Tag: car update

This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

The other day the cruise control in the Tesla stopped. I was moving along a road, heard a beep, and then realized the car was slowing quickly. I have the regenerative braking set to the aggresive mode, and so the car was quickly moving from 40mph towards 0. I pressed the accelerator and didn’t think more of it.

Then it happened again a day or two later. Then again.

The third time, I realized each time it had been at night, on a narrow road that has some quick up and down hills. The car has often slowed a bit coming up over the hill, but these times I had been using cruise control to keep the speed steady as I returned home.

The manual notes that autosteer, which I think includes the cruise capabilities as they act similar, can turn off temporarily. Not what you want in a car trying to get to Level 5 autonomy.

My suspicion is that this is because the rapidly rising road seems like an obstructed view. Careful drivers probably slow slightly coming up over the rise, and I have if there is a biker or car on the side of the road. However, the human thing is to assume the road is clear, which is should be, and then brake hard if it’s not. Telsa seems more conservative and tries not to get into the place where it brakes in an emergency.

That’s not a great view, in my opinion. Most cars with adaptive cruise will hold the speed unless there is an obstruction, which shouldn’t be the case with a rising road. I’ve driven cars that did this well, not braking unless a car was actually in front of me.

I wish there were a “report” button on the display that would let me tag a moment with +/- 2 minutes around it and then later add a note to send to Tesla on how the behavior. I realize this would be a lot of reports, but this is the type of feedback they could use to improve their AI/ML models.

Actually, I can give feedback, so I’ll try that the next time something weird happens.

I don’t find this to be a safety issue, as I should be ready to take over, and if the car isn’t sure what to do, then be conservative. I just wish I could let it know that this isn’t a place it needs to be that careful.

This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

Before we could get our car, we needed to make our down payment for the car. I wrote about the ordering experience. Part of that process was choosing the loan (or case or lease) and payment. I had left it near the default of US$4500 and two days before our pickup appointment, we got an email that we needed to check the paperwork and make the payment.

As we logged on to the Tesla site, part of the workflow asked us for the credentials for our bank account.

Wha?!?!?!

We backed out and looked again and sure enough, when you click make payment, you get a popup from the Tesla site asking for your bank (Wells Fargo for us) and your login credentials.

This isn’t a recurring payment, and this isn’t from Tesla. The fine print shows this is from Plaid, a financial company. Lots of banks use their service, and maybe I use them for something, but I hadn’t seen a request to give my credentials to a third party. This is apparently a model being used as other businesses ask this from customers.

I’m not comfortable.

A Workaround

Fortunately, I searched and found a few posts from Tesla owners. This one noted that you can click the “X” in the dialog and then get a popup to enter the bank routing information. We did that, and it worked fine.

I think this is a poor business model. I’m not even sure this is legal with some of the computer security acts in the US. While some posts indicate this generates a token from your bank that is used for access, I think providing login credentials is a problem.

If you run into this with any other company, I’d try clicking the X and using a semi-more secure method of entering routing and account info.

The other day I had to run an errand early in the morning. I happened to follow the route I used to travel daily to take my kids to school. I had to pass the elementary school near my house and then the high school.

In neither of these cases was I using Autopilot. I find it to be a bit unnerving on busy country roads with no median. There’s a bias towards the middle of the road, and often I see drivers coming towards me staring at their phones, so I reserve Autopilot for those times when no one else is on the road. If I see a car, I disable it.

I was using cruise control, however, and as I approached the active school zones, I turned it off. There weren’t any incidents, but the recognition of the road conditions by the Tesla OS (?) was disturbing to me.

For both of these schools, they are facing a busy road. The elementary school is on a 45mph road. In the morning and afternoon, as school opens and closes, there is an hour during each time period where a flashing yellow light highlights a 20mph speed limit sign.

Some people don’t see this, which is scary. There is a fence to keep kids back, this is still a little scary for me, even though my kids are adults. However, most people slow down, and that often gets humans who notice the change in speed to slow down. Not to 20mph, but I think most get down to 30mph.

The Tesla usually notes speed limit signs. However, as I slowed into the zone and passed the 20mph sign, the Tesla still displayed 45mph on the console. The was repeated near the high school. That road is a 35mph zone, but has the flashing yellow above a 25mph sign.

In both cases, I would think this is an easy AI/ML thing to recognize.

What’s confusing to me is that the OS usually finds other signs. There is a construction area just West of my house, where the road detours slightly. There are orange signs propped up on the side of the road (along with cones) that note the speed limit goes from 40mph to 35mph to 25 mph. The Tesla recognizes and displays all these changes.

