Thoughts after a 2300 mile journey

[Pruitt]

I just got home from a long distance trip from Wyoming to southern Arizona and back. Several things stick out in my mind concerning the car and the charging infrastructure.

First, I had more trouble with superchargers being off line or not working properly than during all the trips I took in the past eight years (and there were many). I posted a separate thread about that elsewhere.

Second, the navigator would frequently get caught in some sort of a loop when I would select a supercharger from the pins on the map. It would display the message "finding superchargers for your trip" and then just sit there with the cursor spinning. I had to cancel the selection and then re-select it, after which it would promptly put up the list of intermediate chargers. It must have done this half a dozen times.

Third, whatever database Tesla draws speed limits from sorely needs updating. On several occasions I was driving happily down the road on autopilot and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the car would slow, the speed limit displayed would drop (usually to 40 or 45) and I would get the message that the car could not go faster than five miles over the limit on autopilot. There were no speed changes posted along the road.

Fourth, at some point one of the software updates enabled a functionality I first proposed when Tesla implemented the five-over limit while in autopilot - when heading into a reduced-speed zone the max speed drops, and now when leaving the reduced-speed zone the max speed and the set speed returns to what was originally set (as long as I didn't make any changes).So the car would come into town off a 65 zone into a 45, then 30 zones, and the car would slow down automatically - it always has. Now, if I don't change the setting or take the car off autopilot, when it gets through the town and the speed limit goes back up, the car accelerates back to where it was set without me having to do anything. This is the first trip I've ever been on where it did that. Might have been implemented some time ago - I don't go on many trips these days. But it was nice they did finally add that in.

"Tesla Supercharger" by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is marked with CC0 1.0.
Admin note: Image added for Blog Feed thumbnail

 

[DerbyDave]

I think bad map data is causing speed limit problems. In town with a posted 40 MPH speed limit, my car for no reason will set the speed limit to 66 MPH and rapidly accelerate. The car is so powerful, it is a jolting change, and you feel like the car is out of control. This is repeatable at least one spot. FSD has a way to got, but is much better overall.

 

[whizfish]

I just finished driving from Santa Cruz, CA to western Maine in my '23 MYLR, about 3200 miles. I had a number of similar problems with sudden very low speed limits and occasional navigator weirdness. My charging experience was still very good but I did run into two stalls that weren't working right, which hasn't happened before this trip. I've driven this route two previous times in the Tesla (one was east to west of course), and I'll be doing it every spring and fall for the foreseeable future. Other observations:

In all my stops I saw only two non-Teslas charging, a VW at one site and a Rivian R1T at another.

I never found a site that was more than half full, except one that nearly filled up while I was charging. Plenty of sites were empty or nearly so. I assume this will change eventually but for now, and on my simple route (mostly interstates) the choices for charging are more than adequate to meet demand.

I subscribed to FSD (and will likely only keep it for the month) and was happy to have it. Actually, I was mostly just happy to have the enhanced behavior of Autopilot when I had FSD "turned off". In particular, traffic aware cruise control + autosteer + automatic lane changes on command are all I really need. In FSD the car chooses when to change lanes and that's mostly OK too, but I'm more stressed watching and waiting for the car to do something dumb. It's not real good at temporary lane changes in construction zones, and things got a little tense when other cars would behave aggressively.

 

[etigro]

What is your firmware ? On my last trips (all on 2024.8.9) I found the in car trip planner making odd choices for superchargers I had to override. What is more striking is the planner from the app would not recommend the same stops and would be more relevant. Curious to understand why the 2 are so different.

 

[Lance From Jax]

I too have experience the rapid change in speed, usually I am cruising down the highway at 70 with Autopilot on, and suddenly my car will slow to 45. I assumed it is seeing and reading speed limit signs that are on a service road running along side the highway.

 

[MaartenD]

I too have experience the rapid change in speed, usually I am cruising down the highway at 70 with Autopilot on, and suddenly my car will slow to 45. I assumed it is seeing and reading speed limit signs that are on a service road running along side the highway.

It would be nice if that would explain these events. It doesn't. I have one location where it just "knows" the wrong speed limit (it knows the correct one a road earlier and it always is displaying the wrong one on the other road) and when leaving my village (which is not signed with a speed limit sign) it sometimes thinks the limit is 30 (km/h) where it is in fact 80. And will then continue this for a mile until the next roundabout, even though there are side roads that would cancel a temporary speed limit.

I don't know what is more annoying. The fact that the second thing is random, or that there is no place to report such things.

 

[SteelClouds]

I was in Bakersfield of all places when I missed an exit to another freeway.. the next turn around was several miles down the road but never fear.. the nav system had me leaping from a 30 foot high overpass to the street below to be on my way.. several times. The nav never did resync..I had to end my route and reprogram it into nav for it to be aware of where I was really at.

 

[DerbyDave]

In FSD 12.x the "observed" speed limit isn't even displayed, so when I am on a road with a 40MPH speed limit, and the car suddenly sets my speed at 66, it is very noticeable. My overspeed settings seem to always be 66 for some reason. Wonder if your can charge Tesla for the speeding tickets?

