This happens to me just using the adaptive cruise control, no Autopilot or FSD enabled and it's super annoying. Can happen on a completely empty road driving in a straight line.
Radar seeing stationary objects is trivial, it sees them just like it sees any other. The trick is seeing only the stationary objects which are actually relevant; e.g. not seeing a street sign suspended above the road, or a tree next to the road, but only the stationary objects in the path of the car. The radar configuration that Tesla use[s/d] apparently has awful angular resolution, making this differentiation difficult if not impossible. But this isn't inherent to all radar technology; some radars can have good angular resolution. For instance with SAR or ISAR, you can produce high resolution 2d images. But I don't know what kind of radar systems your Leaf has.
- when on level ground approaching a steep hill, the radar might not know if the object directly in front of the car is just a continuation of the road or not
- when approaching a sharp curve in the road, is the object directly in front of the car actually in its path, or is it just on the side of the road
I know you're not asking for advise but I'd recommend to have that checked, my recollection is that the manual spends far more pages listing the circumstances under which the system may fail to apply the brakes than those in which it may break when it didn't have to, so it seems odd enough for me that I'd get that checked if it happened to me.
The one issue I've noticed is that it sometimes hits the brakes for cars that are obviously exiting the highway because a tiny sliver of the car is still technically in the driving lane, so I've learned to keep my foot over the gas pedal to override it in that case. The amount of braking isn't scary though, it's just annoying because there's no need to slow down at all.
I second the suggestion to get it checked.
Is something occluding your eyesight cameras, like EZ pass?
Usually, the behavior is adaptive stuff all shuts off when the road turns to sharp or weather blocks the cameras.
> Sadly, Subarus don't make headlines though. A Tesla does just about anything and it's local news and Facebook fodder.
Why sadly? Subaru hasn't been loudly making empty promises about self-driving capability and hasn't been aggressively pushing not-fully-cooked self-driving software onto the road.
EVs are new still. They're hyped and covered like crazy by the media in a lot of positive ways, so why should they not get equal press coverage when there is negative news? Once EVs hit a certain mass, they won't be novel anymore, and nobody will care.