[KennyBlanken]

It's not a value-add given it causes chain-reaction crashes from phantom braking and quite regularly slams into the back of emergency vehicles on the side of the road (likely because the cameras are blinded by the emergency lights.)

Teslas had radar assist. It was too expensive for Musk. And to keep new car owners from being annoyed by older Telsas having more features than theirs, he ordered that the older Teslas have their radar units be disabled.

[InTheArena]

Actually, it appears that getting rid of "sensor fusion" has resulted in almost all of the phantom braking issues. My car still has radar assist, and only uses visual models now. And in that time, Phantom breaking has become a thing of the past.

The hitting a emergency vehicle thing - which is incredibly common as a kind of car crash - see why police always set their wheels to face into traffic when they do a traffic stop - doesn't seem to be occurring.

(Just in case you wanted some actual data)

[AlotOfReading]

Having worked with these kinds of systems, it can be difficult to tell from the driver's seat the actual effects of that change. It may have reduced false positives and true positives. It may have simply moved the false positives into scenarios you don't encounter. It may have not affected the true positive rate at all, but might have made positive identification slower and thus violated a real-time constraint elsewhere in the system leading to accidents. I've actually seen this last one root caused before.

The only people who have the data to know whether removing radar was safety net positive or not work(ed) at Tesla and can't say. Even then, they probably wouldn't know whether the system could have given better results with different changes.

[InTheArena]

Ehh. I had the same streach of road that resulted in three phantom breaking situations (one of them not in a tesla, but in a toyota). Steep descent on a road with a rail road crossing with exposed rails. No issues at all once the vision only upgrade hit both my M3 and MY (which has HW3). It's possible that they put in some other fix at the same time, but they stated at the time that sensor fusion was a big reason for phantom breaking, so I take them at their word that this was fix.

[sweetjuly]

That's not quite their point though. Completely deactivating the emergency breaking system would also solve the phantom breaking problem, and since the average person does not end up in situations which ought to trigger the feature that often it's unlikely any individual driver would ever notice that is was broken.

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not doubting that it went away for you. You know what you've experienced a lot better than I do. Everything I listed is consistent with that observation though and it's impossible to differentiate between them without internal data.

[MBCook]

I’ve owned 2 cars with radar. I’ve been in at least 2 others owned by family with radar.

None Teslas. None had phantom braking.

Tesla may have solved their issue (no 1st hand experience) but having radar shouldn’t have caused it if implemented properly. It’s clearly possible, seeming every other brand has managed.

[InTheArena]

Really? I saw phantom breaking all the time from both Toyota and Hondas. Typically on a slope, with something like rail crossings where the signals got a little squirrely. having the same glitch across multiple vendors with different implementation makes me think it's more a basic physics problem.

Regardless, the Tesla vision system - love it or hate it, is doing far far more safety systems then radar only based systems.

[MBCook]

In the 6 years I had it I got a handful of false warnings from my Honda, but never a false brake activation.

In the three years I’ve had my Mach E has had fewer false alerts than the Honda.

The one exception is it has a reverse brake assist the Honda didn’t, designed to stop you from hitting things when backing up. One friend’s driveway is so steep where it joins the street that if you’re not going very slow it will trigger the reverse brake assist. That was a surprise the first time.

[ghaff]

My Honda definitely periodically flashes a warning on a curve when there's an oncoming vehicle in the other lane but it's never actually braked on me.

[hokumguru]

Anecdotal I know, but I bought a model Y last year without radar. We’ve used FSD substantially and haven’t seen phantom braking issues even once. I think it’s been mostly resolved.

[dmix]

I've never driven one but I follow a youtube channel that documents beta FSD, posting raw video feeds and analyzing/critiquing them, and I've noticed they've been gushing about it more and more this past year. Far more than in the past he's always talking about how its mastered very complex stuff it would have disengaged or awkwardly completed only half a year earlier. I think the platform has improved quite a bit in recent years.

Of course opinions on the internet will have been established from headlines in prior years so who knows how much impact it will have on discourse if it turns out to be the case.

[hexane360]

On the other hand, I saw this just this morning: https://x.com/RealDanODowd/status/1778224756220940585

[kwhitefoot]

> Teslas have their radar units be disabled.

That's simply untrue. My 2015 Model S still uses the radar.

[machdiamonds]

Do you actually have any examples of FSD v12 hitting emergency vehicles?