Remember that on AP2 cars AEB currently only works up to 28 MPH. After that you are on your own. Also, those poles are probably too small and radar transparent to trigger either FCW or AEB even if it was working to full speed.
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AP2 minor accident
- Thread starter davinci2017
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- Model S
Remember that on AP2 cars AEB currently only works up to 28 MPH. After that you are on your own. Also, those poles are probably too small and radar transparent to trigger either FCW or AEB even if it was working to full speed.
Joe F
Disruption is hard.
Agree that was a non deliverable by Tesla. However, as summon is currently implemented, at 1 MPH, would anyone really wait that long when they could just get in after exiting the garage? I get impatient just waiting for it to back out. If my garage was large enough to open the MS door, I wouldn't even use summon at all.
My left was, right wasnt, as I was attempting to change something on the screen at that very moment, as I am sure you would have done as well at some point. I suppose you drive the entire duration without even blinking and your hands firmly on the wheel when AP2 is engaged, quite useful
Like I said, I was surprised that the car didn't see what for humans are brightly colored reflective hazard marker poles and was expecting that it would be available since it has been a long dev cycle and the freeway speed has been increased quite a bit and hence I felt these types of safety related things would be included before other features. Good discussions all around regarding why its difficult to program this and look for it, but with the level of promises Tesla has been marketing these types of concerns really are more glaring to me.
However I am not angry with Tesla, I didn't say "what the hell, I paid for this, its not working, I'm raging and gonna sue" none of that.
My original post is calm and a discussion and more for information for folks who use AP2 who may not realize that it does not see such hazard cones/poles. I do realize that my eyes were off briefly and there was user error that doesn't follow the warning on the manuals, but I for one don't believe that everyone is sitting and holding the steering on AP2 cars after auto-steer is engaged and don't take their eyes or right hand off for even a second. CMON!
It just so happened mine coincided with such an incident and ended up being consequential, thats life, I was angry initially at myself and partly the car, but now I'm come to accept it and try to share with folks and figure out what to do next.
Thanks for everyone who is understanding and compassionate
However I am not angry with Tesla, I didn't say "what the hell, I paid for this, its not working, I'm raging and gonna sue" none of that.
My original post is calm and a discussion and more for information for folks who use AP2 who may not realize that it does not see such hazard cones/poles. I do realize that my eyes were off briefly and there was user error that doesn't follow the warning on the manuals, but I for one don't believe that everyone is sitting and holding the steering on AP2 cars after auto-steer is engaged and don't take their eyes or right hand off for even a second. CMON!
It just so happened mine coincided with such an incident and ended up being consequential, thats life, I was angry initially at myself and partly the car, but now I'm come to accept it and try to share with folks and figure out what to do next.
Thanks for everyone who is understanding and compassionate
@davinci2017 no doubt everyone using AS has had to glance elsewhere, especially because some things can't be controlled without using the screen. I mapped as much as possible through the steering wheel click wheels.
Sorry it turned out poorly but I've read a new hood is about 1k but it might not paint match perfectly. Since your car is new it is easier to get a better match. Good luck!
Sorry it turned out poorly but I've read a new hood is about 1k but it might not paint match perfectly. Since your car is new it is easier to get a better match. Good luck!
Depending on the circumstances this could have easily happened to someone who was manually driving with both hands on the wheel. If the OP had been following the other car too closely (maybe TACC set to a low follow #) when the proceeding car made the last minute lane change to avoid the construction, it might not have given the OP time to verify the lane to the side was clear and react appropriately. Compound that with an accelerating TACC and the OP was probably doomed hands on the wheel or not. Luckily it wasn't a concrete barrier.
This does illustrate how far Tesla still has to go to meet the cross country self driving challenge this year. Maybe they will have to find the one lane on every interstate along the route with no construction and no weird changes.
whttiger25
Member
Thanks for sharing your story davinci. As far as your earlier question on getting it fixed, if it were me I would just go through insurance assuming you have a $1k Collision deductible or less. Of course, you could get a quote on your own and then decide, but often you can work with your insurance company to open a claim and get a quote through them, get some feedback on how your rates for the next 3 years will be affected if you accept the insurance claim, do the math, and then decide if you want to fix it yourself or not. You can back out and close the claim, and your rates will not be affected.
