this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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Tesla's come with a feature called obstacle avoidance or something like that which in theory could have prevented this, although even that isn't a guarantee. It's also a feature that can be enabled/disabled so it's possible it was disabled.
In 2022 they said the feature prevents about 40 incidents a day of people pressing the accelerator down instead of the brake.
Stops you from going into the garage door and other various things.
“Here, I’m showing a particular mode of failure of humans where they accidentally press the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. For example, these people are pressing the accelerator pedal thinking that they’re pressing the brake pedal. But the car realizes that they are doing this and are heading towards a collision and automatically cuts out the acceleration, and presses the brake to prevent the humans from colliding."
Edit: Clarity, but also I think the enable/disable is because it does take control away from the driver, and there could be a theoretical emergency situation where one collision by accelerating away, is better than the other incoming collision? Some people might not want to give up that control? Like if you got a semi about to rear end you at full speed, jumping the curb and hitting a fence is probably the better option.
There also needs to be an obstacle in the way for the radar to detect. The low railroad track is probably not enough.
The cars don't have radar anymore, I don't think they got rid of it for vision cars?
Even with vision it doesn't look like a wall or other large object is there to set off the sensor. This probably looks like a speed bump to the camera.
For parking, the vision cars remember what they approached. People say it doesn't work as good as ultra sonics, but assuming it doesn't see it as a speed bump vs an object in the way, that should still be okay, at least in theory.
I think the problem here is if you program it to stop when it sees a rail like that, odds are a lot of vehicles might stop themselves on roads and parking lots if they see anything that looks somewhat similar.
You can see the barrier is about boot height though in one of the pictures. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to be able to discern that vs a speed bump?
It's like half raised above the ground, and then half its own height.
I don't think this feature works at speed either, I think it's meant for slow/stopped situations?
I wonder if they'd consider raising the barrier as well in a spot like this...
Also, if it doesn't view it as an object, Tesla should go test some cars against that to help improve it. Test them right there even, it'll cost them so much money for every failure they'll get it right sooner than later lol.
The feature is called Obstacle Aware Acceleration.