FSD Watch Out!

[SSonnentag]

This is a great example of why radar is important.

 

[John K]

This is a great example of why radar is important.

May be stating the obvious, car was stated as radar equipped.

 

[FutureBoy]

The only warning (of sorts) in the video, is when the lights of the oncoming vehicles get blacked out. But in the dark like that, the lights could just as well be blocked by something off to the side of the road. The only other clue is the brake lights of the semi. But that happens way to late to really react to the situation and is not a reliable indicator of something being wrong.

Basically, this is a bad situation that no human (other than say Geordi La Forge) could have seen coming.

One possible safety measure that could be applied though might be some sort of emergency lighting. Much like home emergency lights, they do nothing till the power goes out. Then they use their internal battery to light themselves. It looks like in the case of this accident, the initial vehicle lost its battery connection which killed all the lights. If there had been some sort of emergency lighting that might have helped. But even that kind of solution isn’t fully reliable. And this kind of blacked out scenario probably doesn’t happen often enough to be worth the extra engineering and expense of emergency lighting.

But I do certainly back up the thoughts of others that the real story here is that the Tesla driver/passengers walked away. The amazing safety engineering of Tesla is really worth the extra time and expense that have been dedicated.

 

[Crissa]

May be stating the obvious, car was stated as radar equipped.

Except as pointed out before, radar is bad at finding stopped obstacles against a stopped background.

It's just something radar is bad at.

-Crissa

 

[SSonnentag]

Except as pointed out before, radar is bad at finding stopped obstacles against a stopped background.

It's just something radar is bad at.

-Crissa

Do we know what type of radar Tesla uses/used? FM/FMCW/CW/pulsed/etc? I know FM has no issues with "seeing" stationary objects as it can even track through zero Doppler. Pulsed radars are designed for ranging, so stationary vs. moving is irrelevant. The ultrasonic parking sensors are nothing more than radars working in the sound domain instead of the radio wave spectrum, and they detect stationary objects by design. I'm betting they're pulsed.

 

[Revoltlution]

I think Sandy Munro said it best, only thing to add would be FLIR (forward-looking Infrared). Just another camera stream, but in another spectrum!
He's a sharp cookie

 

[Red61224]

So on the way home from work last night I encountered a truck on an empty country two lane highway that had just rolled when he was speeding and ended up on the shoulder of the roadway after miserably coming around a curve too fast, he overcorrected and rolled the truck. Luckily for me I spotted him in time to avoid hitting him like the one above. I was traveling at 55 mph and no other traffic was around. Wanna guess what color the paint of the truck? NOT Black, grey, blue or brown. Hint: It was WHITE

 

[John K]

So on the way home from work last night I encountered a truck on an empty country two lane highway that had just rolled when he was speeding and ended up on the shoulder of the roadway after miserably coming around a curve too fast, he overcorrected and rolled the truck. Luckily for me I spotted him in time to avoid hitting him like the one above. I was traveling at 55 mph and no other traffic was around. Wanna guess what color the paint of the truck? NOT Black, grey, blue or brown. Hint: It was WHITE

RED! (See, why this is funny to me…)