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Comment by raylad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

Tesla 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.

And 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.

On the contrary, we need real evidence suggesting it does. Certainly the population level crash data doesn’t support it.

>The surveys showing people think “autopilot” means “can drive itself” were fatally flawed, in that they were done with non-Tesla owners.

Reality check: There are videos shown Tesla drivers sleeping in the car, or using the car from the back sit, so we have proof that a subset of Tesla users are using autopilot as "it drives itself and only laws forced Tesla to add those warnings". This videos are reality, no conspiracy, no subjectivity, no fake stats... some idiots are believing the marketing and some other idiots are still defending that marketing.

> some idiots are believing the marketing

That doesn't follow. Some people are definitely being idiots, but the marketing doesn't say that it's okay to do those things, so they're not "believing the marketing" by doing so.

If an at-fault Tesla hits me, my legal beef is with the driver of that Tesla. They may in turn rely on insurance or on suing Tesla to recover damages from their own misunderstanding of the car’s abilities or improper marketing, but my beef remains with the driver of the at-fault vehicle.

Nearly every major manufacturer has a separate emergency stop system that continually looks for an obstacle in the vehicle's path and applies braking force, overriding the driver and any cruise control or self-driving that is in use.

These often use RADAR, have worked for years, and are routinely tested by international agencies such as the IIHS.

See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgUiZgX5rE

Teslas at least used to do this too:

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/performance-of-pedestrian-c...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJfn2tO5fo

If Teslas no longer have this functionality, is a serious problem that needs to be corrected. That could mean reprogramming existing cameras or adding a sensor if the system really did rely on the now-removed RADAR.

That's not true and you are confusing different features. AEB and Autopilot/Assisted Cruise Control do not behave the same. Here's some articles I found with a google of "radar cruise control stationary object."

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-s...

> But while there's obviously room for improvement, the reality is that the behavior of Tesla's driver assistance technology here isn't that different from that of competing systems from other carmakers. As surprising as it might seem, most of the driver-assistance systems on the roads today are simply not designed to prevent a crash in this kind of situation.

> Sam Abuelsamid, an industry analyst at Navigant and former automotive engineer, tells Ars that it's "pretty much universal" that "vehicles are programmed to ignore stationary objects at higher speeds."

Here's one with BMW owners asking about it: https://g20.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1738458

Here's a review of Cadillac's SuperCruise: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/14830/i-wrote-this-in-a-superc...

> Related: All these types of semi-autonomous systems have a hard time identifying stationary cars—vehicles in stopped traffic on the highway, for example—as "targets" to avoid. Coming over a crest at 70 mph, I pick up the stopped traffic ahead of me far before the system does. I even give the system an extra second or two to identify that we're hurtling towards stopped traffic, but have to initiate braking. However, it's very likely that even at that speed, the car could have made the stop before an impact.

And the feature you're thinking of, AEB and its limitations are here: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...

> If traveling above 20 mph, the Volvo will not decelerate, according to its maker.

> No car in our test could avoid a collision beyond 30 mph, and as we neared that upper limit, the Tesla and the Subaru provided no warning or braking.

The Toyota Safety Sense system will slow the car down by 25MPH regardless of its initial speed (except possibly for "very high speeds").

It makes no sense to give up entirely when an application of brakes would reduce damage.

In the case of this accident, the vehicle not only didn't apply brakes but continued to accelerate after it hit me (the double hit).

This may or may not have been operator error, but the driver says she was on autopilot, that there was an OTA update issue, and that it has happened before. This all seems to suggest an investigation is appropriate and necessary.

I don't see why this has anything to do with Toyota's system, which by the way, had a recall for TSS braking due to stationary objects.

You're mad, I get it, but you need to take this up with the driver (who claims she had a failed OTA update, which caused her to wreck, AND THEN DROVE AND WRECKED AGAIN) whose insurance will take it up with Tesla. It isn't your job to figure out why the car did it.

The point is that it not only didn't slow down but accelerated.

Okay, and?

The only point here is that you were hit by an inattentive driver who didn't maintain control of her vehicle twice in one day. She put you in danger and your life at risk, and you're blaming the car.

Radar 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.

I 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

Stop 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.

We 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.

Exactly: An investigation would find out what happened.

Please post an update when the investigation concludes

The main point of this thread is that I don't know how to actually get an investigation to happen!

The insurance company handles it.

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