Tesla Explains Why it Tried to Ram a Cyclist

Tesla responded to my eMail support inquiry from 21 days ago, asking about what would possess my Model X, Pensive, to attempt to ram into a cyclist.

I certainly understand your concern regarding the incident you described. Although Autopilot and/or Traffic Aware Cruise Control were not active, it sounds like the Lane Assist feature was activated. Page 102 of the Owner's Manual described when Lane Assist may be activated. Cyclists may not be detected by Lane Assist, so it sounds like after the vehicle was detected in front of you it tried to maneuver to a safer lane/location.

Thanks for the email, Matthew. I hope this is helpful.

That's true (pages vary based on version; it was 104 in the copy I had). I followed-up, asking how to disable the collision-avoidance functionality as it wasn't clear from the manual, which only described how to turn the collision avoidance warning on and off.

Would this be controlled by turning-off emergency breaking or the forward collision-avoidance warning, or are those entirely separate options?

Site Issues

The eMail started by addressing the issues I had submitting my support inquiry via the Web site, although it wasn't particularly enlightening:

Thank you for contacting our executive support team. I’m sorry to hear about that error message. I'm not familiar with the reason you'd be receiving that, but I'm glad you've notified the correct team. It's possible that your other emails had exceeded the character limit.

I'd trimmed my request below the limit indicated by the Web page, so the suggestion would imply (were it true) that the UI and backend have different limits, which would be unfortunate. I'm not convinced this was the case.