Hell, right now I'd pay a few bucks to disable AP so I could use the old school cruise control. I still don't understand Tesla's opposition for making that an option whether you have AP or not.
they meant "save a few thousand dollars so my Tesla can just have the ordinary cruise control that it comes with, without the autopilot which I believe to be unusable"
Prices and packages aside, I'm asking can you turn on basic cruise control without turning on any form of automatic steering?
To me, design hubris is forcing someone to accept a choice-limiting or poorly documented form of automation in order to accept a more basic form. I have a Fiat 124 Spider... love it, but it has one "feature" that I absolutely hate, which is that if you hold the clutch down and brake while stopped on an uphill incline, it holds the brake for 2 seconds after you take your foot off. Presumably this is for people who don't know how to balance clutch on a hill... although the overlap between those people and the people who'd buy this car must be vanishingly low. You can disable this dumb thing - but the only way to do it is to pull the fuse that controls antilock brakes. It's infuriating.
> Prices and packages aside, I'm asking can you turn on basic cruise control without turning on any form of automatic steering?
Yes.
BTW, the automatic steering is very easy to override by just turning the wheel. When I change lanes I just turn the wheel and then turn autopilot back on.
BTW, I also had a Subaru that held the clutch on a hill. I really appreciated it in San Francisco. Personally, I don't understand the hate. I never felt like I needed it, but I remember my mom complaining about other people rolling back in a steep driveway at my preschool in the 1980s. Maybe the feature is needed for those places in the world where everyone drives stick, even the people who are clutzes?
I learned to drive stick on the hills in LA, and owned a manual in SF... not rolling backward is part of being a good driver. I'm just saying I'd like the option to turn it off w/o disabling antilock brakes. For me, the feature creates unpredictable stalls or dangerous situations, because you never know if it's engaging. It engages on a 4% grade or something; it's hard to know if you're at 3% or not before you take your foot off the brake and find your car not moving as you let out the clutch. If you assume the brake is on and it isn't, you let the clutch out further to override it (also not marked how much throttle that takes) and you shoot forward into the car in front of you. If you assume it's off and it's actually on, you stall. People who live in parts of the world where there's only manual transmissions know how to drive a manual car. I think it was made for people who've only driven automatic but chose a manual this time. The Fiat 124 up until last year was the only car sold in America where the automatic model was still more expensive - an add-on. AFAIK.
I don't care what features they add, and I've heard other people not be bothered by it. Just give me a way to turn them off!
In the Subaru when it would engage it would turn on a light on the dashboard. It also only engaged on very steep hills where you would always be stomping on the gas no matter what.
I think the Subaru just had a much better execution of it than the Fiat.
Edit: Maybe call the dealership and see if the level sensor can be adjusted? It really should only hold the brakes if you are on a hill that is so steep that you are naturally worrying about rollback.
That's an interesting idea, mangling the level sensor ;)
The other quick-fix is to always hold the e-brake up just enough to turn on the light when you think the grade might be >3%. This is apparently because whoever designed the system assumed that people who use the handbrake on a hill know how to release it and drive better than people who don't - whereas if you grew up driving on really steep hills in the US you weren't taught that method. The other way around it is to hold the brake w/o the clutch, keeping the car in neutral, and then unbrake-clutch-shift-gas really fast before the car rolls backward (more dangerous, but acceptable as heel/toe practice). I really wish it only happened on a very steep hill; it's the very mild slopes that caused me the worst surprises when I first bought the car and almost got into several accidents.
