The Transportation Department projects the new rule could save 360 lives a year and prevent 24,000 injuries.
The Biden administration plans to require that all new cars and trucks come with pedestrian-collision avoidance systems that include automatic emergency braking technology by the end of the decade.
In an interview, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the requirement is designed to reduce pedestrian deaths, which have been on the rise in the post-Covid 19 era.
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The new standards will require all cars to avoid contact at up to 62 mph and mandate that they must be able to detect pedestrians in the dark. They will also require braking at up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected.
The Transportation Department projects the rule could save 360 lives a year and prevent 24,000 injuries.
Radar doesn’t work for stopped vehicles at high speeds though. You’ll still need cameras and or lidar. OEMs rely so heavily on radar though that their cameras don’t detect this well enough in emergency situations either.
You need either an impeccable vision algorithm, or lidar for this scenario.
That recent Blue Cruise crash for example, even if the conditions had been perfect, and not at night, with no lights, that’s a failure condition for the system. A vehicle moving out of the way of a stopped vehicle ahead of it, is a failure condition on all existing L2 systems. In this case for the human, it’s also a failure condition given the specific conditions.
This is an actual area we can improve on in terms of mandated safety features, solving this problem. There are tons of rear ending of stopped vehicles at high speeds. It’s very dangerous for police/emergency services doing stops, or broken down vehicles. If the vehicle could react to this even when a L2 system isn’t engaged, that would be big.
If it was lidar based it doesn’t even need to be a lidar capable of semi-autonomous driving features, it could be a narrow forward facing one simply for this purpose in emergency situations.
It seems pointless to argue with these people because it seems they’ve convinced themselves that they know exactly how to construct an infallible or nearly infallible autonomous system even though actual experts with billions of dollars at their disposal have yet to create one.