If it often brakes hard and late to the point that people think you're brake checking them, then you shouldn't be using it. They don't think you're brake checking them, you ARE brake checking them.

Stop being dangerous on the road. This isn't a game.

>They don't think you're brake checking them, you ARE brake checking them.

This is the important part. Doesn't matter what the intent was, the fact of the matter is that the people behind you nearly rear-ended you because of your car's actions. And you, as the driver, never know when you might piss off the wrong driver - brake check the wrong person and suddenly you're in trouble with someone who might not care if you say, "But my car did it, not me! Honest!".

Even worse, the person behind you might fail the brake check. I can't believe people are knowingly operating faulty autopilots on public roads. If my car randomly braked I would take it to the mechanic - not continue to drive it.

Autopilot should be fixed, but the problem in your scenario is people trailing others too closely. If you fail phantom braking, you're going to fail real braking whether it's activated by a computer or not.

Safe trailing distance is determined by safe driving expecations. If everybody in the world started doing hard and sudden brakes, then the safe trailing distance would be extended.

While ideally everybody would always leave enough space for hard and sudden brakes (eg in case a deer runs across a road), the reality is that driving has a lot of loose rules, and you're expected to behave rationally and similarly to the other drivers on the road. For example it's usually fine to speed a little in the left lane if most people deem it safe to do so. And there's no strict definition for "reckless driving" despite it being illegal. Driving is an intricate social dance with millions of actors, and if you are the one acting way out of line, you are liable, and hard + sudden brakes for no reason, is definitely out of line.

(That's not to say this is the best system though. An autonomous system with well defined behaviors, less ambiguity, and less social guesswork, would probably be safer. But such a system would require full participation, not just one or two tesla drivers choosing to let Elon take the wheel)

> Safe trailing distance is determined by safe driving expecations.

Respectfully, it's not. A safe trailing distance is defined as enough room for you to stop even if the car in front of you stops abruptly (for example, if a kid or animal runs into the street), factoring in your reaction time and the stopping distance of your vehicle. The buffer isn't for normal variations in the speed of traffic, it's for anomalies.

> the reality is that driving has a lot of loose rules, and you're expected to behave rationally and similarly to the other drivers on the road

This isn't a valid excuse for unsafe following.

> Driving is an intricate social dance with millions of actors, and if you are the one acting way out of line, you are liable

I'm not sure what sense you mean "liable" here, but it's certainly not true in the legal sense--you're liable if you violate the law, for example, by following too closely (the law doesn't seem to care whether others follow too closely or not).

> An autonomous system with well defined behaviors, less ambiguity, and less social guesswork, would probably be safer.

It doesn't require full participation, it merely requires fewer fatalities caused per 1M miles than human drivers. That's the point at which we should legalize AI, and if it becomes significantly safer, that's the point at which we should mandate AI in the general case. And then something really interesting happens--we can start to do away with those ambiguities that make AI hard because human drivers become the exception rather than the rule. Rather than informal social systems governing driving, driving becomes a formal digital protocol. Maybe rather than relying on computer vision (or computer vision alone) cars are loaded with a national database containing the right-of-way rules, speed limits, scheduled maintenance, etc and/or they use other sensors. These things in turn make AI safer (discrete signals = fewer failures due to computer vision errors). Safe and ubiquitous AI could lead to much narrower roads, freeing up more space for pedestrian traffic.

Moreover, since cars are safer, they don't need to be so heavily armored--rather, they become smaller and lighter, which further increases safety by increasing survivability in pedestrian- or cyclist-involved accidents.

Moreover, those strict protocols could make transportation more efficient (a given road increases its throughput and latency for a without increasing lanes or compromising safety) because (1) cars are smaller and lighter as previously discussed, (2) AI can travel faster with less buffer due to its increased reaction times, and (3) because AI can coordinate so you don't have inefficient traffic patterns like "4 semis driving in quadruple file" or "one reckless ass hat changing lanes frequently, abruptly, and aggressively, causing everyone to slow down".

Without human drivers, maybe taxis become cost-competitive with public transit (or better) and fewer people need to own a car (and the cars they own needn't be so large since one can easily and cheaply rent a larger car for transporting large items). And for those who do own their own car, those cars can drop them off at their destination and park farther away (no need for so much parking downtown).

