Tesla: Dangerous phantom braking and overrun stop signs

Phantom Stunts

Phantom braking occurs when the car brakes by itself for no reason while driving semi-autonomously with the help of an Adaptive Cruise Control (ADR) ACC. Tesla also calls this ACC technology, which is available from almost all other car manufacturers, autopilot During our test drives with a Tesla Model Y, we experienced such surprising phantom braking several times on the freeway. This happens when the area monitoring system of the semi-autonomous vehicle believes it has detected an obstacle. The dangerous thing about it: For the cars behind the Tesla, this strong braking comes completely surprising, because the drivers cannot see any reason for braking.

According to the Washington Post, Tesla drivers have reported such phantom braking dozens of times in the United States. In the last three months alone, there are said to have been over 100 complaints to the responsible National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about such incidents. Tesla had already withdrawn an update for its self-driving software in October last year. Despite this, this problem still occurs.

Some of those affected complain that there was no other car far and wide when their Tesla braked hard. It was different in our case, there were definitely vehicles on the road next to us. Just not in front of us, we overtook them on the freeway without any problems. We don’t know what exactly caused our Tesla to start an emergency brake. Possibly a reflection from the car we just passed.

NHTSA is now investigating the incidents and speaking to Tesla. Experts think it is possible that this problem could be exacerbated because Tesla does not use radar sensors and only uses cameras instead. Audi, BMW, Daimler and VW, on the other hand, always use radar sensors as well. In fact, we didn’t experience any phantom braking during our test drives with vehicles from these brands. Only one Volvo made two unwanted hard stops when we were driving on the freeway. That was a few years ago though, and Volvo has certainly improved its ACC tech since then.

Roll over stop signs

In addition, it seems that the autopilot from Tesla, more precisely: the Full Self-Driving (Beta), recognizes stop signs – this worked very reliably in the test with the Model Y – and also brakes before it, but then very slowly in anyway the intersection rolls without stopping. As a result, NHTSA is now recalling nearly 54,000 vehicles. Specifically, certain Model S and Model X built between 2016 and 2022, Model 3 built between 2017 and 2022, and Model Y built between 2020 and 2022. Tesla is installing a software update that disables this “rolling stop” feature .

Elon Musk

put into perspective
the problem in a tweet and sees no risk in this behavior:

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