Featured Tesla Autopilot recall probed by safety regulator following new crashes

Hummm, perhaps I should send NHTSA this accident:

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Full Self Driving drove for 99% of the 717 miles except for a brief time I drove to the gas station. Sad to say, USAA claimed I was 90% responsible. So I'm disputing this with:

• Orange circles are my path
• Green circles are his path
• Red circle is where his front bumper hit my right rear bumper cover

So here is his damage:



Here is mine:


I'll check under the bumper cover but it will be easy to pop it back on.

Just another case where FSD was better than the humans . . . and the claims agent.

Bob Wilson

 

What are you showing us? From the picture, it looks like you drifted into his lane.

 

If thats true it shows how pointless this "better" is unless Tesla finally takes liability (level 3) or at least supports claims - shouldnt be hard given they have all the data and such a good system Would be awesome marketing as well.

How come they dont

 

I haven't tried adaptive cruise control without the lane assist feature being on, I think they're separate functions? In the settings menus you can choose to turn lane assist on or off, but there's a separate setting for enabling adaptive CC or disabling it. I'm going to assume, but can test it later I Guess, that if you turn lane assist off with the button or in the settings, that once you click adaptive CC it'll kick back on. Alternatively maybe it will only allow regular cruise control to work instead and tell you that the adaptive isn't available unless LKA is on.

The lane assist in TSS3.0 is great on the highway/freeways.

Yeah I'm with you on this one, if you're turning left into the inside lane, and theres a left turning onto an outside lane, then you cant/shouldn't be turning right across that other lane unless its very open and clear. If the intent was to turn right this quick after turning left, then you should be in the rightmost lane that turns left. If you don't then you have to change lanes and there isn't a ton of room to do that here. Should have just accepted the right turn wasn't possible and then turned around further down the road.

 

So if you turn off Lane Assist, you then have to manually engage the Adaptive CC? Can you have Lane Assist On without the Adaptive CC?

 

So far, I fail to see any evidence of claims agent failure.

Possible cockpit automation complacency? ... automation rustiness? ... loss of situational awareness? ... did somebody pre-warn of fatigue impairment?

AARP offers a Smart Driver™ course to help senior citizens refresh their driving skills. My dad benefited from a similar local course for some years, until the continuing march of age related declines won out. Now almost to Medicare age, I ought be considering it.

 

LTA is exclusive to DRCC mode, but DRCC does not require LTA to be active. Pressing the button that toggles LTA won't do anything unless DRCC is on already, and if it is, it only disables LTA and not any other aspect of DRCC.

But like Zeromus, I find that LTA works quite well on the Prius with TSS 3.0 so I always keep it on.

 

Oh yeah the lane trace assist is only active with the adaptive CC. Lane *keep* assist can be active without it. And it can be turned up pretty far and it'll definitely let you know when you're getting too close to the edge of the lane. I don't see why you would want Lane Trace Assist, where it turns the wheel for you, and not also want the adaptive cruise control speed part on at the same time. I can't think of a scenario where I want to actively be in full control of the gas/brake pedal but not actively in full control of the steering wheel.

 

There are two different lane assist functions. LK(keeping)A is a passive system that helps keep the car in lane, either with warnings or even gentle turning of the wheel. It can be on regardless of what cruise control is doing.

LT(trace)A is the active one that will keep the car in the center of the lane and follow curves. In a Subaru and Acura, it could only be turned on when the ACC was in use.

 

Not drifting, deliberate.

I cleared his lane and had. my right turn on. I steered into that lane and almost complete entry into the parking when he clipped my rear bumper cover.

If I'd drifted, we would have had side body contact, not rear bumper and front bumper impact. But there is a lesson learned:

• Manual driving is more dangerous than Full Self Driving (FSD) - both drivers and the claims agent are 'human'. Had I used FSD, the car might have taken a different route to the gas station.

Bob Wilson

 

But if your bumpers hit, then you definitely cut him off aggressively enough to be at fault. A right signal doesn't give you carte blanche to change lanes and slow down enough to make a turn across another lane of active traffic... Not to continue to derail the thread but only being 90% at fault is probably them throwing you a bone.