When it sees a 40mph sign after emerging Southbound, it displays 40mph. Northbound, there is no speed limit sign after leaving the construction area. The Tesla continues to display 25mph for the next mile or two, while most humans realize the 25mpg no long applies. At least, I doubt a police officer would stop anyone for doing 40mph, though technically the limit is likely still 25mph without a sign.

I’ve seen a few posts that Teslas don’t quite get school zones for some reason. This isnt’ an area where Autopilot should be used, IMHO, though I suspect there are people using the Full Self Driving near schools.

I have often used cruise control in these zones, set to 20mph or 25mph, since the two near my house are rather long, but I haven’t trusted Tesla to enable it in this case. In other cars, I slow to 20 and then press a button, which keeps the car moving slow.

I don’t know how other car companies might approach this, but I do think that school zones are one of those difficult cases that appear easy to recognize as humans, but might not be as easy for computers. This certainly is one of those situations that might prevent Level 5 driving from being accepted by many.

I love the car, but I continue to respect that using some of the driver assist features means these are assisting you, not driving for you.

There’s a video of this post as well.

This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

It’s been a little over two weeks, and the odometer shows about 600 miles. Quite a bit, since we were gone for 5 days out of town without the car. We’ve driven most days, but not all of them, and the charging experience has been interesting.

This was a capture recently of the main screen after a trip to town:

If you look closely, this is plugged into a 110/120V circuit, pulling 12A, and charging at 5mi/hr. Since a trip to town is 25 miles for me (roundtrip), this means it takes about 5 hours to recharge.

That’s slightly deceiving as I still have over 250mi of range after a trip to town. These trips usually use about 6% of my battery, but that means I could drive this without charging for over a week back and forth each day without issue.

Well, the car would be fine. I might be a little concerned.

Catching Up After Delivery

We definitely had range anxiety after the first day of driving. We picked up the car and went over 100 miles. When I plugged in at home, the car said it would be over 24 hours to recharge.

That’s disconcerting, but unlike a quick fill up at a gas station, I can keep recharging each day. While we hadn’t recovered back to a 90% charge before I drove it to the gym the next day, across 3-4 days, we did recover while also driving the car. Each overnight charging session got us a little closer to 90%, with some loss during the day from driving.

It’s a weird feeling, but I’m getting used to relaxing about the charging.

Maintaining 88%

For most of these 2 weeks, I’ve had the max charge set to 88%. Tesla doesn’t recommend going to 100% unless you have a long trip the next day. I see all sorts of recommendations from 70-90, and I ended up at 88%, mostly because the granularity on the slider in the app isn’t great and I got close enough and decided to stop there.

Almost every night I catch back up 88% after a trip or two each day to town. My wife takes it to do a few errands and some friends have wanted rides, so we sometimes get 50-80 miles of usage in a day, but rarely multiple days in a row.

If the car hasn’t recharged to 88% before I drive it one morning, it usually does by the next day.

Better Charging

I was worried about recharging before I started tracking my mileage. Since then I’ve relaxed a bit, but mostly for the next month or so. In November the weather changes, and since I’ll be coaching again, there will be more trips during the week, and some longer ones to tournaments. Plus, ski season will start and I wouldn’t be surprised if we drove 100-150 miles one day for coaching and then wanted to go 200 to ski the next.

I purchased a Tesla Wall Charger in August, but have been waiting for an electrician to come out to install it. This is a small job, and ultimately, it only took the team of 2 about 15 minutes to get it hooked up.

I went from this:

to this:

Charging went up as well:

At this rate, a completely empty battery, which I wouldn’t want, could go from 0-80 in about 6 hours. That’s likely an overnight charge any day of the year for me, since I’m rarely out late.

I don’t know that we need it, but the US$500 for the charger is worth some piece of mind. The install was $250, but with the 30% tax credit, we would likely get most of that back, so really it’s a $500 investment for me.

The Bottom Line

As I noted in the charging post, I think a 110V charging solution would work most of the time. At least, after tracking my mileage I think that. However, that’s summer, and I know that my pattern of driving is different in the winter.

The Tesla charger seems like a good investment to me, but I had a setup that made this a relatively cheap install. If your breaker box isn’t close to the garage, this could cost more and a few people have said their cost was closer to $500-1000 for an install on top of the charger cost.

We’ll see how I feel about the investment over time as I track our trips and mileage, but so far, charging hasn’t been an issue. Hopefully my range anxiety will lesson.

The other bottom line is the cost of driving. Using a few apps (I’m testing them), it seems that I use about 3.5kW to get to town and back. With my current power rates, that’s about $0.45 for the trip. In the BMW, it’s about a $3.80-$4.00 trip right now. If we still had the Prius, this would still be about a $2.00 trip.

It takes a long time to get a payback for that on a $50,000 car, but it certainly is a dramatic savings over what I was paying in the BMW to go to the gym.

A video of this post is available as well.