they disabled both the built-in emergency braking system and their replacement emergency braking system. they absolutely did disable a safety feature and did not have anything in its place.
In this case, as I understand it, they also disabled the emergency braking feature built into the Volvo. Which wouldn't be obviously crazy if they had better, adequately tested emergency braking integrated with the "autonomy" system. But to disable the existing safety feature in favor of their own system, and also disable their own system due to a high false positive rate, seems negligent on the face of it.
For a development vehicle,I am assuming they bypassed the car's stock functionality I am sure they had their own braking system that was supposed to stop for cars, pedestrians, cyclists etc. It didnt function currently at that time
From what I read in some of the earlier reports on this, the car didn't have the ability to emergency brake in autonomous mode. It was disabled at that time, so it could only brake in regular traffic, not for obstacles that appear suddenly.
The justification made for disabling the emergency braking - that it would interfere with data gathering - might appear reasonable at first sight, but it does not stand up to scrutiny, for if the emergency braking is triggered, the driving system has already made a mistake, and you already have the data on that malfunction.
For the record, I just took delivery of a Model 3 and seemingly all of these safety features can be toggled off in settings. Because of how complex these systems are, it wouldn't surprise me if someone turned off or configured automatic emergency braking because they thought it would make autopilot better or something.
How hard is it to disable the “dead man's switch” for this feature? Can it be done without searching the forum for hours? Is it documented in the owner's manual?
The direction of my blame here kind of depends on the answer to those questions. Of course, it's technically the owner's fault, but a feature like this really needs to be 100% idiot proof.
This is a new feature to many people, and it's exactly the type of feature that people are going to “test” outside of the ideal operating conditions. It's not Tesla's responsibility to account for every stupid decision of its customers, but Tesla should have at least done everything in their power to ensure that critical safety features couldn't be disabled (which they may have done; I don't know).
Most critical safety features on cars can't be trivially disabled (ABS, airbags, automatic seatbelt locks, etc...). The only safety feature that I can think of that can be trivially disabled is traction/stability control, but there's a real reason for this (getting out of deep snow/mud). Also, disabling traction/stability control is a multi-stage process on many cars. On late model BMWs at least, pressing the “DTC” button once will partially reduce traction/stability control, but not completely disable it. To the average person, it appears to be completely disabled. However, if you do a little research, you'll find that if you hold it down for another 5 seconds, it disables completely (sort of). Even with it completely disabled, certain aspects of the system remain on. The only way to completely disable those portions would be to flash custom software to the car (which is well beyond the ability of the average person).
there should be an active button that disables all electronic assists with 1 press. I have no idea how such a dangerous system passed safety regs. Was it a mercedes by any chance?
I'm not sure. But I think that one thing worse than disabling them might be to wait until the car reaches freeway speed and suddenly apply full brakes to, say, the front left wheel.
I've seen a similar failure in a van. The van was equipped with antilock brakes, which override the driver's control input and reduce braking force when the speed sensors on one or more wheels detect that the wheel has stopped too suddenly, as if skidding. One of the sensors had malfunctioned, resulting in an "ABS" warning light, and a fault code readable with a tool indicating which sensor was malfunctioning.
Did it disable the ABS? No. Instead, it continued to rely on the faulty sensor information, activating ABS under moderate deceleration on dry pavement, greatly reducing the available braking force and creating a severe danger.
I think there may be a bias among people designing safety equipment to always try to provide the intended safety benefit, even when part of the system isn't working. The problem is it's easy to lose sight of how the safety feature fits into the overall picture. A pilot can almost always safely fly a plane that doesn't use automation to recover from a stall, but not necessarily one that uses the trim to point the nose at the ground in spite of control inputs to the contrary.
So, in the case that emergency braking is, nothing is designed to happen and no one is informed. I guess they just hoped really hard that it wouldn't murder anyone?
Almost all current assitance systems in luxury cars, which are not design for automated driving, could have avoided this situation with activation of the emergency brake. But this car didn't even brake at all?
It will be interesting when Volvo pulls back from that relationship, because even the uptodate emergency brake assistent should have catched up. Except Uber as deactivated those in favor for their own technology (because it is superior).
EDIT: German Automotive Club did tested full sized cars in 2016, which means decaded old technology in IT. The results where that the Subaru Outback was the only one detecting persons in the dark. But was very poor with biclysts.
https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussg...
Would you care to elaborate on what went wrong? The other comments here make ‘automatic emergency braking’ sound like a really good idea, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this particular feature would be so problematic.
If you’re talking about other automatic steering features, that’s very different, and your comment makes more sense to me.
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