instances when this human has lots of difficulty. Tesla has problems when the lines are extremely faded. The car may think there is one huge lane, while a human has no problem understanding there multiple lanes when the lane dividers are extremely faded or sparse.
No sarcasm. The car does better than I do on average. There are some situations where I do better, like when context dependence is hugely important. It got confused a while back in the dark and very heavy rain while driving through a curved intersection. I could see where to go based on my knowledge of the intersection, but the car didn’t. Occasionally we’ll have patches of highway where the markings are totally gone for a bit–no one really has any idea where they’re supposed to be, so basically you try to stay on the path and not hit anyone–and the car doesn’t do great there, either. But as you say the car does better in heavy glare (probably because of the side/rear cameras). And I’ve never had problems with moderately faded lines, either.
On surface streets, the idea of a lane might be very loose to start with. No markings, maybe some cars on the side, bicyclists, pedestrians–the car does just fine with positioning, maybe staying in the center for maximum safety but moving to the side if there’s oncoming traffic.
Never had any case that I’d call “terrible”. Worse than a human, sometimes, but not dramatically so. And always in highly degraded circumstances.
Where the FSD fails the most is in total darkness or if it’s foggy at night. Failure here means that the screen turns red and it screeches at me and tells me to take over. If it’s a little foggy it will still work and do fine but I get a warning that FSD may be degraded.
Got 2024.27.25 tonight and gave it a spin.
Now only one step back! The lane-picking problem is fixed. But that turn lane is still confusing it a bit–I had a green light but it was stopping. It probably would have gone eventually, but it was a bit stale and I didn’t want to miss it, so I gave it some gas.
Low-speed jerkiness is mostly fixed, though not completely. Handled a speedbump just fine that it didn’t before. But there were still some jerky situations at <5 mph.
It handled some construction cones very nicely. There’s some work done on the entrance road to my place, with cones taking up most of the actual lanes. With cars parked on the side, you have t actually weave around the cones to get through. It did this just fine.
So overall a small but welcome improvement over the previous version. And hopefully they have HW3 and HW4 running in a way that they can keep the deployments running in parallel from now on.
I do wonder how HW4 would do in the same situations. Did they have to quantize the model in a way that would cause the low-speed behavior? Or is it just a 12.5 thing?
It came with Actually Smart Summon as well, but I didn’t try it.
I got 2024.27.10 yesterday and only briefly used it. 2024.27.25 is installing now. The big change is that there is no steering wheel nag if you have sunglasses. Day time driving could be annoying with photochromic lenses. I will be driving from Santa Barbara to Hollywood and back for a show tomorrow so I will get bad traffic there and smooth sailing back home at midnight.
I think A.S.S. is insane. I don’t trust it at all. I can see using the dumb summon to get out of a parking space if the other car is too close. The summon feature in the future is supposed to integrate with MyQ garage openers which could be useful to me. I am already partially integrated. The garage opens automatically when I get home and shuts when I leave. I have to use the remote to close it after I park and to open it when I am going to get into the car.
Next improvements for FSD are End-to-End on Highway and improved lane change decisions.
To complement your BMW experience with my VW experience, we have bought a new T-Cross that has very similar features to what you describe. The adaptive cruise control is excellent but it keeps a bigger distance to the car in front, so this being Germany means that often someone will get in between, so the cruise control will slow down to restore the right distance, so someone will get in between again, and so on. When there is a slow car in front or one that is turning right and almost at a standstill it slows down and keeps the distance just fine, but when that car clears the way it is about one second slower to react and accelerate than I would have done.
It has twice told me to break (red sign flashing and beeping noise) while driving at 90 km/h in a three lane section of the Berliner Stadtautobahn. If you don’t react, it breaks with 60% of the breaking power required to stop, you are supposed to add the 40% with your foot. Only there was no reason to break, the lanes were all clear. To make it shut up you have to accelerate. I guess if you don’t expect this it can be very dangerous.
Speaking of seeng ghosts and suddenly breaking hard there is this story about Tesla’s braking habit that still gets mentioned in German newspapers (link in German and probably paywalled, translation of some parts after the link):
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/lebensgefahr-autopilot-gutachter-muss-testfahrt-im-tesla-nach-phantombremsung-abbrechen/100070945.html
Expert has to abort test drive in Tesla after phantom braking
A Model 3 brakes abruptly by almost 50 kilometers per hour. Following cars can only just avoid it. A German expert now confirms the phenomenon for the first time.