Just some context for how expensive it is to properly fix these cars. Someone side swiped my front bumper when the car was parked on a narrow road, and they were kind enough to wait around for me. About half an inch of paint was scraped off, you could barely tell. I told her I'd be fine with avoiding an isurance claim if she wanted to just write me a check once I got an estimate. I thoguht, what, a couple hundred bucks at the most? Well I took the car to my nearest tesla authorized body shope, and they told me they had to repaint the entire bumper. There is no such thing as touching up the paint on a Tesla. Extra labor to handle the parking sensors. Total bill? $1350.
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EarlyAdopter
Active Member
The interesting point here, to me, is that currently those construction zone poles are designed to catch the attention of humans, but not cars.
As autonomous driving systems become more prevalent they will need to add additional markings to make them stand out to autonomous driving systems. For example, in addition to reflective markings on visible light spectrum, they should have highly reflective radar markings, too. Basically, wrapped with some aluminum foil. Not expensive at all and will help save lives, both passengers and construction workers.
As autonomous driving systems become more prevalent they will need to add additional markings to make them stand out to autonomous driving systems. For example, in addition to reflective markings on visible light spectrum, they should have highly reflective radar markings, too. Basically, wrapped with some aluminum foil. Not expensive at all and will help save lives, both passengers and construction workers.
Sorry you had this problem, it sucks but at least nobody got hurt. Just a thought, have you reported it to Tesla? If it is not too late, maybe they can review their captured data/videos and use them to better understand why they missed seeing the hazard poles (or actually didn't miss them)
i drive 70 miles a day on AP without issues so, not saying it isn't possible, but the feature is a driver assistance tool meant to keep you in a normal lane. The system isn't designed for out of ordinary situations. Autosteer is not full self driving or even self driving, and i think a lot of people still consider the two synonymous.
insaneoctane
Well-Known Member
Does Tesla have a mechanism to report such collisions? I would think that AP2 has some buffer of the incident to review? Even if the behavior of the AP2 system was to expectations, surely something can be learned here?
here is a wishful thinking: perhaps Tesla has actually programmed this in (I am laughing here as I am writing this) - if the object on path is a soft target (like the plastic cones), go ahead and hit the object and take small hit on the car, vs, applying emergency braking and damaging some car parts (brakes/calipers), potentially hurting people inside (neck?), and potentially triggering a rear-end collision with a vehicle from the rear...Though, the logic needs to get more sophisticated - such as - the car's camera should read ahead of the cone and see what the cones are trying to protect (damaged road ahead? workers?...) and make a decision in split second by looking back, speed of car, distance remaining etc...
It's not just AP2! Nobody's driver-assist functions currently seem to handle "soft" objects in the lane yet, notably including AP1. And it's not just tall thin skinny things like those "cones"; almost exactly what you describe happened to me yesterday with a set of full-size construction barrels (in all their 5' x 2' orange and white striped plastic glory) on interstate 87. I looked away for a little too long while trying to goose Waze into updating on the main screen, and AP1 nearly took me right into the barrels rather than following them and merging into the unoccupied lane to my left.
100% my fault -- I know AP doesn't handle this kind of situation, I've said so here before, and still, in a not-fully-awake state I expected it to do something it just can't do. If there'd been a car in the lane next to me, I would have either hit him or hit the barrels instead of being able to make a last-minute course correction.
There's a funny video of Charlie Miller trying to find *any* "soft" object that will trigger the AEB on a Jeep Cherokee. He tries refrigerator boxes, boxes covered in tinfoil, trash cans, garbage bags full of stuff -- no dice. Of course the Model S should be able to do much better since it's got a camera, but as others have said, the camera seems to really be used pretty much just for detecting lane lines. "Should" it be able to see a large, non-radar-reflective object like a construction barrel? Probably. But does it, and does it then ignore the lane lines that are leading it right into the obstacle? No. At the current level of automation on the Model S, that's your, the driver's job. It does go to show how tremendously different future systems -- even with the same sensors AP2 now uses -- will have to be from what we have now.
