-3:14 a.m. Pacific Time on November 15, 2021

Tesla found that in the latest software update, complaints about the serious and dangerous phantom braking incident that plagued Autopilot have increased.

Phantom braking is a term used to describe when advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or automated driving systems apply brakes for no reason.

The system may erroneously detect an object on the road or predict a collision that will not actually occur and apply the brakes in an attempt to avoid it.

Obviously, phantom braking is what you want to avoid, because if someone is too close behind you, it can cause an accident.

For Tesla owners, it has always been part of Autopilot, but to a large extent it is manageable. Incidents will be few and far apart.

But for many Tesla owners, the situation seems to have gotten worse recently.

Last month, after many testers reported persistent phantom braking problems, Tesla briefly withdrew the new version of its Fully Autonomous Driving (FSD) Beta software-this is the acknowledgment of CEO Elon Musk The problem.

FSD Beta was only tested by a limited number of Tesla owners, but it is now clear that phantom braking has also become a major issue for Autopilot users.

In the past few weeks, Electrek has received numerous reports from Tesla owners claiming that they have experienced an unusual number of phantom braking incidents.

After following up on the issue, we found that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that Tesla owners had a significant increase in complaints about the same phantom braking issue last month.

One of the recent complaints from NHTSA is:

"After accepting the delivery at the end of May, we have accumulated 9,000 miles on the car and experienced a terrible experience when the traffic-sensing cruise control system slammed the brakes for no reason, and there was no one or passing vehicles ahead. Behavior possible It is a 5-10 mph deceleration, or in some cases full brake pressure, which puts us in danger of being rear-end collision. Several times we are close to a rear-end collision."

The complaints are very similar to this one. The driver said that their vehicle had a large number of phantom braking incidents on Autopilot.

Some car owners stated that they contacted Tesla about this issue, but were told that this was due to "software evolution":

"When driving with cruise control, the vehicle will occasionally brake suddenly for unknown reasons. Once, I was worried that the car following me would either hit my car or be forced to take other actions that might cause an accident. When contacting Tesla with concerns, they talked about the development of software programs...there were no fixes available."

The increase in complaints appears to have started when Tesla transitioned to a vision-based autopilot and stopped using radar.

That started in May 2021, but complaints have also increased significantly in the past few weeks.

I also personally encountered this phantom braking problem on my Model 3 recently.

I am an avid Tesla Autopilot user, and the Phantom Brake has always been something that needs attention. It happens from time to time, but not often.

For me, this is just another reason to be careful and always pay attention when using the system.

But after I received the 2021.40 software update on the Tesla Model 3 last week, I saw a significant increase in phantom braking incidents. I have several for each drive. As many as one every 10 kilometers on Autopilot.

This is very similar to what the other owners described above.

Sometimes it is a strange slowdown for no reason, and sometimes the car brakes suddenly for no reason.

An interesting example that I noticed last week was when I changed the auto lane to the left lane on the highway, because I saw a car driving up the ramp, and when I passed the ramp, the car Will merge.

I drove Autopilot and let it move to the left lane to let the cars merge. It had no problem, but when I overtake, Autopilot decided to slam the brakes, as if the car was merging and changing lanes to the left, it was not.

Fortunately, there was no car behind me, and I was able to quickly counter the braking incident, but it was terrible.

I talked to other Tesla owners about the latest update, and it seems that some people are experiencing the same problem while others are not.

There is no denying that the Phantom braking incident has increased significantly, but it does not seem to affect all cars in the same way.

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Tesla is a transportation and energy company. It sells cars in the "Tesla Motors" division and stationary battery packs for household, commercial and utility scale projects in the "Tesla Energy" division.

Autopilot is Tesla's advanced driver assistance program, with functions such as automatic steering, automatic parking, and traffic-aware cruise control (TACC).

Fred is the editor-in-chief and main writer of Electrek.

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