Tesla electric car crashed into a truck that was flipped over the highway: Mistakes of autopilot?

The incident happened early on Friday morning on a highway in Taiwan, when a Tesla Model 3 hit a truck that had flipped over earlier. It seems to have been an accident caused by Tesla’s autopilot, when the car failed to detect a large rectangular object lying in front of it from a distance, under the light. daytime and normal weather.

Traffic video shows the Tesla crashing into a overturned truck, only a braking attempt before the collision, but does not change the end result.

And this is a video in the opposite corner, showing that the car has almost no change in speed or direction until a few seconds before the collision, or in other words the automatic system does not detect obstacles.

According to experts, any driver who needs even a little attention will have the action of changing directions or slowing down early, but cannot rush straight like nothing in front of him. Therefore, the incident is almost determined by the car’s autopilot system.

Thankfully, no unfortunate loss of people happened.

In the past, there have been many times Tesla’s Autopilot system has caused similar errors, involving large obstacles and immobility in front of them.

The car crashed into the trunk of the overturned truck lying on the road.

So why does Autopilot have problems with motionless obstacles?

Basically, Tesla’s self-driving system mainly uses the camera to observe and in situations like the above, a large, bright, light colored object lying on the road on a brightly lit day can cause What is the system hard to identify? In the image above, you can see that the trunk of the truck almost reflects all the sunlight.

In general, immobilized objects are challenging for automatic emergency braking systems and self-driving systems, because if it uses radar to activate brakes for immobilized objects, cars tend to continuous and unintended stops.

Pictures of another accident involving the autopilot’s self-driving system, when motionless obstacles were not detected.

Identity systems such as LiDAR, which are being used by many companies to help their self-driving cars identify roads and obstacles, are able to provide better range information for large, motionless objects. But Tesla does not want to use LiDAR. Elon Musk even declared that any company, including Alphabet or Apple, would fail to use the Lidar sensor in a self-driving car.

“Lidar is a fool’s junk,” Musk once said.

In accidents, Tesla’s Autopilot system is usually not directly responsible, as the company has stated that the system only has the ability to support the driver and issue a warning, requiring the user to always Hands on the steering wheel. The crash is also the clearest proof, because if there is a slight attention even to the smallest of the user, it will not happen as shown in the video.

Reference jalopnik