This is all just a sketch of some of the possibilities, but the point is that there's a horizon (a critical mass of AI cars) that could manifest in a cascade of other significant changes.

Accidents tend to happen when multiple things "go wrong". If a car accident happened every time some single thing was imperfect - well, car accidents would be more common than safe journeys. It's the confluence of multiple imperfections that result in car accidents (usually) - e.g. Driver 1 steps suddenly on the brakes AND Driver 2 is fiddling with the radio AND it's raining - or whatever, and you get a car accident.

So, yeah, maybe Driver 2 should be able to pass the brake check, but that doesn't mean it is good or safe or desirable for Driver 1 to be randomly brake checking people. Having a car that randomly brakes is like having a driver who randomly applies the brakes - you shouldn't do that, it's bad, and unsafe.

Brake checking is (usually) illegal in the US, albeit hard to prove without a dash cam or witnesses.

So no, it's not the case that people trailing too closely is the problem. It's the case of the Tesla requiring, without good reason, the car behind them to brake hard to avoid the collision. This is dangerous and (usually) illegal.

Teslas or people in general people should absolutely not break-check, but no, cars that drive so close to the car in front that they cannot safely stop in an emergency are tailgating.

I do agree there is some nuance, but it really saddens me that so many comments in this thread are supportive of a form of driving that, while very common, is unsafe for themselves and others. It's a form of normalisation of deviance and I'm sure it costs far more lives than teslas dodgy "autopilot" (even if that too should not be road legal).

In metropolitan areas (where I imagine most Teslas are driven), it often just isn’t possible to maintain a textbook-safe following distance. The instant you allow more than the average distance ahead of you, another car will jump in to fill the gap.

And?

People sometimes fill the gap in front of me, and if they're particularly unsafe about my induced following distance I flash my lights, flip them off, and back off. In a typical 30 mile drive in one of those metros it costs on the order of tens of seconds. People usually aren't that aggressive about filling gaps until they have something to gain, so the frequency of people causing you to slow down winds up being pretty low.

I would do pretty bad things to any person who would severely harm or kill my kids for example, and no amount of blaming car electronics or recent update would change that...

In this circumstance (crashing into the back of a tesla breaking hard) you would have been the person primarily to blame. Yes tesla sells a dodgy "autopilot" that does unexpected things (and in my opinion should not be road legal until fixed), but you were tailgating to the point where you couldn’t stop in time. The car behind has to be responsible for maintaining safe separation to the car in front (under reasonable circumstances).

edit: The "you" in the above being the hypothetical driver.

You and the Tesla aren't the only ones on the road. You can't control people behind you being just close enough to not be able to stop. Or having another person behind the Tesla swerve into you when trying to avoid hitting the Tesla.

There are plenty of scenarios where you are still impacted by the brake checking Tesla without you being at fault.

I kind of agree, however at least from my experience in Germany keeping at least the minimum legal distance is an exception rather than the norm. It kinda makes me mad and I wish it was mandatory for all cars to have sensors which would either not allow you to get closer given a certain speed to be in line with the regulations or at least make a really annoying sound so that you simply wouldn't want to. I would bet this would save so many lives.

There's a difference between doing bad things to prevent someone from hurting your kids and doing bad things to someone who hurt your kids in an accident. Acting in defense is justified, but acting in revenge should rightly land you in legal trouble (including prison depending on the severity of the "bad things").

My first thought was, what if it's a sheriff, police officer, or state patrol? Now you've got a couple nights in the county lockup, a reckless driving charge (this can be a misdemeanor or felony depending on the severity), and $thousands in towing and impound fees.

I don't think abrupt braking constitutes reckless driving (maybe it varies by location), and it seems like it would be pretty easy to fight by claiming you saw a deer/etc in the road. If the cop says he didn't see it, you respond with some variation of "unsurprising because you were following me too closely to see anything else". Of course, none of this absolves Tesla from fixing their software.

I can't imagine a cop anywhere in the world responding well to the phrase "unsurprising because you were following me too closely," especially if s/he already thinks you were brake checking them!

By the time you're fighting the ticket, it doesn't much matter how the cop reacts.

> By the time you're fighting the ticket, it doesn't much matter how the cop reacts.

Now you get to add a defense lawyer's trial rate...

