When Driving Assistance Systems go wrong

[FastLaneJB]

Interesting article in Autocar on this with an EV9 where it emergency braked out of the blue. This mirrors my experience on a Lotus Eletre and is a common known fault with their software also, not sure they've fixed this yet.

Basically in that car had it a couple of times but say you are driving around a town / city and some car comes up to the white lines on a side road. Nothing happens, all good. But if you are getting close to that junction and as they drive up their cars nose crosses the white line the car would emergency brake because it assumes they are coming out of the junction. This is what I felt was going on anyway based on the times it happened.

Tesla I'm sure has emergency braking but doesn't in my experience suffer from this issue. Just mention it as it was poor software that forced me to return the Eletre among a few other things. There's a big gap in quality of software and as it takes over safety features of cars, it's not just a quality of the Sat Nav and does it have Apple CarPlay / Android Auto to consider. It can be a fundamentally bad and dangerous car to drive also if the software is bad these days.

When automated driver assistance systems go badly wrong | Autocar

 

[GeorgeSymonds]

Tesla are well known for phantom braking, they’re far from immune, although I’m not sure if you’re talking about a passive system or something that occurs when AP or the equivalent is active. Ours throws the anchors on under AP if it sees a car on a side road waiting to pull out.

I can’t talk to other systems but we also get ‘corrective steering applied’ fairly regularly including when driving down the motorway when not on AP if I drive to the right of a lane around a left hand bend. Completely needlessly.

I guess the challenge with the side road scenario is if you wait until you know what the car on the side road is going to do it could be too late. Maybe defensive driving does require slowing down significantly if you see a car that could pull out rather than bomb last at 60, there aren’t any prizes for being in an accident that’s not strictly your fault.

 

[gsmith123]

Phantom braking from AEB while driving manually is extremely rare (I haven’t seen that once in 40k miles)

Phantom forward collision warning audible chimes are quite common imo (at least on the most sensitive option).

 

[FastLaneJB]

Yeah this isn't phantom braking while on autopilot, not at all. This is at any time, you don't need any active cruise type system enabled. It's also far stronger braking as it's full on emergency braking, same as if you floored the brake pedal fully.