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Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

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Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#302
post #113

2022 Model Y with FSD. I use Autopilot 50+ miles a day, and use it 98% of the way on trips from San Diego to SF. It infrequently phantom brakes, and more often brakes hard and late and sometimes people think I'm brake-checking them. It also is annoying slow to recover back to cruise speed from a slow down. Also if you're in the right lane when the two right lanes merge- it is totally unreliable, I've been sandwiched…

> 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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#303
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a long list of things that work poorly and would be nice to change out with something that works. UI - Just let me integrate 3rd party apps finally. Deeprain - My car likes to run the wipers on a perfectly dry sunny day sometimes. To my great vexing annoyance. Autoheadlights - Its just bad. On off, on off constantly. Deepsleep - Car just doesn't want to wake up sometimes. Either on entry or when accessing it…

Don’t forget the wipers..POS logic.

Thats deep rain. For some reason someone thought using machine learning for wipers was a great idea.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#304
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.)

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#306
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#307
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#308
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#309
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

#310
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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