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Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

latimes.com

11–20 of 147 posts

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know all new model luxury cars like Audi and Mercedes come with automatic braking for frontal impacts. So considering the number of Mercedes sold in the last few years, I think it's safe to say there are more of them than Teslas.

Automatic braking has been a common feature even in non-luxury vehicles since at least 2018.

Yeah, once the Toyota Corolla has something, you can pretty much assume it's just standard now.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#13
Ive a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It has the front sensing collision detector and auto braking. It may have hit the brakes 1 time that I wasnt paying attention and 9,999,999 times when there was nothing in front of me. I disable it and thus far have avoided crashing. The point is that driver assist systems are only assist and you have to pay attention when you drive. Ive said this here before, Autopilot is a terrible misnomer. It seems to sit squarely in the valley of being good enough to 'trust' but not good enough for real world use. If I were in charge of the world, it would be rebranded immediately.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#14
It's kind of interesting that this appears to happen with police cars and emergency vehicles mostly. Is there a particular way of parking such vehicles that makes it hard(er) for a Tesla to detect it?

It might also indeed be about phantom braking. My relatively old (probably designed around 10 to 20 years ago) system gets confused sometimes when I pass a truck or a bus and once even when I passed a bicycle. It happened at least 5 times in less than 10,000km. So I suspect there is some merit to the Autopilot disabling the feature.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#15
post #13

Ive a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It has the front sensing collision detector and auto braking. It may have hit the brakes 1 time that I wasnt paying attention and 9,999,999 times when there was nothing in front of me. I disable it and thus far have avoided crashing. The point is that driver assist systems are only assist and you have to pay attention when you drive. Ive said this here before, Autopilot is a terrible misnom…

Dunno, autopilot (at least originally) was just a stupid switch on a plane that would try to hold altitude and speed. It wouldn't try to avoid objects, couldn't take off, couldn't land.

Very similar to Tesla's auto pilot, that can't manage your driveway, random surface streets, but can mostly (but not completely) handle highways.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#16
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.

This is purely anecdotal, but I find the automatic braking system on my Mazda CX-9 to be fairly annoying. Once every couple months or so, it has a false alarm and brakes while blaring out alerts, in an urban environment where I don't observe anything out of the ordinary at all. And it's never activated in a situation where I found it to be helpful.

That said, it's possible that an annoyance every two months is just the cost of a system that really would help me if I got into bigger trouble. It's hard to say from purely my own anecdotes.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#17

yet another tesla hit piece from russ mitchell and the la times. is it just me or does the la times drag tesla at every opportunity? could it be because the owner of the la times, patrick soon shiong, has a company called nantenergy that seeks to compete with tesla? at a minimum, there’s a conflict of interest. and, kind of a tangent, but where are the articles about the thousands of lives lost due to the incompatibi…

I'm pretty neutral on Tesla/Musk, but I looked at this guy's (Russ Mitchell) writing history and it appears to be an unhealthy fixation on Tesla. His Twitter, and almost every article he writes, is about bashing Tesla. It's like he has real personal beef with Musk, a person he's probably never met.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#19
My hypothesis on this is that all automaker's automatic emergency braking systems likely function at approximately the same level, but Tesla drivers are disproportionately likely to rely on it due to the use of Autopilot being so incredibly common. Statistically, drivers of other brands that include similar lanekeeping abilities are far less likely to use them compared to Tesla owners' use of Autopilot.

Should it be happening? Well the NHTSA doesn't seem to mind it. Maybe we should be asking them why their automatic emergency braking tests are so stupidly out of agreement with what drivers expect and automakers promise that the systems are able to do. The freight industry has a high speed test and their systems are top notch.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#20
post #14

It's kind of interesting that this appears to happen with police cars and emergency vehicles mostly. Is there a particular way of parking such vehicles that makes it hard(er) for a Tesla to detect it? It might also indeed be about phantom braking. My relatively old (probably designed around 10 to 20 years ago) system gets confused sometimes when I pass a truck or a bus and once even when I passed a bicycle. It happen…

I wonder if the cameras or ML are thrown off by flashing emergency lights or emergency vehicles' livery (most cars on the road use just 1 paint color)
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