Tesla's Recall Fix for Autopilot Irritates Drivers, Disappoints Safety Advocates

> For Pecan, the changes have turned Autopilot into a constant nag. He said he gets dinged by an alert to pay attention if he averts his eyes to look briefly at the side-view mirror or change the radio station. Sometimes, he gets a warning when he is looking at a previous alert.

This mostly seem to only happen within the first 10 seconds of turning it on. Even glancing at your speed on the screen can trigger it. Otherwise, the threshold for the rest of the autosteer "session" seems to be 4 seconds or so looking away from the road, depending on if it thinks you're looking at your mirrors or the cars around you.

Also, "disappoints safety advocates" is barely touched on. The only quote is

> Consumer Reports, in preliminary tests, found that drivers can still circumvent some of the safety systems, including covering up an internal camera designed to monitor whether a driver is staying focused on the road. “We don’t think that the recall, as far as what Tesla did to address these concerns, fixed the issues that we have reported on in the past,” said Kelly Funkhouser, associate director of vehicle technology at Consumer Reports’ auto test center. Consumer Reports is still evaluating the adjustments, she said.

1. I tried covering it up to test it, it didn't work. In addition, Safelite damaged my internal camera wiring harness, and for the two weeks that it was broken, autosteer was completely unavailable.

2. That quote is so vague that it's worthless. WSJ could have omitted the second part of the headline until Consumer Reports finished their evaluation of the adjustments.

I am one of the disappointed owners. It is incredible to see how badly this has been designed and implemented. When I use the cruise control with collision avoidance, what I’m looking for is a system that can smoothly follow the traffic without sudden jerky braking and acceleration. Instead what I get is a system that keeps accelerating until it is really close to the car in front and suddenly brakes to avoid collision. What we need is a system that estimates the speed of the vehicle in front and matches that speed. Also, maintaining fixed distance is a really bad parameter design choice. What is more effective is if it can keep 3-10 second distance away - this works for lower as well as higher speeds instead of say keeping 10ft distance that fails when there is slow moving traffic or very high speed traffic.

The attention nag is annoying but warranted. It's especially annoying when I'm trying to change the music or enter a destination on the map while the vehicles in motion (which makes total sense).

That said, these nags have been in FSD Beta for a while now; it's high time that AP2 gets the same scrutiny. I have definitely texted while AP2 was active, and I regret having done that. These nags will lock you out if you're on your phone, as it should be.

AP2 has made some WILD lane changes and maneuvers in the past.