Isn't this the exact behavior we are taught as human drivers?
No. You should brake. The intended and authorised safety regime for automobiles assumes you will maintain a situation where you can reasonably brake before foreseeable impacts.
This is quite different from say, an airliner or a railway train which couldn't possibly brake, and so those need completely different safety environments. "Absolute block" is an example for railways, there is intended to be no possible way for two trains to be in the same section of track, so, you always have at least an entire section (it will often be more on fast trains) to brake even if you can't see far at all.
In a car you don't have that environment, you should always be prepared to stop in the distance you can see. If you're thinking, "But nobody drives like that" then you're part way to understanding why so remarkably many people die on roads.
With large farm animals such as horses and cows, or with larger wildlife like moose and elk, your life is at stake - there are plenty of drivers killed just hitting moose (look at the size of the mother in the embedded video and you can easily imagine her sliding up the hood and through the windshield: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=livewith.drivingm.... This video also shows something that's true of elk and deer as well - they have very little traction on pavement.
2) The difference between the nose of a car while braking and while coasting is an inch or two. Won’t make a lick of difference.
Source for 1) Having a deer jump over my car, leaving only fur in the windshield wiper blades. 2) Mythbusters, measuring for a “Wanted” car jump myth.
Ironically I did actually end up having a encounter with a deer. I did break, and swerve, but at the time I had a car without anti-lock breaks. I lost control of the vehicle and flipped it (which is also why they tell you not to swerve, unless you have good awareness).
The car could have reacted better and likely prevented the hit, but if a human had been the only driver nobody would have even suggested that the driver was at fault.
When there are other cars around or when the animal would've jumped in front of the car before you could react, I'd say the driver can't be blamed for hitting the animal because there was no reasonably alternative. In this case, breaking and turning on the hazards would've been a perfectly fine solution. This deer didn't have to die and a human driver could've (should've) avoided a collision.
The deer is just an example of the system failing, though. It shows that Tesla's wannabe-self driving is incapable of dealing with animals near the road. A small deer like this could be hit safely, but when a car doesn't try to break for something bigger and heavier, people could easily die. You run over birds and bunnies, but don't even try to drive through a horse. That thing is going straight through your windshield when you hit it, so you'd better risk getting rear-ended when a runaway horse walks onto the road. You're going to need one of those death mobiles like a Cybertruck that doesn't do those fancy "crumple zones" or "safety glass" to make it through anything larger than an adult boar without risking a crash, so any full self-driving system should be able to anticipate large animals near the road (or shut down in areas where large animals are known to cross roads).
Well not a tesla. You have to really work to flip them, but the point stands.
This despite being taught about danger of animals, and living in a place with a large wild population.
Your brain does not process images outside of the immediate distance in front of you nearly as fast as you think it does. I had a good four seconds that I could have "seen" the dear, but it was only when it was directly in my path that I realized what was going on.
When you are watching youtube, you are staring right at it. When you are driving a car, chances are you looking straight ahead.
If a child jumped in front of my car, I'd swerve even if that meant risking a tree. If I ran over a child I don't know that I'd be able to live with myself anyway, so the choice is clear: I risk myself to improve the odds of the child making it away unscathed. But a deer? No way in hell. I'll slam on the brakes, since my car has ABS, but I would not take my chances with swerving.
Of course, they also said to break as much as possible but hit it straight on. You would total the car, but cars are designed for that, versus your body not being able to take a deer going through the windshield if you clip it on the side. The engine block is padding, use it.
Looking at the video, it looks exactly like the videos of horrible car crashes I saw in school (less blood). As usual with Tesla, the headlines are sensational, the hacker news comments breathless, but it's a fairly straight forward physics and recognition problem. 300+ people die a year, and billions of dollars in cars are destroyed each year. A neural network mimics the way human brains work. If a animal goes in a unexpected direction (or if it wasn't recognized at all), its going to be a problem.
The headline is "Tesla Autopilot Hits a Deer" which is as bland and unsensational as you can get while being true.
> A neural network mimics the way human brains work.
This is like saying a drawing of a circle mimics the way the sun works. NNs are vaguely inspired by a high-level neuron topology, but the similarities pretty much end there. Gradient descent and backpropogation don't take place in the brain at all, and we don't know enough about the brain to mimic the way it works.
Deer standing safely by the road side will happily panic and jump in front of your car at the last possible moment. In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.