 

[Pruitt]

I was in Bakersfield of all places when I missed an exit to another freeway.. the next turn around was several miles down the road but never fear.. the nav system had me leaping from a 30 foot high overpass to the street below to be on my way.. several times. The nav never did resync..I had to end my route and reprogram it into nav for it to be aware of where I was really at.

Maybe you should change your handle to "SteelKnievel" ...

 

[Pruitt]

There's one road near my house that's posted 40 mph with a sign just past a corner. When I'm coming straight down the road the car reads the sign and autopilot maintains that speed all the way. When I come down the side street and turn onto the road the car apparently doesn't see the 40 mph sign. Autopilot will maintain 40 mph for about 100 yards, then slow to 30 mph. I think the 30 is what the database tells it is the speed, which the car ignores when it sees the sign.

 

[Seattle]

I just finished driving from Santa Cruz, CA to western Maine in my '23 MYLR, about 3200 miles. I had a number of similar problems with sudden very low speed limits and occasional navigator weirdness. My charging experience was still very good but I did run into two stalls that weren't working right, which hasn't happened before this trip. I've driven this route two previous times in the Tesla (one was east to west of course), and I'll be doing it every spring and fall for the foreseeable future. Other observations:

In all my stops I saw only two non-Teslas charging, a VW at one site and a Rivian R1T at another.

I never found a site that was more than half full, except one that nearly filled up while I was charging. Plenty of sites were empty or nearly so. I assume this will change eventually but for now, and on my simple route (mostly interstates) the choices for charging are more than adequate to meet demand.

I subscribed to FSD (and will likely only keep it for the month) and was happy to have it. Actually, I was mostly just happy to have the enhanced behavior of Autopilot when I had FSD "turned off". In particular, traffic aware cruise control + autosteer + automatic lane changes on command are all I really need. In FSD the car chooses when to change lanes and that's mostly OK too, but I'm more stressed watching and waiting for the car to do something dumb. It's not real good at temporary lane changes in construction zones, and things got a little tense when other cars would behave aggressively.

I also went on a long drive from Seattle to St Louis in my 2015 S, about 2,200 miles. I had a lot of the same experiences as you. My 10 year old S is still a great car to drive, I love driving it. I'd consider a new S for faster supercharging and more range. My car had lost about 20 miles of range over time, estimates of driving time and ranger were good, charging time was underestimated.

• Slow supercharging - it would go as high as 120kw for a short time, but only when I had low remaining range, maybe 20 miles, and it would degrade steadily to under 50 kw by the time it was half full. Tesla has notoriously derated older cars for supercharging according to similar reports from others.
• Routing getting stuck - on certain routes at times. I'd have to pick another location that was different or far away into the distance so it would route me to places. If I picked some random particular spot along the way it would get stuck. Mostly though it would do a great job on routing.
  • I also learned to look at all chargers in a city using the show chargers map option
  • Since my car was older and thus was a slow supercharger, I noticed they would usually not route me to the fastest speed supercharger in a city; this is okay because I can't make use of that extra speed, but sometimes I wanted the other one bc it was by a restaurant or something similar
  • The estimates for time charging at stops were underestimated, maybe by 50-75%, I felt like that was the one thing that was off. The range estimates were excellent, even for my older car that
• Never saw any non-teslas charging
• Many sites were empty or had only one other car out in the boonies. In the cities there were usually a few cars there
• Never ran into a nearly full site
• Good old 2015 Tesla autopilot works great, reliable freeway cruiser technology - set it and it follows the road, avoids cars and running into things. I think it works better than the similar technology on other recent vintage vehicles I've driven; no exp in person on FSD

I really enjoyed the ability to drive as far as I wanted and just find a hotel along the way a while farther. I could imagine a business for Tesla but also a useful service would be showing me hotels with superchargers (and there are many of them across the Midwest), or hotels with l2 chargers that could fill me up over night.

 

[UltronY2021]

I don't think the speed limit is just a database anymore, it sure seems to be reading road signs now. A construction site that just went up dropped me to 15mph on a road that is otherwise 35mph - it read that sign correctly. A random sign that happened to say 15 dropped me to 15 in a 40, that was a rude awakening. Most bizarrely a sign caused me to drop to 6 - yes 6mph - 2 days ago.

Why do you think the Superchargers are messed up more now?

 

[Toyman]

I don’t use FSD, but do use the lane keeping and cruise control. I drive on US highway that has a speed limit of 65. When I pull out headed W.the screen indicates a speed limit of 70 & I can cruise at 75. When I come out of town, the speed limit (signed) goes to 65. The Tesla may show 55, 60, or 70 & my cruise is restricted to 5 MPH over what ever the T decides the speed limit is. That problem, along with phantom brake issues, and phantom wipers, and it slamming on the brakes when a car pulls up and stops on a perpendicular side road, forget this POS. WTF trick is E going to pull on StarLink, limit the speed to 5MBS unless you are watching X.

