A few observations from a 2023 HW4 Model S road trip

[EVRider-FL]

I’m about 2000 miles into my first significant road trip in my new 2023 Model S with HW4, delivered May 1. I drove from FL to New England, currently in RI. I purchased the car with EAP but subscribed to FSD before the trip so I could use FSD Beta when I wanted to. I’m on build 2023.32.4 (FSD Beta 11.4.4), but I haven’t enabled FSD Beta yet because I don’t want the car to make its own lane changes on the highway (I have Navigate on Autopilot set to require lane change confirmations). I’ll enable it when I’m doing more driving on rural highways and back roads later in the trip.

I’ve noticed a few quirks that I didn’t experience in my previous 2018 Model S100D, which also had FSD Beta installed:

• When using Auto Lane Change, with or without Navigate on Autopilot, if there’s an exit lane next to the one I’m moving into, the car sometimes tries to move into the exit lane.
• Once in a while Auto Lane Change will begin changing lanes but then abort for no apparent reason, not because of other cars or undetected lane markers.
• Once in a while Autosteer will slow down unexpectedly, not because of slow traffic in an adjacent lane (which is a feature). This is not phantom braking, bad weather, or a speed limit change, the car just reduces speed. On the other hand, phantom braking has not been an issue.
• On a few occasions, the nav system briefly announced that I needed to turn onto some non-existent road while I was on the highway, but then quickly recovered. I have to wonder what would have happened if FSD Beta was controlling my lane changes.
• Auto wipers don’t work as well as they did in my old car. Sometimes they work as expected, sometimes they won’t turn on at all in heavy rain, sometimes they’ll turn on when there isn’t any rain. I’ve had a lot of rain on this trip, and most of the time I’ve had to set the wipers to one of the manual settings.
• The left turn signal button the yoke wheel doesn’t always work (fortunately it works most of the time). I tried to make a service appointment in RI to fix this, but they were fully booked while I’m in town.

I don’t know if the AP issues are related to HW4, the build that I’m using, or something else. There have been other quirks too, but nothing I didn’t experience before so I’m not mentioning them here.

 

[uscbucsfan]

These are all on HW3 as well. It's just issues with the stack.

 

[Supcom]

Turn on FSDb and get what you paid for. FSDb is far superior to NOA. Turn on Minimal Lane Changes if you are afraid of lane changes, but, on interstates, FSDb does lane changes exceptionally well.

 

[EVRider-FL]

Turn on FSDb and get what you paid for. FSDb is far superior to NOA. Turn on Minimal Lane Changes if you are afraid of lane changes, but, on interstates, FSDb does lane changes exceptionally well.

I had FSDb enabled in my previous Model S and my wife’s Model 3. I used Minimal Lane Changes, but that didn’t stop the car from changing lanes to follow the route when it didn’t really need to, both on and off the highway. When using NoA on previous road trips, the car sometimes wanted to make dangerous lane changes (like entering an express lane that was closed). It’s less stressful to drive on the highway without FSDb.

 

[EVRider-FL]

Another thing I noticed when driving on the interstate yesterday, which isn’t necessarily new behavior, but I haven’t noticed it before:

They’ve been doing road work on this stretch of highway, and there are temporary dashed lane markers that are much shorter than the permanent ones and spaced further apart from one another. The driving visualization in the instrument cluster (not FSD Beta) switches between showing dashed lines and solid lines, alternating every 1-2 seconds. This makes it impossible to use Auto Lane Change, since the car won’t cross solid lane markers (at least not without FSD Beta). I drove on this road in both daylight and at night, and the behavior was the same.

 

[JeffMH]

How long did it take your car to update to the latest beta once you signed up for it? I'm also going on a road trip to MN and I signed up for the monthly FSD to try it out. I'm a bit nervous as I haven't received a single firmware update since I got the new plaid back at end of Mar. Hopeful that I get to try it out on the trip.

