Note: My 3LR is just a standard 3LR, no EAP or FSD or Performance Update etc, so it comes with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) including Collision Avoidance Assist and Automatic Emergency Braking (a tap of right stalk down once ) and Lane Assist with Autosteer (a tap of right stalk down twice. )
Update 15 August 2022
After 23,000 kms and 11 months I have really enjoyed the way the car drives. Here are some notes on what I’ve experienced.
Acceleration – the car has lots of power and smoothly accelerates quickly, so I found it important to be modest in putting the foot down, compared to my older petrol/diesel vehicles.
Using right stalk as indicator by mistake – If rolling to an intersection and turning right if I forget and put the right stalk down, instead of the left stalk up, the car may go into cruise control and start accelerating at the intersection, eek!, so I need to watch for that and apply brake if that happens to cancel cruise control.
TACC – TACC sometimes sees obstacles and starts braking, when I know that I don’t need or want to brake.
These include pedestrians jogging on the roadway, pushbikes on the side of the road, cars pushing their nose out a bit too far from a street or driveway, cars turning left into the left lane beside you when I’m in the middle or right lanes, a car turning right across the road in front of me a safe distance ahead of me, a low bridge, a dark shadow on the road, a road works metal cover etc etc.
In these cases, if I can see them, I can flip the right stalk up to disable TACC until I pass, then flip it down to turn it on again, or, if the car starts to brake, I can tap the throttle with my foot to override the braking, so my car doesn’t slow unnecessarily.
Lane Assist – while it’s nice to rest my hand on the wheel while the car steers, practically I found that NSW roads are so badly maintained, that every road, including freeways, have large potholes and broken surfaces. Lane Assist keeps me in the middle of the lane, which is where the most damage from trucks occurs and I found the most potholes, so I stopped using lane assist, so I could move to the left or right of each pothole as I saw them.
22 Sep 2021
When I first started driving, I found Tesla Tom’s short video on Cruise Control and Auto Pilot in an Australian Model 3 was helpful.
Note that a new Tesla will need to travel about 100km over a variety of road conditions, including freeway driving, to calibrate before you can use cruise control.