The expert opinion is significant “because for the first time an independent, court-appointed expert has confirmed the occurrence of phantom braking”,
His findings were devastating: There had been five situations in which the autopilot “behaved implausibly”. According to the expert, he was able to rectify four cases through personal intervention without causing any danger. The Tesla had reduced its speed twice in roadworks on a narrow road because the assistance system had estimated the distance to the cars in the adjacent lane to be too small.
After the fifth situation, however, the engineer was forced to abort the test drive with the autopilot. The expert was driving at a speed of 140 km/h in the left-hand lane of a three-lane section of the highway when the vehicle suddenly braked to 96 km/h. There was no discernible reason for the maneuver - neither corresponding signage nor other influences in the ongoing traffic.
Back to VW: I am happy with what I got. It is simple, primitive even, it forces me to to keep paying attention to traffic, I would not want more for the moment. The breaking stuff is bad, though, and it has happened twice during the 3,500 km I have driven so far. Has Tesla solved this in the USA?
It’s been a while since I experienced the last phantom braking event. And never to that degree, though I tend to drive a little slower than 140 km/h.
I don’t know that it’s been totally eliminated yet, but with the switch to vision-only it’s been much reduced. My car has radar but I don’t know if it’s used at all, since newer cars are vision-only and they all use the same software stack.
Standard low-resolution radar will always have phantom braking. It has only a few “pixels” of resolution, so it can’t distinguish between fixed objects beside/above the road and other cars. They use various heuristics (like ignoring stationary objects), but that only helps so much, and unless you already know the exact geometry of the road, it can still get confused. I’ve never heard of a radar-based adaptive cruise control / automatic braking system that didn’t have it to some degree.
At least with Tesla, you can override the braking with the accelerator. Even when I experienced it, I only lost ~10 km/h before I was able to correct for it.
I’ve never experienced phantom braking with FSD on surface streets. Sometimes it is a bit too cautious (like with yellow lights), but I’ve never seen it brake for no reason.
Yes, same with VW. You can override everthing by doing something else. The driver must stay alert, which is a good thing IMO.
Meanwhile Mercedes has just obtained permission from the German autorities to deploy Full Self Drive Level 3 for the top models under limited driving conditions up to 95 km/h. They hope to raise that speed to 130 km/h next year. 130 km/h, though still slow by German autobahnstandards, would at least be acceptable. It costs 6,000 €, it seems.
In the USA they have not yet introduced it, here they specify “for speeds up to 40 MPH”. That was what they had for Germany in January 2022.
I don’t think I want that yet, we’ll see in a couple of years. Wonder when the first accident of an autonomous Mercedes will be reported and what the precise conditions were when it happened.
At least on mine there is an adjustment for following distance. Which is speed-aware. You might have that too.
Even with the adjustment, the issue remains that I need it to follow more loosely than I would if driving manually, so I have time for it to “think”, react late or not at all, and then time for me to take over and still have room to do my thing safely. With the result that the following distance is big enough other drivers like to jump into that big juicy gap.
'Zactly. It totally reminds me of the early days of PCs running waay too much software on waaaay too little hardware. I’m driving several seconds ahead of reality. It’s driving a couple seconds behind reality. That lag is super-stupid and super-dangerous. And delivers a lot of petty annoyances such as your example.
I have yet to experience phantom braking BMW-style. But good to know I have a new risk to be alert for. 60% effort on my brakes will exceed maximum braking on most ordinary cars and every commercial vehicle. Oh joy.
Yes, I set it to the lowest possible distance right away; it is still too much, particularly in heavy-ish commuter traffic, when people drive closer to each other and are generally more impatient and irritable.
One problem I see is that it always reacts the same. People, on the other hand, sometimes drive like sunday-drivers and sometimes must drive hastily, because they are running late. The computer does not take anything into account. I would like a control that allows me to set the level of “frenziness” or “aggressivity” or whatever the marketing people would like to call that.
That is very well put, I have the same feeling.
Remember: if it breaks for no reason, accelerate! You must override the bug.