 

[EVRider-FL]

How long did it take your car to update to the latest beta once you signed up for it? I'm also going on a road trip to MN and I signed up for the monthly FSD to try it out. I'm a bit nervous as I haven't received a single firmware update since I got the new plaid back at end of Mar. Hopeful that I get to try it out on the trip.

My car has HW4, so I had to wait for a build with FSD Beta 11.4.x, because 11.3.x is not compatible with HW4. I subscribed on Aug 27, and received 2023.32.4 with FSD Beta 11.4.4 on Sept 14, two days before my road trip. I did receive other updates after taking delivery of my car on May 1. If you have HW3 and a build with any FSD Beta version, you should be able to use it as soon as you subscribe to FSD. Which build do you have?

If you’re not getting updates, make sure your car has both cell and WiFi coverage where you park, and make sure the Controls > Software software update setting is set to Advanced.

 

[EVRider-FL]

I enabled FSD Beta yesterday so that I could use it to drive on rural highways and other back roads in NH. It works pretty well even on curvy roads, but there’s a quirk that happens consistently: on a two lane road, especially with curves, if two or more motorcycles are riding together and coming towards me, the car will start driving erratically in my lane, presumably because it’s trying to avoid a collision with the motorcycles. It occasionally happens even with one approaching motorcycle, but not consistently. On the other hand, I haven’t had any phantom braking incidents caused by approaching cars on curvy roads. Still using 2023.32.4 with FSD Beta 11.4.4.

 

[EVRider-FL]

Another quirk that I only experienced on the last day of my road trip: I was driving on I-95 in FL with FSD Beta, speed limit 70, cruising speed set to 75 — on at least 3 occasions, the cruising speed inexplicably changed to 55 or 60, even though the speed limit didn’t change and remained 70 on the display. I was in the right lane but was not exiting. This was not one of the situations where the car will temporarily slow down, because those do not change the set cruising speed. And this only happened during the last couple of hours of my 5 week road trip.

 

[EVRider-FL]

Another quirk I forgot to mention. I don’t remember if this happened with NoA too, or just FSD Beta, but when driving in the rightmost lane of a three lane interstate, the car sometimes wants to move out of the rightmost lane (that’s what the message says), even when Minimize Lane Changes is enabled. What’s wrong with the rightmost lane? That’s where you should be if you’re not passing anyone.

 

[uscbucsfan]

Another quirk I forgot to mention. I don’t remember if this happened with NoA too, or just FSD Beta, but when driving in the rightmost lane of a three lane interstate, the car sometimes wants to move out of the rightmost lane (that’s what the message says), even when Minimize Lane Changes is enabled. What’s wrong with the rightmost lane? That’s where you should be if you’re not passing anyone.

It's the merge lane.

 

[davewill]

• On a few occasions, the nav system briefly announced that I needed to turn onto some non-existent road while I was on the highway, but then quickly recovered. I have to wonder what would have happened if FSD Beta was controlling my lane changes.

I did the same thing (subscribe to a month of FSD during a road trip to try it out) and ran into the same issue with HW3. However, I think it was the Nav system that was having the problem and it might have happened even without FSD. There was recent road work in the area, and it would suddenly think I was on the frontage road next to the highway, or in the lanes going the other way. It would voice the bad turn warning, even while the map had already corrected itself back the correct route.

As for FSD, I got really annoyed at the lane change logic. On a four lane highway (2 each way) it would shift to the left "faster" lane in situations where I was 1/4 mile behind a car that I wasn't gaining on. Worse, I could see cars in the distance behind me that were gaining on me. It would also do it for "routing" reasons, when I knew that the next exit was on the right and tens of miles away. On surface streets, it will try to do lane changes too close to intersections or fail to get in the correct lane for a turn and try to do so ridiculously close to the turn.

I have found Autopilot to really lower the stress of driving long distances, and hoped FSD would turn out to be an improvment on that. I came to the conclusion that it's not. Glad I didn't buy it.