It doesn't make sense to argue that the responsibility for a violent or aggressive interaction stops with the Tesla/etc driver rather than the maniac who responded aggressively. The Tesla/etc driver is responsible for his own driving, as is the person reacting to that driving. Further still, since we're being pedantic about litigating responsibility, the person trailing the Tesla/etc should be leaving plenty of room such that he can comfortably react to abrupt braking (the leading driver might have a good reason for braking quickly!).

>It doesn't make sense to argue that the responsibility for a violent or aggressive interaction stops with the Tesla/etc driver rather than the maniac who responded aggressively.

I never said that the responsibility stops with the Tesla driver. I simply said that it's wise to not put yourself in a situation where you may accidentally piss the wrong person off - this is a general sentiment that applies everywhere in life, really. You don't know if the person you're dealing with is the nicest, most understanding person in the world, or an absolute maniac who's been dealing with some heavy stuff and is one step away from losing their absolute shit. Yes, you're not responsible for someone else's emotions, but you are responsible for how you interact with them.

>Further still, since we're being pedantic about litigating responsibility, the person trailing the Tesla/etc should be leaving plenty of room such that he can comfortably react to abrupt braking (the leading driver might have a good reason for braking quickly!).

Of course. Surely you'd agree that nuance plays a large role here, though? There are often times where you'll find yourself closer to the back of a car than you'd like, despite your best efforts to maintain plenty of room (eg, someone cuts you off or moves into your lane with less distance than you'd like).

It's not a brake check if the person in front of you is slowing down and your braking is to maintain safe distance. A brake check is braking for the purpose of affecting those behind you. It seems clear he means it is braking due to the slow down ahead.

> A brake check is braking for the purpose of affecting those behind you.

Intent doesn't matter to the person in the other car, who likely is relying on your behavior to some extend to understand traffic ahead. If your driving seems like a brake check and brings in all of the unsafe conditions associated with brake checking, then it's a brake check.

Of course, the unsafe conditions aren't associated with braking, but with the failure of the trailing car to leave adequate room for their own braking. The accident here would happen whether the leading car had a justifiable reason to brake or not, and the trailing driver would be responsible in either case.

Unfortunately that just shows the person following was not doing so at a safe distance - any car you're driving behind could perform emergency braking at any moment.

^ It's this. I haven't been honked at yet, but I have felt a little apologetic to people behind me. I recently updates my follow distance from 3 to 4 and its helped tremendously.

Sure, but if you're doing it far later than a human would have done it, then you're really screwing with the person behind you who isn't an AI with instant response times.

This is why the law requires people to follow at a safe distance. If you're only leaving room for "instant response times" then you had better have instant response times because you're liable.

The question isn't who's legally liable. The question is are you doing things more unsafely than you need to be. You don't have to be legally at fault to be doing something that's unsafe for other drivers to deal with. Sudden breaking at highway speeds, especially for no actual reason, even if the person behind you is following at a safe distance, is rolling the dice that every car behind you for a while is driving at full attention.

"I require every other human driver to be driving correctly so that my AI-car may drive unsafely" seems like a bad bet. I'd also imagine that, if as a human, I just slammed on my breaks for no reason on the highway, I would be found to be at fault for an accident assuming the car behind me wasn't directly tailgating me.

You seem to view safety as some binary that doesn't account for frequency or severity of incidents. Your framing suggests you think it's better to continue with human drivers and the commensurate 40k lives lost each year than to use an AI that has even the slightest possibility of causing even the least significant accident irrespective of whether or not any accident occurs in practice.

I suggest it's better to compare a given AI with humans in terms of fatalities caused per million miles driven. If an AI performs a little better than humans it should be legalized and if it performs dramatically better than humans, it should be mandatory.

Of course, this is where we need more data and greater transparency so we can answer these questions.

I'm not trying to say that at all. What I'm saying is that we're at an awkward time now, where this sort of quick AI-assisted breaking is especially dangerous because fallible humans are most of the rest of the drivers on the road. In an all FSD world, this wouldn't really be a problem.

You're putting a lot of words in my mouth and assuming I'm against working on AI driving because one person might ever die. All I'm trying to point out is that it's pretty worrying to have a system that could cause a highway-speed accident because of a well-known and decently common bug. I'd be equally worried if it came up that some other decently selling model of car would randomly have the ABS system engage.

