Indeed it is. To make it clear, it slams on the brakes bringing me down from 150 to 120 km/h, it doesn't come to a dead stop, so unless someone is seriously tailgating, then it's not creating any danger, it's just uncomfortable.
Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it’s typically when the front radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn’t seen that object enough yet to code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.
“But as I recall, the understanding then was that Tesla had a database of things like bridges, and the braking meant that the database was incomplete. So folks were told to file a bug report ASAP after the incident so that Tesla could fix the data.”
So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and then say “Bug Report <speak bug report here>”
>Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it’s typically when the front radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn’t seen that object enough yet to code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.
Random as it concerns the actual road and driving -- in other words un-needed and unexpected for the driver (and other cars).
Why and how the Autopilot came to it, is really irrelevant, except to Tesla engineers.
If I crash because of Autopilot error it's no comfort knowing that it's doing its regular pattern matching just fine, it's just that something hasn't been seen enough to be registered as "as a known false positive"...
>So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and then say “Bug Report <speak bug report here>”
Let me scrap the remains of my co-passengers and possibly my kids of the seats first. As for the bug, they'll learn all the details about it from my lawsuit.
Does the Tesla driver assistance package often confuse highway signs with large trucks? From parent comment's link:
> Situation: When autopilot is engaged, it somehow sees some shadows/images, and it brakes pretty hard even though no car is in front of you. It does not come to complete stop, but it will go from 65-70 to 45 pretty quickly.
Conditions: Typically for me it has been driving in the dark (evening or early morning) and going under an underpass. I am not sure if others have seen this during the daytime or other conditions.
Another driver's description sounds like Google Maps getting confused by overpasses:
> It just happened to me today when I went under an overpass. The GPS based speed thought I was suddenly off the freeway and on the surface street overpass and said limited autosteer speed to 45. Luckily I had my foot on the accelerator so I could override it but it just jolt me a bit trying to slow down.
False positives are one of the more difficult problems in collision avoidance. Small pieces of metallic debris on the road surface (for example) can throw off a huge radar signature that looks like something that you really wouldn't want to hit.
Many automatic emergency braking implementations disable at high speeds, and/or ignore stationary objects, for this reason.
I get the impression that Tesla has made their automatic braking a bit more aggressive in recent updates, given recent publicity about cars hitting fixed objects while on autopilot.
Indeed it is. To make it clear, it slams on the brakes bringing me down from 150 to 120 km/h, it doesn't come to a dead stop, so unless someone is seriously tailgating, then it's not creating any danger, it's just uncomfortable.