Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

> Automatic braking doesn't get much attention, but it seems like something that could be incredibly valuable if it got to the "clearly better than human" level.

It's important to point out here that a handful of back of the envelope analyses are out there that show that Tesla's autopilot is already "clearly better than human" level at avoiding emergency vehicles.

These are very common accidents. Emergency vehicles in travel lanes get hit all the time, crews are carefully trained to avoid that situation if at all practical, and taught how to reduce personal risk when that's not possible.

In fact (and I don't have a link handy) if you extrapolate out from a few different data sources it looks like Tesla's on AP get in these crashes about half as much as vehicles in the general fleet.

Now, that doesn't mean that these 13 events don't constitute a cluster worth investigating. And it doesn't mean that there can't be a bug worth fixing. It doesn't even mean that the media shouldn't write about it.

It does mean that we should be very careful with pronouncements about safety from a sample set of this size, though.

After several officers where nearly injured/injured/killed because drivers ran into them as they were stopped on the side of the road, some states instituted laws that say you either slow down to 45 or you move over a lane.

Is that built into AutoPilot and whatever it's called on other brands? Humans have to do it, so cars should have to as well.

Musk is very adamant that cameras are enough even going so far as to stop including radar in Model 3 and Y units shipped to the US. So even if it were the radar being confused according to the Tesla line it shouldn't matter the cameras should be enough.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/25/tesla-is-no-longer-using-r...

I think the flashing lights and appearance might degrade autopilot. Other cars also have issues because they use radar (except for some new models with camera-based systems like the 2022 Honda Civic) and ignore stationary targets when they see a moving vehicle as a more likely "target". Some systems use a combination of radar and camera (with camera providing low-speed, parked car, bike, and pedestrian detection). Then it's up to the quality of the algorithms and tests have shown that some cars are pretty poor at detection.

I'd much prefer a system that stopped my vehicle as smoothly as possible to one that I would rely on to autonomously brake for me.

I suspect that if all cars were fully autonomous, that we would have fewer collisions and fewer high-speed collisions simply because we wouldn't need to use traffic signals to push traffic along (and we'd have fewer traffic-stopping accidents).

A few months back, an older gentleman collided with my car on US 75 in Dallas while I was at a full stop. Would automatic braking have slowed him? Probably. Would he have collided with me at all if his car were driving autonomously? Probably not. He was distracted and took his eyes off the road, never seeing that the traffic ahead of him was at a complete stop. It took nearly 10 minutes for us to get off the road for a fender bender because nobody would allow us to get over. Traffic simply flowed around us despite the issue.

I suspect that within the next 50 years, driving at all in most major cities will require a special license, and it will become a civil rights issue for both those who don't know how to behave like adults but want the freedom to move about anyway, and those who simply do not want to be tracked by any entity.