 

[pancoastp]

I had FSDb enabled in my previous Model S and my wife’s Model 3. I used Minimal Lane Changes, but that didn’t stop the car from changing lanes to follow the route when it didn’t really need to, both on and off the highway. When using NoA on previous road trips, the car sometimes wanted to make dangerous lane changes (like entering an express lane that was closed). It’s less stressful to drive on the highway without FSDb.

I'm using FSDb in my 2023 MX with HW4, I prefer it over EAP, as it seems to be 'smarter' than EAP is. I also have minimal lane changes selected, and if it starts to signal to move where I dont want to merge, I just flick off the flasher and it stops. Other times, I just let it do it's thing, and it moves over, then 15 seconds later it moves back. Kinda like me telling my kid. 'See, i told you it wasn't a good idea' but, i figure the uberComputer needs to gather as many videos of automated lane changes and what happens in order to learn and get MUCH smarter.
I am very comfortable with FSB, I did roughly 6000 miles this summer using EAP and another 3500 with FSDb, so have a decent level of familiarity with it. I also don't remember phantom braking on a trip since I finally got FSD activated. It does slow down about 100 yards out from an upcoming stopsign, more than it needs to... enough to be a little irritating.

I have noticed that with FSD, initially when taking an off-ramp lane on the freeway it would overshoot and get my R side across the line, but.. it quit doing that after about 1500 miles or so of FSD... now it just pulls over where it should be and maintains the lane centering

 

[EVRider-FL]

I did the same thing (subscribe to a month of FSD during a road trip to try it out) and ran into the same issue with HW3. However, I think it was the Nav system that was having the problem and it might have happened even without FSD. There was recent road work in the area, and it would suddenly think I was on the frontage road next to the highway, or in the lanes going the other way. It would voice the bad turn warning, even while the map had already corrected itself back the correct route.

As for FSD, I got really annoyed at the lane change logic. On a four lane highway (2 each way) it would shift to the left "faster" lane in situations where I was 1/4 mile behind a car that I wasn't gaining on. Worse, I could see cars in the distance behind me that were gaining on me. It would also do it for "routing" reasons, when I knew that the next exit was on the right and tens of miles away. On surface streets, it will try to do lane changes too close to intersections or fail to get in the correct lane for a turn and try to do so ridiculously close to the turn.

I have found Autopilot to really lower the stress of driving long distances, and hoped FSD would turn out to be an improvment on that. I came to the conclusion that it's not. Glad I didn't buy it.

The navigation issues happened when using Navigation on Autopilot, not just FSD Beta. You can reduce the number of unwanted lane changes in FSD Beta by enabling the Minimize Lane Changes option, but you have to do it at the start of every drive. I sometimes forget to do that until the car tries to move into a faster lane. I wish it was a sticky setting.

I didn’t renew my FSD subscription after my road trip, but my wife’s car has FSD so I can play with the beta there.

 

[KLam]

I don't have hardware 4, but I think this applies:

Auto lane change is a function (speed differences) of your cruising speed setting and the speed of the car ahead of you. Most people will set to have their cruising speed 5-10 mph above Max Speed Limit the system detected. This I have discovered to make the car change lane when I don't want to. The main reason is that most cars on the right lanes are at or below speed limit, especially for trucks. So now I set my cruising speed at 0 offset and move the speed up or down with the scroll wheel. When approaching my exits with slower car on the right lane, I dial down my speed to match that of the car in front to suppress the auto lane change.

 

[EVRider-FL]

I don't have hardware 4, but I think this applies:

Auto lane change is a function (speed differences) of your cruising speed setting and the speed of the car ahead of you. Most people will set to have their cruising speed 5-10 mph above Max Speed Limit the system detected. This I have discovered to make the car change lane when I don't want to. The main reason is that most cars on the right lanes are at or below speed limit, especially for trucks. So now I set my cruising speed at 0 offset and move the speed up or down with the scroll wheel. When approaching my exits with slower car on the right lane, I dial down my speed to match that of the car in front to suppress the auto lane change.

If you enable Minimize Lane Changes per my previous reply, FSD Beta will not change lanes to get around slower traffic.