6 ms·
One concern I would like investigated is that it appears Tesla's Autopilot can't detect (or can no longer detect?) stationary objects. Until fairly recently, I
by raylad 5y ago
One concern I would like investigated is that it appears Tesla's Autopilot can't detect (or can no longer detect?) stationary objects.
Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used to be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary object (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the impact.
Now, though, Tesla has stopped installing RADARs in their cars and apparently also disabled existing RADAR in cars that have it (because they all are using the same camera-only software).
If this has also removed the ability to detect stationary objects and the corresponding emergency braking functionality, this is a really serious problem and needs to be addressed, perhaps with a recall to require installation of RADAR in all the new cars and re-enabling of it.
- awfml 5y agoI think its probably more likely the driver made a user error— tens of thousands of people use autopilot every day in stop and go traffic
- raylad 5y agoStop and go traffic is not the same. In stop and go traffic, the car in front of you is visible to the camera at all times. In this case, my car may not have been acquired by the camera before it was already stationary, in which case it might have been ignored, causing the accident.
- xeromal 5y agoWe won't know until the lady provides you with evidence that her AP was actually on, but my guess is that she fucked up and she's just using AP to offset blame.
- eightysixfour 5y ago> Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used to be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary object (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the impact. It is the other way around. They've stopped using RADAR because RADAR has too many false reflections at speed and it was causing learning issues in the ML dataset. The vision based position detection is better (could argue about weather and visibility here, but it is irrelevant to this convo). Reliance on RADAR was causing it to hit stopped objects, because it was relying on radar data that was already too jittery and had to be ignored. Regardless of the RADAR issue, the driver is responsible for the vehicle at all times. If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault.
- yupper32 5y ago> If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault. That'd be relevant if they didn't call it autopilot. If they called it lane assist or cruise control plus or something then I'd agree. Tesla is at major fault for implying that the Teslas can drive themselves, even if the driver is also at fault.
- mwint 5y agoTesla could call it Egre-MuzzFlorp and it wouldn’t matter. The surveys showing people think “autopilot” means “can drive itself” were fatally flawed, in that they were done with non-Tesla owners.
- yupper32 5y agoAnd yet, people drive their Teslas as if it means "can drive itself". Words matter. You'd need real evidence to convince me that Tesla calling the system "Autopilot" hasn't significantly contributed to crashes.
- mwint 5y agoOn the contrary, we need real evidence suggesting it does. Certainly the population level crash data doesn’t support it.
- krisoft 5y agoRadar is not good for detecting stationary objects. Of course you get a nice reflection back from a stationary car but you get a similarly nice reflection from an overhead trafic light or a manhole cover or a dropped nail. Because of this every automotive radar ever fielded gates out the stationary objects. If you wouldn’t you would get a crazy amount of false positives. They can do this because the radar measures the relative speed of objects via dopler shift, and you know the speed of your own vehicle. Anything which has the same speed as you have but goes in the other direction is most likely stationary. (Or moving perpendicular to you. The velocity difference is vectorial, but dopler can only observe the component along the observation vector, and civilian radars have terrible angular resolution.) In short: nobody ever used radar to stop cars from hitting stationary objects. This is not a Tesla specific thing.