I wrote my OP here because the parent poster was casually talking about "not really break checking people" as if that's just normal behavior that's a part of R&D, instead of an AI accidentally emulating dangerous aggressive driving patterns that FSD is supposed to do away with. I'm not trying to ban FSD research or anything. I want this improved! It's just scary when people excuse dangerous behaviors by FSD systems because it's otherwise safer.

The other issue is that more data and greater transparency are both not things Tesla seems to have any interest in providing anyone, so while this may get fixed, it's not really pushing the industry forward all that much if no one other than Tesla is going to benefit. There's plenty of mentions in this thread of this sort of issue happening on other cars and adaptive cruise control systems that could benefit from an improvement for the betterment of all drivers, but instead "not breakchecking people" is going to be a unexplained feature improvement in some FSD patch probably.

if a car is tailgating me (less than one car length of space behind me above 30 mph), and my Tesla sees a ghost and brakes hard, and the car behind me rams into me, then that is completely on them. it's on me if they were further away than that.

Sure, but fault aside, you still just got into a highway-speed car accident. I don't get to decide if the person behind me is a reckless driver or not and "but the law says it's not my fault" doesn't do away with any injuries or damage to my car that happens because of it. There's plenty of completely legal things you can do that will create unsafe situations on the road, and you get a mark on your insurance for getting in the accident whether or not it's your legal fault that it happened (as I found out when I lost the front half of my car to flying road debris.)

But it's cool technology. A death or two is worth it /s

> But it's cool technology. A death or two is worth it /s

You're clearly trolling here, but maybe we can reframe this into something worth discussing: does autopilot result in more or fewer deaths per 1M miles driven than the median human driver? That seems like a reasonable threshold/criteria for legalizing the technology.

This sounds dangerous enough that I'd reconsider even driving the vehicle. I have a 2019 model 3 and I've experienced phantom braking twice. Both times I was on the highway with autopilot enabled and was passing a truck that cast a shadow over my lane. After the first experience I refused to even use autopilot for months afterwards.

Just recently I was driving in the right lane of a suburban road (with no assisted driving features enabled) and some trees on the curb cast a shadow over my lane and the car absolutely freaked out with collision warnings. Thankfully I was accelerating so it didn't force me to stop, but at this point I'm seriously considering going with another vehicle. Having the car scream at you as you're driving down the road is nerve wracking.

It boggles my mind that people would continue to use a car that randomly breaks without their input.

Most cars have this starting in 2016. Later this year every single car will be mandated to have automatic emergency braking. At least Tesla will have millions of miles of practice. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/most-new-cars-hav...

Most (all?) other cars have radars for this. They do not seem to experience as many problems as Teslas, which is especially telling considering how much more other cars are on the road.

I mean, plenty of people drive dangerously anyway. I'd rather most people brake abruptly than drive 20mph above or below the flow of traffic, weave dangerously, pass on the shoulder, run red lights, fall asleep, drive drunk, etc. If they get in a car that's merely "too cautious", that's a pretty big net win for society.

I have a 2019 and I've used autopilot extensively and i've never had it break when it shouldn't. I've had it beep at me erroneously maybe twice, so I think this is something in the settings that is causing the issue.

I have a 2022 and it phantom brakes all the time. We haven’t touched any settings and if it were a settings issue, I’m sure someone in the Tesla community would have figured it out (there are a lot of Tesla’s out there and yours seems to be the only one that isn’t affected). Moreover, a phantom braking setting would be pretty insane—I have a hard time believing they prioritized a phantom braking feature over, say, more media app integrations.

The "settings" might be about where you're driving. Certain locations might be more prone to make AP see things.

Do yourself a favor and sell that car before it’s worthless. You won’t be doing a favor to the person buying it though.

Lol I can sell my Tesla for $20K more than I paid for it when it was new because Tesla can’t make new cars fast enough. The sky is absolutely not falling any time soon.

>But that said, once you learn the quirks it is extremely predictable and robust.

I feel like a self-driving vehicle is one of those areas where nobody should have to "learn the quirks".

It's honestly like a black mirror episode. "I have to have maintain a mental model of how my black box ML car AI will act so I don't die or kill other road users... and it can be updated daily."

