On the other hand, the engagement of autopilot might have been caused by a desire to explicitly NOT pay attention, however briefly. think: "ok, now let me read this text from the person I'm on my way to meet."

I have found myself occasionally using autopilot to augment my driving when I'm doing something that inherently decreases focus on the road, however briefly; eg, taking my sunglasses out of the glovebox. I still drive the same way I normally would in any other car when reaching for something in the glovebox, so it's easy to think "any enhanced safety is better than none".

On the other hand, it could lead to a false sense of security where you pay 10% less attention than doing the same task in a non-augmented car. Or you get comfortable doing such things, so you do them more frequently than truly necessary. (for example, you might just shield your eyes from the sun with your hand rather than grabbing sunglasses in a non-augmented car).

The issue isn't with the sensors, but rather the system reacting to sensor data.

The stuff the DoD buys (or was buying a decade ago) is good enough to tell two basically identical tractor trailers apart based on minor features, dents/dings, etc.

As the long slow march of progress continues it may come down in cost enough to be viable on vehicles.

As I understand it it's the algorithms that analyze the radar data that are the secret (literally) sauce. I didn't work on any of that. I just plumbed various data from A to B. I don't know much other than it was really damned good for being "legacy" at the time I was working there.

So yes.

The Neural Network should be capable to recognize a truck from any angle and even if parts are obstructed. I hope we will get the details public and see if it actually tagged the obstacle but ignored it or it detect it as something else like maybe a side road advertising panel

One of these crashes involved a firetruck, which unlike a semi-trailer, does not have a large gap underneath it.

Radars are limited period. The radars used by Tesla lack the angular resolution to distinguish between a stationary object next to the road (e.g. a building or parked car) with a stationary object parked right in the middle of the road.

That fire truck wasn't crossing the road, it was at the road side, which creates a different situation. The problem with high trailers is, that they very much look like a bridge to a radar. In any case, a proper side bareer can prevent deadly accidents.

It's insufficient angular resolution for the application, no matter which way you slice it.

https://twitter.com/CC_Firefighters/status/95552999131956019...

The radar that companies people on HN don't think highly of sell to the government is "scary good" and that's just the decade+ old tech that I'm familiar with.

I'm sure there's reasons Tesla doesn't/can't put that in cars though.

Elon caving and adopting Lidar is probably more likely.