Six cars aced new pedestrian detection tests

The good news is that cities are starting to finally do this. Slowly, but it is happening.

That means halving the bandwidth of all inner-city roads (that are traditionally at 35mph+)

If a road used to carry 1000-cars per hour, it will only carry 500-cars per hour if you drop the speed limit from 35 -> 18. Effectively doubling the length of time for congestion.

You can get around this by building twice as many roads I guess, but cities don't really have any more room.

artificially setting limits like that is a poor solution, especially when you're depending on police enforcement to ensure compliance.

a better solution is narrowing lanes (to 9-10 ft), and possibly installing bollards everywhere, because that internalizes the costs of collision (car gets wrecked and you get hurt in addition to pedestrians), so drivers naturally self-regulate driving behavior for safety (rather than the secondary measure, speed). you also don't need an external police force and it's attendant costs, both financially and societally, for enforcement.

They recognize much more objects on the road but major problem is to do not cause a lot of false alarms. e.g. You don't really want to drive car which decided that plastic bag on the highway is reason for emergency braking, on the other hand is that really plastic bag or some drunk person who is sleeping on the road...

I remember when Volvo introduced IntelliSafe technology few years ago that car was totally "paranoid" and it was beeping all the time -> most of drivers deactivated that system.

How good are humans detecting pedestrians in low light conditions?

It's an important test case, but I wonder how many of those would be undetectable by a human as well.

> they’re all failing in low light conditions

Isn't this an issue with lights ?

Having actually test-driven many of these cars this year, in practice Tesla is much better than the competition. There might still be problems in different conditions, and it is not fully autonomous of course, but the common HN myth that other cars basically have the same lane assist that tesla has is just a lore. Tesla autopilot is light years ahead of the rest of them.

>I don’t know how they can claim autonomous driving “coming soon.”

How is easy: it doesn't cost anything, and makes them profit.

It's like how the had the gal to nam their system "Autopilot" when it's not, and full awareness is required from the driver in the small print...

I own a 3 and my opinion is while people are raving over the new summon features they should instead realize that it also shows how far off autonomous driving truly is. Just go watch all the videos, all we truly have is a 60k RC car that moves slower than a RC car and still requires permission to move.

Now the current software does very well on limited access roads; highways and interstates; and has for over a year that I have owned the car. It does fine on two lane roads but the use cases there are far more limited and mostly to showing off for friends. Well that and doing stuff you normally would wait till your stopped to do.

I think it's fair to say that whether you hit the pedestrian is more or less irrelevant to your score on a pedestrian detection test.

I remember reading an article on hn that the rise of SUV's and their design is related to the increase of fatalities.

Like, compare a pedestrian collision where the car has a lower and more aerodynamic front vs the wall that is a SUV's front.

And at the same time people are also on their phones in their cars, decreasing the chance that they can respond to that person walking into the road. I've had so many times where I didn't have an accident just because I was paying attention to what other people were doing.

> They can achieve a huge safety improvement by forcing speed limit. But somehow car manufacturers don’t want to implement it.

I've had multiple cars that show the current speed limit on the dash. Some based on GPS, others based on visual recognition. None of them have been correct 100% of the time. I wouldn't want my car to slow me down on a highway because it misinterprets a sign or because their data isn't up-to-date, or because the GPS is glitching and thinks I'm driving on a side road.

It's a really simple solution in theory, but in practice it doesn't seem feasible yet.

> But somehow car manufacturers don’t want to implement it.

Maybe because nobody would buy a car that enforces its idea of the current speed limit on the driver? (It'd be good to have as an option though, I agree, as long as it can be overridden.)

> Basically none of them are good enough for a real world scenario in a busy city

So what's "good enough"? Even if these systems don't prevent all collisions they'll often vastly reduce the speeds at which they happen.

Not exactlty the same thing, but Volvo has stated they plan to limit the top speed of all their cars to 180km/h

I 100% agree but I would bet the issue is unit cost for the hardware. Anything with reasonable resolution is going to be in the four digit dollar range per sensor.

Because they are not?

The pedestrian detection and automatic emergency braking systems are separate from autopilot. They are always on, even if autopilot is not in use. As I understand it, they are different code, more conventional and similar to the systems in other cars, where autopilot is a grand research project/extended beta. As with most things Tesla they are likely to improve over time with OTA updates.

people suck or kids will be kids?

Cars are the leading cause of dead children in the US and this is what annoys you?

Personally, I would also brake if a kid pretended to walk into the road. There just has to be one kid who isn't pretending for it to become a really big issue.

Beginning of pranks to come with self drive cars.

Imagine when someone realised you can slam on the brakes in front of X brand of car and it prioritises avoiding the car in front over all else

You should be a more defensive driver. This sort of attitude could lead to you seriously hurting someone.