Autopilot in aircraft have a similar problem, which led to the Air France Flight 447 crash in 2009. The airspeed indicators froze over, the autopilot switched from "normal law" to "alternate law", and the pilots failed to understand that the autopilot's protection from stalling no longer applied. They did not have enough training (or were too confused) to fly without the help of automated aids and flew the plane right into the ocean.

Boeing's planes were known for having fewer of these automated aids and thus required more skill to fly the plane, but the 747-MAX debacle threw cold water on that idea.

Of course, (unlike some commenters in this thread) the air travel industry thankfully had the good sense to look at autopilot on balance rather than fixating on a single fatal accident (or in the case of Tesla's Autopilot, the mere possibility of a fatal accident). The salient question isn't whether or not an autopilot allows for any fatalities, but rather whether or not it reduces fatalities relative to manual piloting/driving.

Yep, autopilot is a good helper but a bad master. In the air there's a lot more space and fewer objects to avoid than on the roads, yet nobody has managed to build a perfect autopilot that could really replace pilots in every situation. I remain skeptical that we'll ever see one in any dimension, let it be air, sea or land.

> "I have to have maintain a mental model of how my black box ML car AI will act so I don't die or kill other road users... and it can be updated daily."

Not defending Tesla here, but this is exactly how I think of other drivers on the road, whether I'm driving, cycling or walking.

Yes, we are literally trained for that - to keep distance with cars ahead of us, expect the unexpected and so on. We are also told not to drive cars without proper maintaince (and inforced by law in most places) so our cars are reliable.

I wonder if future driver training will factor in spotting problems with self-driving or related functions.

But Autopilot is not really a self driving vehicle though - it's basically just lane keeping + adaptive cruise control. It will gladly blow through a stop sign or a red light, it can't change lanes, or make turns, or do any other completely normal driving things that one would expect from a self driving car.

Navigate-on-Autopilot, and some other features which are part of the FSD package that is already publicly available, absolutely will stop at stop signs and lights (although the process is often annoying and buggy), change lanes (sometimes into a trailer if it doesn’t see it quite right), and make turns (takes exits/ramps), although these are things that can be individually toggled on and off. They’re there, but the implementation is kinda buggy shitware.

I'm pretty sure Tesla's with FSD get in less accidents when compared to the average driver. Mine tends to be frustratingly overly cautious in most cases.

Except when it suddenly turns into incoming traffic. Don’t believe stats from Tesla.

> Except when it suddenly turns into incoming traffic

Is there any reason to suggest these aren't factored into the aforementioned data?

> Don’t believe stats from Tesla.

I'm all for more transparency, but I'm certainly not going to trust a random Internet commenter either.

Source?

I guess the rest of us drivers have to "learn the quirks" the hard way?

If you’re not tailgating someone, you’ll be fine, and anyway “the rest of us drivers” includes plenty of people who drive much more dangerously than an overly cautious AI. Autopilot has many millions of miles of driving time and as far as I know there hasn’t been even a single fatal accident due to phantom braking.

> It infrequently phantom brakes, and more often brakes hard and late and sometimes people think I'm brake-checking them.

Honestly, it sounds to me like this technology should be made illegal until it's fixed. "Infrequently" isn't good enough, especially if it brakes as aggressively as you say. I want self driving to succeed, but Tesla's self-driving tech is just too immature to use on public roads.

The right question to ask is how many rear-end collisions does it produce and how many accidents it prevents.

If it infrequently phantom brakes (especially when there is no vehicle behind - an AV can sense that), that doesn't cause any collisions, this might be optimal behavior, given the current level of technology.

Agreed. People seem to think that anything that allows for any accident at all (irrespective of frequency or severity) is better than the status quo of 40k fatalities per year, which is pretty wild considering how otherwise rational this forum tends to be.

This comes down to the actual risks. The real question is has it actually caused any accidents?

With random hard braking the question is not if but when and how often.

I'd say the question is whether we should tolerate cars with what you could call undefined behaviour. Imho we shouldn't.

Why do people think the goal is “perfection” rather than “better than the average driver”? If Autopilot is 10x safer than human drivers, we would have to be stupid not to mandate it much less tolerate it, even if it’s crash rate is non-zero. Human drivers kill 40k people a year in the US alone—that’s almost twice as many people as all homicides combined.

