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Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

latimes.com

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

#101

Post by antattack »

ajross wrote: post #23
Rebelgecko wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yeah. I'm as big a Tesla booster as you'll find but I'm in the "this is probably a bug in recognition" camp. They can presumably fix this via properly parametrized modelling. It's not a rare edge case at all.

Until recently Tesla relied on forward microwave radar to detect collisions which is very bad at detecting stationary objects.

Great majority of stationary cars on a highway are emergency vehicles, hence the 14 or so collisions.

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

#102

Post by UncleEntity »

mindslight wrote: post #75
myself248 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slowing down on a highway is required by law in many areas, in the presence of emergency vehicles.

Yes, by 10-20mph. Not down to <40mph. I thought it was a smart idea when I first saw signs about it on a road trip many years ago, and incorporated it into my own driving before the law had been widely adopted. I aim to do most of my driving at less busy times, so I often end up moving over a lane even if I'm not in the rightmost lane. And actually it's a good idea to do the same for all stopped vehicles, regardless…

I see flashy lights on the highway and I can’t tell for sure what’s going on I for sure slow down <40 mph because for all you know they could be up to anything that requires you to come to a complete stop. Especially if the blinding lights are especially blinding.

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

#103

Post by oxplot »

oxplot wrote: post #96

Has journalism been this lousy forever or is it just recently? Quoting numbers of complaints per manufacturer is meaningless. How many cars with the given feature turned on exist from each manufacturer? How many miles driven with the given feature on? What speed were these cars at? That’s just from top of my head. Oh wait? Complaints? How is that a measure of safety? Let me add some more: How many people were injured…

Damn it — fell for this again.

All that matters is whether you are more likely to get into an accident/get injured in a Tesla vs other cars in the same price bracket. That's it! All these slice and dice reporting is of little value.

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

#104

Post by baybal2 »

taylortbb wrote: post #65
namrog84 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think so. I thought their whole gimmick or goal was to drive entirely by cameras and nothing else. Because humans only have eyes. Though just speculation and no source.

Due to the current chip shortage they've moved to a vision-only system, as they had difficulty getting radar units in the quantity required. Until recently however, all Teslas had radar since ~2014. The high profile crashes are mostly/all radar-enabled vehicles. The thing about automotive radar, and this isn't just Tesla, is that stationary objects are normally excluded. Otherwise the system brakes for things like ov…

> The thing about automotive radar, and this isn't just Tesla, is that stationary objects are normally excluded. Otherwise the system brakes for things like overhead signs that have high radar reflectivity. Stopped cars, concrete barriers, etc are all basically invisible to most automotive radar.

I believe most automotive radars in the last few years are FMCW exactly to accommodate adaptive cruise control.

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

#105

Post by rameshs »

kbos87 wrote: post #80
lacker wrote: post #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 th…

Automatic Emergency Braking is amazing and it never gets talked about. I’ve logged 40k miles in my 2019 Subaru with Eyesight and it very reliably notices dangerous situations. Other vehicles hard stopping in front of me is the most common occurrence, and it always hits that sweet spot of me being glad it alerted me so I could brake before it had to. I’ve had one instance where it went straight to braking - I took a r…

Second this. Really impressed with Subaru's eyesight system. No false alarms till date. Twice in 3 years it alarmed when cars were turning in front of me and it was too close for the car to stay comfortable but i would have been okay with it. 3 times it has saved me from frontal crash at highway speeds by applying AEB.

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

#106

Post by ajross »

myself248 wrote: post #66
ajross wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm as big a Tesla booster as you'll find but I'm in the "this is probably a bug in recognition" camp. They can presumably fix this via properly parametrized modelling. It's not a rare edge case at all.

I have a hunch that at some point, there'll be an investigation and a discovery process, and we'll learn that the training dataset deliberately _excluded_ emergency vehicles because they didn't represent "normal driving" or something. That's purely uninformed speculation, but I could see it happening like this: Early on, someone says "The totality of situations encountered on the road is too complex. We're not buildi…

No, the car sees emergency vehicles. It sees stopped vehicles. It sees vehicles stopped across lanes. This situation is far, far more common than the count of actual accidents we've seen. There probably is a bug, but it's not remotely as simple as "can't see fire engines".

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

#109

Post by SkyPuncher »

gorkish wrote: post #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…

I have a Hyundai with radar based adaptive cruise and AEB. Notably, with cruise control enabled, it gives visual proximity to a leading vehicle.

The only case I've ever had an issue is at the crest or base of a steep hill on a secondary road. The angle does not allow the radar to work at the right angle.

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

#110

Post by SkyPuncher »

kbos87 wrote: post #80
lacker wrote: post #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 th…

Automatic Emergency Braking is amazing and it never gets talked about. I’ve logged 40k miles in my 2019 Subaru with Eyesight and it very reliably notices dangerous situations. Other vehicles hard stopping in front of me is the most common occurrence, and it always hits that sweet spot of me being glad it alerted me so I could brake before it had to. I’ve had one instance where it went straight to braking - I took a r…

I have a Hyundai with a similar system. In urban highway traffic, I've found it exceptionally good at reacting to drivers going from "barely braking" to "stopping hard" before I can physically react. Pretty incredible system.
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