Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#2You mean Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC)?
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#3Its just a matter of time before the injured and dead count starts increasing. Tesla needs to take their responsibility and disable AutoPilot before more people die because of its severe faults and flaws.
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#4Can any other Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) stop in such a case? (Real question, I don't know).
My current understanding is that Tesla's TACC is the best on the market. Correct?
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#5Its just a matter of time before the injured and dead count starts increasing. Tesla needs to take their responsibility and disable AutoPilot before more people die because of its severe faults and flaws.
Currently the amount of injured and dead is falling for both Tesla cars and Tesla cars while on Autopilot.
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#6This has been true for a long time. Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk. Heck, it can get confused with a bridge's shadow on a bright day. Thus autopilot has to be configured to deal with these situations: stop or run into them. The vast majority of the situation you don't want the car to stop, as that will lead to a more dangerous situation and increase the chance of a collision.
It's one of the many situations that show that "autopilot", particularly Level 4 and Level 5, have a very, very long way to go. Also, as the reddit thread discusses the psychology of autopilot, this is why I don't want self-driving cars yet. Humans are horrendous at paying attention when they aren't directly in control. Airlines have been dealing with this problem for decades. Tesla has even started calling their services "driver assist" instead of autopilot to help combat this problem.
And yes, many people use autopilot without a problem every day, but you have to remember that it only takes one single miss to kill you (see: driver killed by ramming into a lane divider on autopilot).
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#7This not news. This has existed from the first iteration of Tesla Autopilots. That is why there where crashes with stationery vehicles for Tesla.
This is shortcoming for using only cameras or any vehicle that has adaptive cruise control.
The problem is that the front camera cannot distinguish from the road and a stationery vehicle. For that, they are the same and they ignore stationary obstacles. If they where taken into consideration, then they would not work at all.
This is where Lidar comes in but at its current price, or at price that Tesla was designing its system it was too expensive.
I am not entirely sure that pure cameras will ever be enough
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#8Yet isn't this addressed by the "dumb" collision avoidance system found in many premium cars?
("dumb" as in limited in scope and not trying to drive the car as a whole.)
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#9Can any other Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) stop in such a case? (Real question, I don't know). My current understanding is that Tesla's TACC is the best on the market. Correct?
This is a deficiency in several automatic emergency braking systems [1]. Tesla extracts as much signal from front facing radar as they can, but edge cases abound.
Marketplace or Planet Money had a piece a few weeks ago that mentioned the hardest problem was consumer education about these safety systems. People are inherently not interested in learning about the life safety systems in their cars. They expect it to “just work”. Whose failing is it if warnings clearly state that isn’t the case?
“The car companies don't hide the fact that today's AEB systems have blind spots. It's all there in the owner's manuals, typically covered by both an all-encompassing legal disclaimer and explicit examples of why the systems might fail to intervene. For instance, the Camry's AEB system may not work when you're driving on a hill. It might not spot vehicles with high ground clearance or those with low rear ends. It may not work if a wiper blade blocks the camera. Toyota says the system could also fail if the vehicle is wobbling, whatever that means. It may not function when the sun shines directly on the vehicle ahead or into the camera mounted near the rearview mirror.”
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars
#10What are we going to find out next, water is wet?
Every radar cruise control system comes with a warning that it can't detect stopped traffic. This seems like a case of RTFM.