So, any data to back this claim?

And has it prevented any?

While the erratic behavior of Tesla’s autopilot might cause other drivers to be more cautious are them, I don’t think you should count this in Tesla’s favor. Imagine if every self thriving car company started adding code to scare other drivers, that would definitely have unwanted side effects.

Teslas have one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven with autopilot engaged versus one crash per every 480k for non-Tesla drivers, so autopilot is averting almost 90% of all crashes. There’s no evidence at all of any “it scares other drivers into safety” mechanism, which is to be expected because such a mechanism seems absurd on its face.

This article is specifically referring to fantom breaking rather than overall performance of the system.

I know I personally have started to stay further from Tesla’s when possible on the road because they behave strangely. But the same applies to other cars which do this odd weaving from side to side within their lanes presumably because of poorly implemented lane keeping systems.

As to accidents rates, Autopilot shouldn’t be compared to overall driving accident rates when it’s not being used in all situations.

No, I mean by having this feature of lane keeping and cruise control saved lived overall.

Probably. Tesla Autopilot gets in about 90% fewer accidents per hundred million miles than US drivers. It would be shocking if this didn’t manifest as lives saved.

Just to be clear, you want to make TACC + lane-keep illegal? Because that's what the comment is taking about.

>It infrequently phantom brakes

>more often brakes hard and late

>people think I'm brake-checking them

>if you're in the right lane when the two right lanes merge- it is totally unreliable

>I've been sandwiched between an 18-wheeler and the gutter

>once you learn the quirks it is extremely predictable and robust

You're taking it better than I would be

It's just standard Tesla fanboy cope. The bottom line is that Tesla is shipping out alpha/beta software to the masses and relying on the masses to absorb the risks of crashing, causing accidents, dying, etc. in order for Tesla to iterate and possibly improve its software. I own an 2022 Model 3 Performance, so I'm not just talking out of my ass. Autopilot is unnerving to use. The car itself is just an appliance devoid of any emotion or character; the exact opposite of a performance focused driver's car. I plan on selling it very soon.

Juxtapose Tesla's Autopilot with BMW's Driving Assistant Professional (I also own a BMW X5 PHEV Hybrid). I drove from Chicago to Oklahoma and back with all the autonomous features engaged 95% of the drive and it was an incredibly relaxing experience. Lane change works and doesn't cost an extra $10K (you need FSD for a simple lane change otherwise you effectively need to disengage AP, change lanes, and reengage AP), zero phantom braking (the BMW has radar...), the eye tracking camera works great (no falling asleep at the wheel vs. Tesla's interior camera which does not even work and the steering wheel tracking can be defeated with a tennis ball), and best of all there's fully autonomous driving (no need to look at the road) if stuck in traffic on a highway and you're going less than 40MPH (i.e., bumper-to-bumper traffic where most accidents tend to happen).

The fact is that Tesla is not shipping game-changing software, and I would strongly argue that it's not even shipping out the best software in the business. It's a hyped up car with hyped up features peddled by a hype man. I would not be surprised if Tesla is not even a top 5 or 10 EV seller in 2032.

May I ask you why you bought your M3 Performance in the first place, then? The "appliance" feeling can be seen already in photos, you don't even need a test drive. About software of our car makers being superior, I'd like to have some harder evidence. Reading a bit here and there Tesla seems the less bad option wrt software quality in a car.

Edit: beside just your personal experience

The only part that matters the fanboys is the marketing. It's even apparent in the way it's haphazardly named.

So let me get this straight, you're raving about BMW's autonomous driver assistance but it cannot steer on the highway at 50 mph?

You misunderstood. It has effectively Level 3 autonomy on highways under 40MPH, "regular old" Level 2 otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M-J3JydpPA

I find your attitude terrifying. I am glad you can handle your car now, but there are many thousand people driving those cars and they might not know how to deal with those "bugs". I am curious, are you currently holding Tesla stock?

Honestly it’s wild that so many people on this forum are making arguments about theoretical accidents that could happen when Autopilot has billions of miles driven and gets in 80% fewer accidents than the average US driver. The idea that we have to wait for Autopilot to be perfect means accepting hundreds of thousands of millions of accidents (including thousands of preventable deaths) that could be avoided. I find that attitude terrifying.

