At 80mph, the stopping distance of an average car is around 300 feet once the brake is fully engaged. That exceeds most car radar systems. And with no warning lights the camera won't do much good either.
"Low beams or dipped lights should shine about 150 to 200 feet ahead, while high beams or brights should shine about 350 to 400 feet ahead" [1].
Would it be customary for someone on that highway to have their high beams engaged?
Using them in this situation will cause major glare from mirrors of the drivers in front, and possibly for the drivers in the opposing direction.
[1] as indicated by the stopped vehicle being reported in the center lane
It is not for finding stopped stuff in the middle of the road at high speed. I hear there are too many false positives for that to be done.
But we don't know how many other vehicles were on the road and what light they were casting. The bystander who reported witnessing the crash was within visual distance, so couldn't have been too far ahead of the MachE. It wasn't reported if there were any other vehicles. If you have enough vehicles on the road (with their lights on) lack of overhead illumination isn't too significant.
It’s designed to fix driver inputs during a panic. You’re right it doesn’t do anything on its own.
I think this is a pretty important point for any well-built self-driving software. Does anyone know if radar advancements could help increase this?
The big problem is that a stopped vehicle looks exactly the same to the radar as any other stationary object.
So if it sees something stationary it could be a stopped vehicle or it could be a reflection from a road sign. Or a lip in the pavement. Or something else like that.
Basically from what I’ve heard if it were to try and stop whenever it saw something stopped ahead it would constantly slam on the brakes unnecessarily. So stationary things have to be ignored, and it can’t save you from them.
They all suffer from this. The only solution I’ve heard of is LIDAR but obviously that’s a huge step up.
The mental toll is nearly unchanged.
So when you stop I feel it’s easier to walk around and shop or whatever since I haven’t been applying as much force constantly.
But you still need that mental brake.
Most adapative cruise control systems explicitly ignore stationary objects while at highway speeds. A vehicle immediately ahead that stops will be detected and responded to. A vehicle that did not move while in sensor range will be ignored.
It’s have no idea if the risk is worse than the reward or not.
Car way in front of me had its hazards on in the right lane. The center lane was clear, so I decided to make a lane change. I assumed this car was just moving slow in bad conditions, but it was actually completely stopped in the right most lane.
I didn’t realize that until I passed it. Given the conditions, it would have been extremely hard to avoid this car if I had not proactively changed lanes.
There was just absolutely no reason this car should have been stopped in a lane when it could have gotten to th shoulder.
Basically every uber driver does this, double parking wherever they want. So L2 systems need uber detection.