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Why was this being tested at night? It looks like the nighttime visibility was less than 50 feet.
by andrewprock 9y ago
Why was this being tested at night? It looks like the nighttime visibility was less than 50 feet.
- tzs 9y agoThe low beam headlights on that model car give just under 250 feet of visibility. At 38 mph that is a little over 4 seconds. That should be fine.
- romwell 9y agoI'd say because night time visibility in Arizona on a clear day is way, way more than 50 feet, and the low-quality dashcam footage you see here is highly misleading. Low visibility on a clear day is simply lack of illumination, and it is a horrible excuse, because: 1. The car is equipped with headlights, which solve the "limited night time visibility" problem; 2. The car is equipped with multiple types of high-quality cameras; 3. The car is equipped with a LIDAR, which is an active sensing system. Finally, if one accepts that the visibility was limited to 50 feet, as the video misleadingly suggests, THEN one has to concede that the car was going too fast for how much it could see. People are taught to drive so that at least three seconds worth of road ahead can be seen. If you believe that either the car or the driver were seeing the equivalent of what the webcam footage was showing, the car was going unsafely fast. Hanlon's razor would suggest, though, that the car simply wasn't able to process the data available to it. We'll know for sure if the investigation is successful.