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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I assume you're referring to the incident from a few days ago, in which case, you're withholding so much information that this is wildly misleading.

That was a first-generation Tesla Model S, which means it is using the first version of autopilot, developed by Mobileye, from 2012.

So you're only correct if you choose to ignore eight years of progress.

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Happens regularly with all versions of Autopilot. Here's a recent one with a Tesla Model 3:

https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ

I wonder why this can even happen. Tesla cars have some kind of radar for front distance, no?

Reportedly[1], radar cannot reliably distinguish between trucks blocking the road, manhole covers, overhead signs, overpasses, and a lot of other stuff.

If the car stops for every radar returns that looks like something that blocks the lane, it will perform emergency brakes for ghosts all the time. The Tesla (and others) do is to ignore returns from stationary objects in certain circumstances.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

Thinking about how radar works - it would be easier to detect a slow moving car than a stopped one.

In other words, driving at 50 mph and coming up on a car going 10 mph, you would get two strong signals -- one strong one for the world going -50mph, and a smaller one for a car going -40 mph.

A stationary vehicle however - it would be indistinguishable from everything else that is stopped.

The "autopilot" on my Nissan Leaf explicitly warns you, in big, red text, that it cannot detect stopped cars if you are driving faster than 30mph.

As long as they're moving, even slowly, it has no problems.

You're assuming that the latest version would not have produced this accident, but do we actually known this?

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