Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by mrguyorama on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:01PM (#34331436)

I own another VAG car with automatic emergency braking. If it is actually applying the brakes for you more than in cases where you are clearly about to rear-end someone, you should consider not tailgating as much. The sensor even gives you a warning if you are following too close at highway speeds.

The radar system they use in modern VW and Audi cars is extremely conservative, claiming to not engage the brakes at all above 35 mph, and waiting until the last possible moment to apply the brakes below that window. It's been absurdly accurate for me. Once every few months or so it "warns" outside of a dangerous situation, but they are almost always situations I could have prevented with a gentler approach to driving, for example following closely a truck with a trailer that is slowly turning off the street will erroneously activate the warning because I'm continuing as if it will be out of my way, which is not the safest.

The time it activated in a real danger situation it didn't even apply the brakes, it "primed" them so that my action of pressing the brakes would happen faster.

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by FireBeyond on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:13PM (#34331591)

> The radar system they use in modern VW and Audi cars is extremely conservative, claiming to not engage the brakes at all above 35 mph, and waiting until the last possible moment to apply the brakes below that window.

I love my 2021 RS 5, but I have to disagree with this. Even in Traffic Jam adaptive mode, many times it will accelerate towards a vehicle _that it detects_, and only brake very late, and hard. On several occasions I've intervened because I wasn't sure if it would. When I've been alone in the car, I've waited later (and seen it brake hard, of its own accord), when I've held off on the brake since I have no passengers to give whiplash.

It will also absolutely emergency brake above 35mph.

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by mrguyorama on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:29PM (#34331789)

It's possible the features introduced in the upmarket trims are to blame. I have all the hardware for things like distance based cruise control and parking assistance and lane keeping, but the previous owner did not buy them so I ONLY have automatic emergency braking. In 20k miles the worst problem I had was it failing self-calibration and just turning itself off for a few months.

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by FireBeyond on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:33PM (#34331837)

Definitely possible - my girlfriend has a 2017 A4 without anything but AEB, basically, so I have no real comparison source.

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by CamperBob2 on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:05PM (#34331470)

If it is actually applying the brakes for you more than in cases where you are clearly about to rear-end someone, you should consider not tailgating as much

Thanks, Dad. Clearly I have no idea what I'm doing, or what I'm talking about, so my real-world experience is invalid.

For the benefit of everyone else, phantom braking is a thing that by definition occurs when you're not following anyone. Such as when the car slams on the brakes upon approaching a car that's clearly about to turn right from a nearby parking lot, but who is equally clearly waiting for you to pass before entering the road.

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by mrguyorama on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:41PM (#34331926)

I think I meant to add more weasel words to that like "consider". Let me be more direct. In 20k miles in this vehicle, I have never once encountered the radar based AEB warning, not even activating, in a situation where it wasn't obviously sensing a car that would be in the path of my vehicle. It has not activated for trash, or overhead bridges, or cars in the next lane over, or any of the number of things everyone else says radar can't handle. It has only ever warned me when there is a car in front of me, sometimes a car that is taking extra time to turn off the road, once because of a car in a suicide lane. In those instances it does NOTHING else than play a generic warning tone and put a red warning on the dash, it never activates the brakes, and does not even do the brake "priming" that it claims to do if it thinks an accident is likely. It is EXTREMELY conservative, to the point that I do not consider it a backup.

I shouldn't have been patronizing, I'm just so confused how the same hardware and (possibly) software can produce such different results. Why would the audi version be so much more sensitive?

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Re:Tesla Vehicle Safety Report by shiftpgdn on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:25PM (#34343233)

I did 30,000 miles in a 2019 outback with a significant amount of phantom breaking, more than I've had in my Tesla or e-tron. Anecdotes don't mean much.

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