Thread by @greentheonly

Thanks to @telanon finding a nice test ground, providing test equipment and convincing Sir Steady to volunteer himself as a test subject.

We'll try to test how AP avoids obstacles and pedestrians which was a hot topic of debate recently. The results are controversial

For those in the ADAS camp the safety features are mostly good in particular, for those in the totally anti-AP camp, there's going to be many interesting moments too I am sure.

Tested on 19.40.1.1 firmware (latest public ATM)

We'll start with the ideal case. Car on AP, driving steadily when we encounter pedestrian firmly in our way.
We can see him from far away so we gracefully slow down, just like a real human! Perfect score! This happened 3 times out of 4.

So you might wonder what happened that one other time? Well Autopilot failed horrifically, or did it? Tesla naming is confusing. And Sir Stead was unhurt, so everything was fine right?
Anyway, check the video:

Now if you pay attention, you will notice that it's the "I'm your driver that you need to monitor like I'm 2 year old" failed, it approached the brave knight waaay too fast, so fast, another safety feature, AEB decided that this is no good, kicked AP from controls and took over

If we watch this from AP view, we get to see that this time Sir Steady was not seen as a pedestrian until sort of late. The silver lining is AEB can stop the car pretty fast, certainly beyond what's in the manual (no driver intervention - car stopped all by itself)

Now let's make the task harder and move Sir Stead to the side.

Somewhat surprisingly the AP beeps, but still hits him and then tries to run away! ("hit-and-run mode").

Only upon rewatch I realized that autosteer aborted all by itself shortly before impact and TACC tried to run

This happened 4 out of 4 times. Let's examine the metadata.
Here we see that the lane positioning is all wrong even while we can see him firmly in our lane. Also radar-vision fusion happened later than expected.

This somewhat confirms AP tendency to misjudge offset objects

I saw it before on cars partially in line and bicyclists jus at the edge of a lane and now the same thing here, even while some of the logic clearly marks it as "obstacle", it's ignored because... wrong lane?

After pondering this for some time we added some more complications. What if we just had a a couple of foil-lined boxes? That way radar would see them as an obstacle and the car would surely avoid it, right? Well, not so fast!

It did emit the "I am unsure, show me the way!" beep

dang, accidentally pressed "post before finishing" be patient and don't look and comment yet!!! ;)