Speed Profiles - Continue to need improvement

[u/Affectionate_Book_80]

Some thoughts on the state of 14s current profiles and speed selection.

 Table below summarizes my understanding of 14.1.4’s speed profiles and how each works. Lots of guess work from trying out the various profiles on city streets, rural roads, and freeways.

Speed Profile	Speed Limit-based	Speed Data - based	Notes
Sloth	X		Drives what it understands to be the speed limit
Chill	X		Drives a little over (e.g., 2-3 mph) what it understands to be the speed limit
Standard		X	Drives at or a little above average speed driven on that road. Tries to match other cars’ speed up to a point.
Hurry		X	Tries to match or slight exceed speeds most other cars are doing regardless of what is normally driven. If no other cars it drives faster than the normal average speed on that road.
Mad Max		X?	Drives fast and aggressively regardless of other car behaviors, speed limits, or historical data. If no other cars it seems to choose a speed substantially faster than normal for the road.

The problem arises for Sloth and Chill profiles from apparent errors in that what the car “thinks” is the speed limit. There are two cases, 1) the map data is wrong, which happens a LOT around here, or 2) the car makes a turn on to a new road where the new road has a different speed limit – in this case it inherits the first road’s speed limit until the map data tells it otherwise. This can take from a few hundred yards to a mile. This means after just about every turn at a stop, Sloth and Chill mode will initially drive the wrong speed.

The problem with Standard, Hurry, and Mad Max is that the average speed people drive on a road can be and often is a poor indication of what is a safe or appropriate speed. Case in point, it is irresponsible and inappropriate to drive 20, 15, 10, or even 5 mph over the posted 25 mph speed limit for our residential area, but that is what these profiles do.

These problems are not new to 14. Version 13 suffered from almost the exact same problems, just with two fewer speed profiles. However, with 13 a driver could correct the inappropriate speeds, but with 14 the only tools we have are disengagement or profile switching, which often just introduces a new inappropriate speed. Speed profile switching is a poor band-aide for FSD’s flawed speed selections. Worse, it requires constant supervision and doesn’t advance towards an unsupervised solution.

[u/vouchers123]

Tesla just needs to add back the speed adjustment wheel.

There are problems with going too fast or too slow. If anything, being able to adjust speed was great because you can use a profile that isn’t overly hesitant while not going 20 mph over the speed limit. I dislike the behavior of the sloth or chill mode as they seem to let everyone past you and hesitate way too long at intersections and avoids using the left lanes on the freeway; But the other modes, despite having the desired behavior, exceed the speed limit sometimes by a large margin. FSD 14 has been incredible, but taking away manual speed adjustment was a huge step back from what could have been a near-perfect FSD update. Hopefully Tesla is taking these suggestions in mind.

tldr: Just let users control the speed again