Autopilot sounds about as safe as driving while intoxicated, which makes Autopilot users massive egoists.

I’m sure you wouldn’t make a claim like this without some data to back it up. Please share with us the crash rate for autopilot versus the average US driver, so we can see what your idea of “intoxicated driving” looks like!

i have a bunch of adjectives in mind, most not usefull but perhaps this one: "subjects of lawsuits"

> It infrequently phantom brakes, and more often brakes hard and late and sometimes people think I'm brake-checking them.

And you're still using this car? Why exactly?

Because the rest of us are just crash test dummies. Nothing to see here, carry on.

Average people are acceptable sacrifices on the altar of technology worship.

Clout, social signaling

2018 Model 3 with Enhanced Autopilot. I took a weekend trip from LA to Phoenix a few months back. I was in the left-most lane for a majority of the trip, and had ~10 phantom braking occurrences each way. It seemed to think the shadow of a car in the adjacent lane (where the shadow fell well into my lane) was something that needed to be avoided.

It also doesn't infrequently highlight a car in an adjacent lane (or even exiting the freeway) as the lead car and slam on the brakes.

I have follow distance set to 7 and it still slams the brakes way later than comfortable.

Would you still recommend Tesla after these experiences?

I like driving, so I don't mind not using Autopilot as frequently as I have the opportunity to. And it's the most fun and best car I've driven.

But honestly I hesitate to recommend it. Not because it isn't a great car, because it is, but because I'm growing more skeptical of Tesla as a whole in the past year:

- extremely delayed timelines (Roadster, Semi, Cybertruck, etc)

- focus on some robot thing

- FSD vaporware/false promises

- Elon's general immaturity

- frequent price changes

- supply chain shortages

- etc

It all adds up and I can't help but wonder if Tesla's initial market advantage is waning. I'm not sure there's another competitor that's caught up to them, but it isn't as clear cut as it was just a couple years ago.

It surprises me that even after all of tha you still consider using autopilot and seem to have accepted the phantom braking as a way of life.

I mean, I pay full attention while the car is on autopilot, keep both hands on the wheel, and my foot over the pedals. Sure, that particular trip was pretty annoying, but my daily commute (~80 miles roundtrip) rarely, if ever, has any phantom braking occurrences, so I don't know that I would call it a "way of life".

> Tesla would just be to have a debug button where you can report and elevate the past 10 seconds of driving

They do. Push the microphone button and say "Bug Report."

Lol. Tesla is really just beta testing in production. When software companies do that we say it’s bad. When Tesla dies this it’s ground breaking innovation. When my internet browser crashes no one dies.

It’s because people are bad at reasoning. You don’t ban Autopilot for being imperfect, you ban it if it’s less safe than the average driver. However, Tesla’s crash rate is on the order of 10x better than the US average—assuming that carries over to the fatality rate pretty linearly, it would mean we could save 36k of the 40k lives lost each year to traffic fatalities if Autopilot were ubiquitous and mandatory. The idea that we should just sacrifice thousands of people until Autopilot is flawless is abhorrent and foolish.

Damn, lots of strawman rage in the responses. Remember that I'm still gripping the controls and looking out the window. I don't allow the system into any kind of corner case unless I am the only one on the road. Letting the computer attempt to drive straight on the highway while a practiced and skeptical driver is ready to take over does not feel like a blatant compromise of public safety. Every incident I've encountered was very easy to handle, with lots of margin for reaction. Hopefully everyone practices this kind of regard for others while still allowing emerging technology to have a path for safe testing in the real world.

I have a 2021 Y with FSD and more or less echo the I've got about the same sentiment. It's nice use it, but does weird stuff. A recent update seems to have resolved many of the FSD issues. It no longer phantom breaks at flashing yellow intersections, and a few stop signs for diagonal merging roads.

And btw, they certainly have the data whether or not you report it.

> But that said, once you learn the quirks it is extremely predictable and robust.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me. You admit that the car you're driving behaves unpredictably if you don't know it's quirks. But it still sounds like you're defending it.

This would be intolerable for most other cars, of not outright dangerous. I'm not trying to attack you, so I'm sorry to be this direct:

Why are you still keeping this anti-feature enabled? This sounds really dangerous.

