In 2021, Tesla, the "top", of new energy vehicles, handed over a total of 930,000 vehicles worldwide, almost doubling from nearly 500,000 in 2020, and also making it thrive in the new energy vehicle market.
However, recently, the US car safety regulator launched an investigation into Tesla, because Tesla will suddenly and automatically brake for no reason after turning on the Autopolit function. Many complainants refer to it as a "ghost brake."
It is reported that this week, after receiving hundreds of complaints, Tesla's "old adversary": the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finally began to investigate Tesla's "ghost brake" problem. The vehicles involved will cover up to 416,000 vehicles, including the Model 3 and Model Y models.
It is worth playing that the "ghost brake" that has been repeatedly mentioned in the United States is rarely mentioned by domestic users, and the domestic Tesla "can't stop" has happened repeatedly.
"Brake ghosts" occur frequently
"Phantom braking", also known as phantom brake, usually refers to the user after opening Tesla's autopilot assist system, at an unspecified moment, the brake function will be suddenly activated without the driver's control, resulting in the vehicle quickly entering an unnecessary deceleration state, thereby greatly improving the potential safety risk of rear-end accidents.
According to the US media "Washington Post" report, about Tesla's "ghost brake", in the past 9 months, the cumulative complaints have reached 354. Especially in the past three months, the number of complaints is increasing rapidly, reaching 107.
Some people in the automatic driving industry told "E Car Hui" that the main reason for the emergence of "ghost brakes" is still the logical hidden dangers in the perception-decision-execution brought about by Tesla's "pure visual solution" that has been controversial by the outside world for a long time.
Especially after the cancellation of the last millimeter-wave radar in May last year and the adoption of a pure visual perception scheme, the "ghost brake" incident began to soar.
Due to the lack of maturity of perception technology and imperfect road data, for example, in the early stages of Autopilot 2.0, many car owners encountered a similar scenario: the vehicle would regard the shadow cast by the overpass on the road as an obstacle and automatically activate the brakes.
Some owners have also exposed the misidentification of Tesla vehicles by speed limit signs on the side of the road, causing the system to suddenly intervene in the brakes without autopilot enabled. In other cases, the system recognizes that there are no obstacles around the vehicle, resulting in some system bugs.
Why don't you use a few hundred radars?
Autonomous driving, from the perspective of technical solutions, has always had two routes of contention.
One is the comprehensive solution of vision + radar, and the vast majority of Chinese and foreign manufacturers take this road. The other is the pure visual scheme that Tesla and Musk insist on.
The fusion perception scheme of vision + radar is considered to be the most reasonable combination at present, and Musk believes that carrying radar will bring greater challenges to processing data, which is true, but radar as a safety and redundant sensor is also very important to ensure driving safety.
One more layer of redundancy, one more layer of security, most manufacturers have recognized such a solution, which is also the current solution used by all RoboTaxi.
But Musk has shared the idea more than once before: using as few sensors as possible can reduce costs on the one hand, and reduce the challenges of data fusion and processing on the other hand.
At present, domestic Tesla has retained the lidar in the front section of the car, and the beta version of FSD has not been pushed in China. Therefore, the ghost brake surge problem encountered by American car owners will not be encountered by domestic car owners for the time being.
However, Musk said that a purely visual version of Tesla will eventually cover all regions of the world. So Chinese car owners will eventually drive Tesla without radar.
FSD has not yet entered China, does not mean that ghost brakes have not occurred.
In fact, in China, Tesla has also sporadically appeared in the case of "ghost brakes" before. At the end of last year, bloggers in the direction of Weibo Cars revealed that they had encountered "ghost brakes" when the road conditions and weather conditions were good.
The fusion perception scheme of vision + radar is considered to be the optimal solution at present, and Musk believes that carrying radar will bring greater challenges to processing data, which is true, but radar as a safety redundant sensor is also very important to ensure driving safety.
Tesla promises that the visual system can reach the level of meeting the automatic assisted driving, but from so many complaints, in the face of Tesla's commitment, at least for now, the owner is still not convinced.