2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Consumer Reports re-ranked (1, 2) the Tesla Model 3 the highest safety rating after the automaker stopped using radar in its vehicles. IIHS conducted tests and showed that the Model 3 without radar successfully prevents collisions with other vehicles and significantly reduces the speed before colliding with pedestrians.
In commercially available cars and unmanned vehicles, which are still in development, engineers use various technical solutions, but among them there are standard approaches, especially regarding security systems. Many modern high-end vehicles have a collision avoidance system that detects approaching a static or slower object and slows down the vehicle. These systems work on the basis of a radar, the quality of which does not depend on the time of day and practically does not fall off during rain and snow.
Tesla, like the rest of the automakers, used radar in their cars, and, unlike many companies, many cameras from all sides of the body. Based on these sensors and machine learning algorithms, the company first created a partial autopilot system, and at the end of 2020 began sending out new software to some owners that technically makes their cars self-driving. Already at that time, the conditionally unmanned Tesla was very different from other drones in that they did not use lidars for navigation, and in May the company announced that it had stopped installing radars in new Model 3 and Y cars since the end of April. Tesla announced that in the first weeks, these cars will be missing some of the usual features, including automatic return to the lane. Immediately thereafter, several vehicle testing and evaluating organizations, including the IIHS and Consumer Reports, stripped Model 3 and Y of the highest safety rating they received from standard testing.
In June, the IIHS re-tested the active safety systems of new vehicles without radar and returned them to the maximum rating. Experts conducted two types of collision avoidance tests with another car and a pedestrian. At speeds of 20 and 40 kilometers per hour, the car was able to avoid a collision with a static car simulator, so it received the highest rating in this test. The models of previous years behaved similarly.
Three types of pedestrian collision tests
In tests with pedestrians, the results were not so clear-cut. In total, the IIHS has three tests of this type: in two of them, a simulator of an adult or a child crosses the road perpendicular to the car, and in the third it is simulated that an adult pedestrian is walking parallel to the car ahead. In cross-over tests, the car significantly slowed down before the collision (by 16-21 kilometers per hour) or braked completely. In a parallel test at 40 kilometers per hour, the car slowed down from 40 to 1.5 kilometers per hour and from 59.5 to 19.3 kilometers per hour. Based on the results of the tests, the organization assigned an intermediate rating for this component (the second stage out of three possible). It's worth noting that the previous model received a similar rating, but managed to avoid a collision in three out of six tests.
Tesla with autopilot had fatal accidents, including two almost identical: the car crashed into a light van, not distinguishing it against the background of a bright sky. The radar could have helped to avoid an accident, but due to frequent false alarms, Tesla engineers decided to cut off all tall objects from its data. It is not yet known whether the company's developers managed to solve this and similar problems with hard-to-see objects.