 

[alexgr]

I just got home from a long distance trip from Wyoming to southern Arizona and back. Several things stick out in my mind concerning the car and the charging infrastructure.

First, I had more trouble with superchargers being off line or not working properly than during all the trips I took in the past eight years (and there were many). I posted a separate thread about that elsewhere.

Second, the navigator would frequently get caught in some sort of a loop when I would select a supercharger from the pins on the map. It would display the message "finding superchargers for your trip" and then just sit there with the cursor spinning. I had to cancel the selection and then re-select it, after which it would promptly put up the list of intermediate chargers. It must have done this half a dozen times.

Third, whatever database Tesla draws speed limits from sorely needs updating. On several occasions I was driving happily down the road on autopilot and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the car would slow, the speed limit displayed would drop (usually to 40 or 45) and I would get the message that the car could not go faster than five miles over the limit on autopilot. There were no speed changes posted along the road.

Fourth, at some point one of the software updates enabled a functionality I first proposed when Tesla implemented the five-over limit while in autopilot - when heading into a reduced-speed zone the max speed drops, and now when leaving the reduced-speed zone the max speed and the set speed returns to what was originally set (as long as I didn't make any changes).So the car would come into town off a 65 zone into a 45, then 30 zones, and the car would slow down automatically - it always has. Now, if I don't change the setting or take the car off autopilot, when it gets through the town and the speed limit goes back up, the car accelerates back to where it was set without me having to do anything. This is the first trip I've ever been on where it did that. Might have been implemented some time ago - I don't go on many trips these days. But it was nice they did finally add that in.

View attachment 1046850
"Tesla Supercharger" by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is marked with CC0 1.0.
Admin note: Image added for Blog Feed thumbnail

Your second issue could very well be due to network connectivity problems. If you see it again, try finding something else to check if you have connectivity or if it is a true SC routing issue.

 

[MaartenD]

I don't think the speed limit is just a database anymore, it sure seems to be reading road signs now. A construction site that just went up dropped me to 15mph on a road that is otherwise 35mph - it read that sign correctly. A random sign that happened to say 15 dropped me to 15 in a 40, that was a rude awakening. Most bizarrely a sign caused me to drop to 6 - yes 6mph - 2 days ago.

Absolutely. You need a database because lots of speeds are not signposted, but it also reads road signs. The first is leading until the car encounters the second. Or thinks it does, because I can not explain some of its speed decisions.

 

[Pruitt]

One of the "fun" things about reading speed limit signs - often schools zones have a posted speed limit for certain hours. The car can't read the hours, so it slows to whatever the school limit (+5) speed is all the time. On top of that, in many places there's a sign that says "end school zone," meaning you can resume the non-zone speed. Car can't read that, either. So you either bumble along at the school limit speed until you reach the next regular speed sign, or (HORRORS!) you take the car off autopilot and drive manually for awhile.

 

[timberlights]

comment on "more supercharger problems" is concerning. I am planning a long-distance trip to Yellowstone next week . . . do I take our old ICE car instead of the new Tesla?

 

[whizfish]

comment on "more supercharger problems" is concerning. I am planning a long-distance trip to Yellowstone next week . . . do I take our old ICE car instead of the new Tesla?

I think you're overreacting. I used at least 25 different charging stations on my cross-country trip and encountered exactly two misbehaving stalls. In both cases there were multiple other empty stalls to try, and in both cases the first alternate I tried worked perfectly. At none of these sites were there fewer than 3 or 4 empty stalls from which to choose (usually 6 to 10). If your route to Yellowstone has supercharger sites where you need them, you'll be fine.

 

[rzn89]

I just finished driving from Santa Cruz, CA to western Maine in my '23 MYLR, about 3200 miles. I had a number of similar problems with sudden very low speed limits and occasional navigator weirdness. My charging experience was still very good but I did run into two stalls that weren't working right, which hasn't happened before this trip. I've driven this route two previous times in the Tesla (one was east to west of course), and I'll be doing it every spring and fall for the foreseeable future. Other observations:

In all my stops I saw only two non-Teslas charging, a VW at one site and a Rivian R1T at another.

I never found a site that was more than half full, except one that nearly filled up while I was charging. Plenty of sites were empty or nearly so. I assume this will change eventually but for now, and on my simple route (mostly interstates) the choices for charging are more than adequate to meet demand.

I subscribed to FSD (and will likely only keep it for the month) and was happy to have it. Actually, I was mostly just happy to have the enhanced behavior of Autopilot when I had FSD "turned off". In particular, traffic aware cruise control + autosteer + automatic lane changes on command are all I really need. In FSD the car chooses when to change lanes and that's mostly OK too, but I'm more stressed watching and waiting for the car to do something dumb. It's not real good at temporary lane changes in construction zones, and things got a little tense when other cars would behave aggressively.

That is one heck of a drive. I live in NY and I don’t like the 8hr trip to Acadia national park. It’s actually amazing you can drive the Tesla that far. We have gone to FL. But 95 is a major route.