Tesla later pushed a software fix for the AEB to trigger even if only the radar alerted.
https://electrek.co/2016/07/01/understanding-fatal-tesla-acc...
Step 2: if stopped object is immediately not in front of the car, otherwise, ANALYZE IMMEDIATELY because a stopped object is right in front of the car.
It's not rocket science, and it's something so ridiculously basic that Tesla's failure to do something this simple borders of gross criminal negligence. It's something their competitors already do; in fact Waymo's problem is that it's too sensitive to stopped objects in front of the vehicle, hence the Waymo's constantly stopping and starting or driving very slowly...but that's the better and safer way to do it, especially when you're testing on real streets with third-party vehicles.
The car always has still-standing objects in front of the car (the road, anything around the road, barriers, anything on opposite sides of barriers, things in the direction of the ar but the road is turning etc.
The car has to know that the road doesn't slope up over the truck or around it. I'm guessing that's where the split-barrier fails occur.
It really needs to create a real-time 3d map of the entire environment (including what's visible from eye-height, not only front of hood) and map a route through that.
Right, none of which are directly in front of the car when the objects and care are plotted in 3d space. Easy (but not trivial) to do with LIDAR but not yet doable with purely visual systems like "Autopilot." Which is my point, and which is the reason every other self-driving car company uses a combination of sensors to get data about car's surroundings.
In case of the first trailer crash it apparently looked similar to an overhead sign to the sensors, also approaching a stopped object would be AEB territory, not ACC, which doesn't work well at higher speeds.