Why Tesla’s Auto Pilot Can’t See a Stopped Firetruck

This is the fourth time a Tesla on "autopilot" has crashed into something partially blocking the left lane. The fire truck was, according to the Mercury News, stopped partly in the breakdown lane at the left and partly in the left lane.[1] Here's Tesla killing a driver in China with exactly that bug.[2] I've posted two other videos of crashes like this before, one from Germany and one from the US.

The Mobileye system just doesn't do well with obstacles on the sides. This was well known years ago; you can see Mobileye's videos with boxes around cars it recognizes. This is why you have to do self-driving as geometry first - if there's something there, you can't hit it, even if you can't identify it. LIDAR-based systems map everything out there. Understanding is optional. When in doubt, don't hit it.

It's no good expecting the driver to take over. The driver can reasonably expect the system to react to a clearly visible obstacle, but doesn't know whether it will steer around it or stop. By the time the system has failed to react, much of the driver's reaction time has been used up.

Tesla's system as shipping is apparently too dumb to steer around an obstacle. It's just lane-following and auto-brake. They don't mention that much.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/22/tesla-on-autopilot-sl... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo

This a a really useful article for me to read since I have a car with adaptive cruise control and have only slowly learn to trust and rely upon it for my daily commute. Now I will be searching for my owners manual and actually reading the thing.

That's a situation that is practically impossible to solve. You are following a car at 60 mph, but there is a car in front of it at a dead stop -- the car in front swerves out of the way at the last second -- no time to react. BOOM.