It’s strictly safer than other cars. Autopilot’s accident rate is one per every 4.3 million miles versus 1 per 480 thousand miles for the non-Tesla US average. Autopilot is nearly 10x safer than the average US driver.

It’s really a bummer to see how many commenters are making strong statements informed by neither data nor experience. This whole thread is well below this forum’s normal level of discourse.

2022 Model Y with regular Autopilot. Phantom braking is rarely an issue on divided highways; however, it's definitely an issue on highways without generous medians. If a semi is coming the other direction (especially over a hill) it will panic and slam on the brakes more than half the time (this has been the case since we bought the car in November). I've also had problems with the shadows cast by bridges and adjacent buildings as well as changes in road surface (e.g., the boundary between a section of road that was recently resurfaced to an older section of road). Further still, the problems seem to be worse in dim light or at night (it also insists on running the brights even when they're not necessary for a human, and even if it means blinding oncoming traffic) where it will occasionally phantom brake even on an empty divided highway. Moreover, sometimes it decides to abruptly drop the cruise control set point speed from 75mph to 40mph (even though it knows the speed limit is 70mph) which results in abrupt deceleration (not sure if this is the same as phantom braking or not).

Additionally, if you interrupt a phantom brake by manually accelerating, it often won't resume speed until it has decelerated to whatever it thinks its "safe speed" was at the time of the perceived danger, even if the perceived danger is well-past. So if you were going 60mph when it got spooked by a shadow and manually compensated for the phantom braking, when you let off the accelerator the car will still slow down to ~30mph even if you're a quarter mile past the shadow.

This is all frustrating, but the most frustrating thing is that I don't even know for sure what the car's reasoning process is--why does it sometimes sporadically set the speed to 30mph below the speed limit on a busy highway? What threat is it perceiving when it phantom brakes?

> and more often brakes hard and late ... If you have the minimum distance set to 2 or 3 car lengths, you should not be complaining about late and hard braking- that's the setting you chose.

I disagree here. As a human driver, I can prefer to follow someone "closely" (pretty sure I could fit 3 or 4 cars into Tesla's "2 car lengths"), but that doesn't mean I wait until I'm that far from them before I begin decelerating. There's no reason fundamental reason Autopilot can't do the same.

> It also is annoying slow to recover back to cruise speed from a slow down.

Fully agree. I think this pisses people off behind me more than the brake checking.

> The phantom braking is annoying but infrequent

I suspect this depends on what share of your driving is on divided versus two-lane highways.

>My suggestion to Tesla would just be to have a debug button where you can report and elevate the past 10 seconds of driving.

Wait, do you think that Tesla are actually obtaining all driver video and manually adjusting the model based on reports like this? I've seen a lot of fanatics with no technology background claim this, but I'm...skeptical to say the least.

My understanding is that the driving logs are only sent to Tesla when you take your car in for service. In addition, I imagine not a lot of people use the bug report feature, so most of the phantom braking in the logs and footage aren't even identified/used.

They claim to do a lot of (spooky) automatic data collection, including camera footage.

yea why not? watch the automation day presentation from 2019. they're pretty clear about how much telemetry goes home in order to re-train the networks.

> My suggestion to Tesla would just be to have a debug button where you can report and elevate the past 10 seconds of driving.

AFAIK they automatically collect data on disengagement.

I'm surprised a debug button isn't already in existence? Maybe it's there if you're a beta tester?

it is there and that is why I question the veracity of the above post. All FSD drivers are part of the beta program and they all have report button.

Phantom braking is not exclusive to FSD, so the vast majority of people who experience phantom braking do not have a report button.

> If you have the minimum distance set to 2 or 3 car lengths

Does it use the same distance at all speeds?

No. It doesn't use distance but time. At 70 mph on cruise control in my 2015 Model S (AP1.5) the distance to the car in front is considerably more than three car lengths.

Brake checking is an exclusively American thing. I can’t recall anybody in Europe brake checking anybody in the 20 years I drove there, across all countries (Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, etc), people just get out of the left lane naturally, and who cares if somebody goes faster?

I will never understand this hostile tension in US roads.

In Germany you're more likely to get "reverse brake checked" - with an M5 3cm from your rear bumper signaling to pass... :-)

Just Google video search for "brake check insert EU country" and you'll find plenty of examples.