As a human, I would probably crash into it, depending on what I seen from non-compressed and compressed version. However, camera works differently from human eyes.
Tom Andersen: Your eyes have much wider brightness range than any video camera ever made, and many many times better than the $1 camera on a Tesla.
That is not a representation of what human eyes would see. It's a cheap video camera.
The thing that would(or should) have alerted you as a driver is the reflecting of the truck's lights on the paint of the broken down pickup as it drove past. Although why the truck driver didn't slowdown as it passed a crash is a bit of a mystery.
However, Teslas have radar for this sort of things. On the other hand this does kinda underscore the problem of using cameras with global shutter control for self driving. The auto contrast couldnt cope with the oncoming lights, so stopped down the sensitivity of the camera, leaving it blind to that broken truck.
Found:
> Beginning with deliveries in May 2021, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar.
from https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision, so radar-less is a new thing. That Tesla should have had a radar unless bought recently.
either way, having a different class of sensor is wise, to make up for corner cases in the main sensor array.
Tesla already have limited number of sensors, and they do most of the driving using monocular(single camera, or single viewpoint with three different zoom levels) inference. This is absolute madness, given the state of current tech.
For that night situation, I would be pushing for a different camera type. One that doesn't have a global exposure setting. This means that groups of pixels can be lumped together to have local ISO settings(its more complex than that, and involves integrating processing silicon directly under the sensor, on the same die.). This is a way to get vastly greater dynamic range in a situation where you have lots of point lights (ie headlights)
This would require developing and qualifying a new camera sensor from scratch (I don't think generic versions of this type of camera exist yet) Musk is unlikely to do this as he has signaled that everything should be done via ML.
Second, using a different wavelength, IR, or near IR.
Thirdly, higher wavelength radar. It gives you this information for free, they are cheap and already qualified for vehicles.
Maybe I would have stopped. Maybe not.
For instance:
https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/manuals/s60/2015w46/sta...
I think the issue is that those lights are on the main power circuit, which shuts down if the user turns off the car.
That appears to be what happened here, I don't see running lights or anything. I think the person turned their truck off.
I honestly don't know if you're supposed to shut your car off after an accident to lower the fire risk, or leave it on to make the car more visible.
Really shows how Tesla has probably made a big mistake going all-in on camera only vision. And their vision system couldn't make the inference of an obstruction based on the oncoming headlights.
Lidar would have been able to detect this easily.
Another thing I don’t understand is why wont Tesla invest in a front only radar sensor to avoid such collisions.