Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-driver-wa...ash-1844858198
Ok, so obviously the guy shouldn't have been watching a movie. But the bigger problem is that the car drove straight into a parked police cruiser with flashing lights. What kind of programming is going on there that makes the vehicle do that? I can't even get my head around it. Did it think the lights were a flashing portal the enter? Why would it aim for an object? If it didn't see it at all, then why would it leave the lane it was traveling in?
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The adaptive cruise in my E550 would do the same thing. The problem is these systems are able to speed match or adapt only to moving vehicles. The way it identifies them as vehicles is down to size and the fact that they are moving in the first place. When a vehicle is stopped, the car sees it as a stationary object that you are about to drive into and instead will prepare to emergency brake if you don’t start braking yourself.
On its face, it’s kind of silly and results in the following situations:
1. You are driving down a highway, there is a vehicle in front of you. You round a bend, and approach a lighted intersection that is red in your direction. The vehicle in front of you slows down and comes to a complete stop. The system detects the vehicle in front doing this, and also slows down and comes to a complete stop.
2. You are driving down a highway, there is no one in range of the system in front of you. You round a bend, and approach a lighted intersection that is red in your direction with vehicles already stopped at it. The car senses this as driving towards a stationary object, and instead of slowing you down as well, it continues on at your regular speed until it senses you are not intervening. The car’s pre-safe brake system will engage and emergency brake before impact. This generally doesn’t prevent a crash but rather aims to reduce the impact severity. You don’t take action and you rear-end the stopped car at a speed less severe than without the system, but a collision still occurs.
There are probably elements of #2 in the Tesla story. And while #2 seems like a horrendous oversight, I have found the car starts warning of (not braking though) impending crashes when I aggressively take a tight curve where there is a safety barrier immediately beside the lane. And really, these systems aren’t meant to be a complete replacement of driver attention and intervention.