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Comment by prawks | Hacker News Reader

Once a pedestrian steps in front of the vehicle, the car’s brakes apply automatically if the driver doesn’t react fast enough. If the sensors detect an imminent collision with a pedestrian while driving at high speed, the airbag pops-up and inflates in a U-shape.

This sounds like it will be a lot of fun once those sensors start to wear out and malfunction.

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Or if a leaf is flying in front of the sensor.

Now I wonder which sensors they use, if they use a camera and some people detection algorithm, it can probably be fooled by a plastic toy. And of course a car which activates the brakes automatically can be quite dangerous depending on the situation, especially if the driver is not prepared for a malfunction. So I wonder who is actually responsible when the car decides to activate the brakes and the driver loses control.

I'm wondering along the same lines, at what speed does the car decide to deploy airbags, and at what speed to automatically brake? And how hard is the braking? I'd imagine it would be pretty hard braking to prevent the car from hitting something.

But one would hope the car wouldn't be going fast enough to lose control.

What's the worst that can happen if they do malfunction? Presumably no airbag, but you're no worse off than being hit by a car without pedestrian airbags.

I suppose the other type of malfunction would be accidentally discharge, but this is a) exceedingly rare, and b) no riskier than the airbags already in the car

Meh, I was thinking more of the latter. First generation sensors I'd imagine would be more prone to erroneous readings, including false positives. Randomly having the car force you to a stop in traffic could be a little annoying.

and they've compensated for that, by allowing the driver to still see once the airbags have deployed.

Car-jacking as car-hacking? You want to stop a driver to get his car? Drop a mannequin in front of it.

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