Here's something to ponder: why don't our cars hit jersey barriers (even the plastic type sometimes used to divert traffic to a different lane at the start of a construction zone) in similar situations? When the car's alongside the barrier, I believe the answer is that the ultrasonic sensors keep the car off it, and the car tracks the other lane line. But what about when it diagonals across the lane at the start of a lane shift, merge, or narrowing? It's plastic, the radar isn't going to see it, after all. I suspect the answer is that a plastic jersey barrier is, unlike a barrel or a cone, a solid object that blocks the camera's view of the lane lines beyond, and that's the only reason why the behavior we're talking about doesn't happen there.
Bottom line is, as soon as you see that first sign, even a mile ahead, warning you of a construction zone, just kill the AP. It's too easy to let habits from "normal" highway driving situations fool you into letting it do something dangerous when there are cones, barrels, equipment, etc. around -- it does not handle them at all.
The behavior that needs to be fixed in the logic is what I term "diving". Basically if there is an unusual lane widening or merging, the car will freak out and dive towards the lane side that has changed in an effort to recenter.
The correct logic is to determine which side of the lane has not shifted and continue following the unchanged lane marker rather than diving to one side.
The correct logic is to determine which side of the lane has not shifted and continue following the unchanged lane marker rather than diving to one side.
I know I'm being pedantic, can we please stop saying radar doesn't see plastic. This is wrong on many levels.
Plastic has a lower RCS (radar cross section) then metal, but a radar does detect plastic.
The other reason cones are hard to detect is that after the radar sends their waves to them, some of the energy is reflected and some is refracted. Of the reflected energy, only the ones that come back to the radar are detected. It doesn't have to be orthogonal, it could be specular (if I shine the radar to the edge of a square building, the reflection comes right back at me) or diehedral (if I shine a radar at the ground, and it then bounces off the building and comes back at me) scattering.
With a round cone some of the energy will always be send back to the radar, and then some from the scattering reflections. The reflected energy is probably going to be way below the noise threshold (the plastic absorbs energy, the next thing the EM waves bounce off absorb energy, etc. until it comes back to the radar).
But radar is not "blind" to plastic. It may have a hard time detecting and classifying plastic when there are other high RCS items nearby (cars, construction signs, etc.) out of the noise, but it can "see" it.
/pedantic
Plastic has a lower RCS (radar cross section) then metal, but a radar does detect plastic.
The other reason cones are hard to detect is that after the radar sends their waves to them, some of the energy is reflected and some is refracted. Of the reflected energy, only the ones that come back to the radar are detected. It doesn't have to be orthogonal, it could be specular (if I shine the radar to the edge of a square building, the reflection comes right back at me) or diehedral (if I shine a radar at the ground, and it then bounces off the building and comes back at me) scattering.
With a round cone some of the energy will always be send back to the radar, and then some from the scattering reflections. The reflected energy is probably going to be way below the noise threshold (the plastic absorbs energy, the next thing the EM waves bounce off absorb energy, etc. until it comes back to the radar).
But radar is not "blind" to plastic. It may have a hard time detecting and classifying plastic when there are other high RCS items nearby (cars, construction signs, etc.) out of the noise, but it can "see" it.
/pedantic
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Just makes me feel that much better about my FSD investment. I have said it after I started driving with Auto Steer.. This car will never be able to drive on its own. There are just too many odd scenarios and if people depend on it to drive itself there will be several deaths. The thought of this car actually doing what it promised and being able to eventually go find a parking spot and picking me up at the front door are long gone in my mind. AEB is set so low at 28mph its realty useless.
Brian-MS90D
Member
I've had my Tesla since March, 2017. The one Tesla topic that gets anyone - owners or not - fired up the most and generates the widest range of opinions - requested or not - is autopilot/autosteer/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I see the same thing play out on this forum over and over and over. It's interesting to me because it's not what I expected people would talk about when asking me about my MS. I assume it's because the autopilot topic is the most controversial feature. The electrical car/drivetrain used to be the most controversial topic. I remember 3+ years ago my friends and family reacting to me wanting an electrical car with the same type of reaction I now get about the autopilot topic (shock, passionate arguments, wide range of opinions, mix of true and false facts, etc).
This is all good news to me for two reasons. First, the electrification of vehicles is becoming more and more accepted as mainstream. Second, the same result (boring acceptance) will likely occur with autopilot, evantually.
This is all good news to me for two reasons. First, the electrification of vehicles is becoming more and more accepted as mainstream. Second, the same result (boring acceptance) will likely occur with autopilot, evantually.
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