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by InTheArena 802 days ago
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)

2 comments

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.