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> Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk

"Radar" absolutely can.

What can't differentiate between these things is the radar in Teslas that was intended for use in adaptive cruise control. There are any number of not insanely expensive radars that could do this job perfectly fine. Tesla just decided to go "full self driving" with this rather bad radar because "humans can do it with vision only!!!1!!!1!"

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I don't the specifics of Tesla's radar implementation but what I have seen of the accidents usually seem like a textbook examples of incorrectly implemented clutter filtering. It's not an easy problem to solve in practice (re: cheaply), but known solutions have existed for decades.

The radar module in Teslas uses the same filtering strategy as most adaptive cruise control radar modules, which is "if relative velocity to object is nearly the opposite of the car's velocity, throw it out."

It works pretty much as designed.

Right, sounds like they drop a bandpass filter on the down-converted Doppler spectrum. It's the simplest way to "solve" the clutter problem by just getting rid of everything stationary.

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