 

I've noticed that different areas have different driving patterns. So when living in Washington DC area in the 1970-80s, two lanes could merge and no loss of speed. In other areas, merging lanes always resulted in a slower speed of the resulting single lane. The DC trick is to be especially attentive to all traffic including the cars before the car you are following and defer increasing the car-to-car spacing until further from the merge point. It is a local skill.

In Alabama, it is common to see cars change lanes during a dual-lane turn. It keeps you on your toes. FSD no longer does this which is why I can now trust FSD left turns. Earlier versions of FSD were bad about this so I would manually make my left turns.

Well the good thing about humans is we have flexibility in our judgements. Which also means, we can disregard someone else's judgement when not backed up by facts and data.

Bob Wilson

 

Just trying to understand how it works on the recent Prius and compare it to Tesla's AP. When you have Lane assist active and you switch lane on an highway, does it deactivate? Does it automatically reactivate after the lane change? Does cruise control disables while you do the lane change if Lane Assist deactivates during that time?

 

You were in the left lane. You then wanted to turn into a driveway directly off the right lane. And you did it in such a manner that you cut off a driver in the right lane?

Sounds to me you set up for the ultimate turn incorrectly before your turn off the original road and then found yourself having to cross a occupied lane and slow down to make the driveway turn. You attempted to make what was the equivalent of a 2 lane turn. Sure you didn't get into a road rage situation.

Your diagram fails to show his path to completion and the relative position of the cars when you started to turn into his lane.

 

Ok, let me see if I understand this correctly. You both turned left and as you proceeded, with FSD being quite energetic in its acceleration (something Musk said they tempered down in v12.4), you were ahead of him before FSD moved to the right lane. FSD then put its flasher, slowed down and proceeded to turn right at the entrance and that's when the collision happened. Is that it?

 

I don't see how... From the picture, there it appears there wasn't a whole lot of room from the turn to the accident. It looks like you gunned it and then tried to cut him off?

 

Well, he had the shorter radius for the the same speed, he would have .covered a longer distance, however, the distance from the curb to the entrance seems to be 250 feet. That's about 15 car lengths and at an average speed of 25 mph, that's about 8 seconds of travel. I guess it all depends how fast both were turning and driving down the road.

The right fender and rear dash cam would give a better understanding of the room between both and the speed they were both going. @bwilson4web, do you mind posting the dash cam footage?

 

I don't think it deactivates, I noticed it kicks back on once it reads the new lane no problem in my experience. If you're going over 80km/h, holding the stalk at half position (no click), then it changes lanes for you if it is safe to do so and keeps on its merry way. If you do deactivate the DRCC by using the brake to slow down to merge, hitting resume button on the steering wheel turns it back on too and it remembers the DRCC speed you set earlier in its memory.

I don't think lane change assist is included as part of TSS3.0 by default, but it is included on the Prime. Fun fact, according to toyota.ca feature list, the SE model shouldn't have lane change assist, but it does! Quite nice. It's also not supposed to have front cross traffic alert but it does have that also.

Does not have parking support brake though.

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On the right turn thing, the angle that seems to be a right side bumper at an angle on the tesla and right side but close to the middle of the VW bumper cover, it seems like the Tesla didn't finish a full lane change, then started turning. Probably did a turn across the lane, or did a shallow lane change, didn't straighten out, then did their turn.

 

Ok, so it behaves like Enhance Autopilot then (regarding the change of lane). Basic Autopilot doesn't. You have to deactivate it (simply using the turn signal is enough to deactivate it) to change lane. Forcing the wheel will also deactivate it. I think that's the main beef with NHTSA regarding this feature. People forget that it's off and can get in an accident. Simple solution for Tesla in regard of that specific problem would be to make Autopilot stay engaged when changing lane. That's a win for customers. Dropping AP and TACC so you can change lane is asinine.

 

I would but my flash drive was out. Worse, I did not realize since 2021, the flash drive had to be at least 64 GB and it was a 32 GB drive.

I have subsequently replaced it with a multi-partition flash drive.

BTW, I pretty much alway floor my Tesla as the faster acceleration gives me lane choice.

Bob Wilson