The truck is more visible in the non-compressed video.
https://twitter.com/haenschengross/status/147332613675511808...
https://twitter.com/haenschengross/status/147332613675511808...
Having been personally involved in a collision with one where my vehicle ended up under their trailer at highway speeds, when the trucker abruptly swerved into my lane to avoid rear-ending another truck they were tail-gating without paying enough attention to brake in time, I find this thread of discussion patently absurd.
It's so sad to see it, but then they claim "oh but it was empty". People use it as their resort when following too closely, I wish they'd just accept their mistake and crash into the back of the car in front of them. But that would be too clean and logical.
I'm reminder of this multi-vehicle accident where you can see some drivers clearly reacting 1-2 seconds before impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9yqXzZ16ns
Wife works in automotive engineering and I asked her why FCW and AEB didn’t detect it and her only thought is that because the truck is on the same angle as the central reservation and already in a bit of state it might not have detected it, although she thinks that more likely something just went wrong
I also thought I might have been able to take the 18 wheeler's reaction as a clue, but it passed the wreck in the other lane and only starting braking right as it passed it.
With that in mind, in this exact scenario, I would have hit it also. Only with full manual control of the car do I think I could have avoided it.
I'm pretty sure I would have hit the truck too[1], but there actually was an earlier clue: Headlights from oncoming traffic are occluded by the two crashed vehicles ahead.
When rewatching the video (so I know both that I should be looking for something and approximately where that something is), the occluded headlights are pretty obvious. An attentive driver may have noticed the vehicles, but I think most people saying the truck was obvious are deluding themselves.
[1] The first time I watched the video, my reaction was "Where is this tru-OHSHIT".
If I'm driving at 120km/h , at night, chances are I'm also tiered and reacting that quickly at that speed with limited vision would have been a coin toss for me.
I'm all for making these cars safer but we are watching that video, knowing the truck would be there but fail to consider all the extra context around it. I think accidents can and will happen with self driving cars, no matter what we do.
Human eyes have much higher dynamic range than typical video cameras. What the video shows is not likely representative of what your eyes would have seen.
1. Even a sober, awake driver glances down to confirm their speedometer and scan their fuel gauge, check engine light, tire pressure, etc.
2. A sober, awake driver should be scanning the road along and beside the projected vehicle path. But they doesn't necessarily mean the would be looking in the direction of the occluded headlights at the very first instant they tell of a crashed car.
3. A sober, awake driver has to process what they see.
4. A sober, awake driver still has a good 0.2 to 0.25 second reaction time.
5. I actually do look for occluded lights when driving at night, but my experience talking about this with others in person is that this is a totally foreign concept.
In other words, you know where and how and when to look for the obstruction because you've watched the video a few times.
This is sort of like the Air France 447 flight or the Boeing 737 Max trim problem. If someone tells you exactly what kind of scenario you're going to face, how to handle it and approximately when you'll face it: you can win every time. 100% of pilots who were briefed on the specifics of AF447 avoided crashing the sim. Same for the 737 Max.
Yet, hundreds of people are dead because pilots in actual cockpits, who were not given prior notification failed to act correctly.
A major difference is that (from watching the uncompressed footage), a human driver would likely have stomped on the breaks before impact. That last minute breaking could make a world of difference.
A collision at 75 mph has a lot more energy (4.5x ish) than a collision at 35 mph. So every 1/10s of breaking will do a lot to reduce the damage of the impact.
That's one of my concerns about driverless vehicles that I want to see the statistics on. I have a hunch that automation will reduce the absolute number of impacts, but may lead the impacts that remain could be higher energy impacts, because they result from a classification error.
in person one might not realize a truck is there, but brain would probably think "something not right" and alert senses maybe even reflexively release pressure on the accellerator, so that when higher level consciousness makes out the truck, body is primed to act.
In the uncompressed video it seems very obvious that there is an obstacle in the road much earlier