Dash cam footage of safety sense preventing a collision

That’s cool. Kudos to Toyota. Btw am itching to test this on my new 2020 Prius Prime, but don’t have the heart yet.

 

LOL, don't run your wife over, because then there's one less person to plug your Rob43 240v adapter into your Prime !!!



Rob43

PS, great vid

 

Does it have a high enough guaranteed reliability to justify such a 'test'?

NO!

Has she filed for divorce yet? Or for a domestic violence restraining order? I'm serious.

Before anyone 'tests' this system. be sure to check whether or not insurance will cover the various cases where the system doesn't fully prevent a collision. Most insurance will exclude such deliberate acts.

Also, if the 'target' is going to be a human, check first with legal counsel. In the various cases where the system doesn't fully prevent a collision, be prepared for a civil suit and/or criminal charges.

From 2020 Prime Owner's Manual, page 373:



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Page 381:



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There are many more pages of warnings and limitations about this system printed in the Owner's Manual.

 

Plus, the warning message from the MID also shows that the system is disabled when driving under 32 mph.


As I found out one morning at 1am driving at 30 mph and noticed (a split second to late, due to headlights being pointed downwards at a dip in the road ) a deer sleeping in the middle of the road.
Both Prius and Deer were not overly harmed when they met face to face.
Prius received a small crack in the grille and a tiny pressure paint crinkle in the bumper just below the crack in the grille
The deer was knocked off its feet and lay on the road for a minute or 2 as I wondered if I'd killed it. Just as I opened the driver door to check on the wild thing, it jumped to its feet an kinda wobbly walked off the road into someones front yard.

 

That’s a very useful thing to remember… Most of the roads near my house are 35 or 40. At peak deer season (right around the corner) we tend to drive 30 or under because “peak” usually means “more than 5 in our yard alone”

 

Some key lines:

"we aren't in the fully autonomous world yet."

"Avoidance technology has been around long enough for insurance industry data to confirm that cars with it are involved in about a third fewer pedestrian collision claims."

A pedestrian collision avoidance system that achieves its intended goal 33% of the time is a huge boost for public health and safety, but nowhere near good enough for a deliberate test on a live human, especially a family member.

"The technologies that are achieving those scores today will seem quaint compared to what's coming: Lidar that not only sees pedestrians but predicts their next move is under development, and 5G-powered V2X connectivity may turn every pedestrian's phone into a beacon that warns nearby cars of their proximity and giving automatic braking another input to help it do its job."

While Lidar was used on the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle contests from the very first run, it is still too expensive for consumer-grade products. And if personal phones are going to be used as beacons for additional sensing, I must take that as an indication that fully reliable pedestrian avoidance is a very difficult problem that won't be up to live-human-target testing for a very long time.

 

@fuzzy1 there is a lot of info in your post above that I've only scratched the surface of. The DARPA Grand Challenge is one. I'm may be mistaken about the specifics of the .mil contract(s) involved but I have heard of at least one suit against the pentagon regarding the multi billion $ contact(s) process.

Poor Jeff H has not mentioned yet the specifics of his thoughts on the possible human testing, I can only imagine some of the possible reasons behind that statement. So much for humor here at PC !

 

I don't consider it humor when we can clearly see from other incidents that too many people are letting their expectations get well ahead of the current technical reality. With deadly consequences.

A few years back, 2010-2014, motor vehicle fatalities had been pushed down to the 35k/year range. Now it is back up over 40k/year.

 

To be fair, the original GC (1 and 2, 2004/5) were going off road through a desert (with trials on closed course tracks). The 3rd GC was an urban one (2007) which dealt with a more representative environment. They did lead to legislation in NV and CA allowing autonomous vehicles to operate on the road.

DARPA funds prototypes, not products. They provide funding to help get American companies over the technological hump so they can develop an actual product to sell to the military, public, or ideally both.

Many of the students and engineers that worked the GCs ended up at places like Google, etc developing their self driving abilities.

 

This would highly inadvisable. I actually got into a situation similar to that shown in the video. However, in the instance that I experienced, the collision avoidance system activated AFTER I had successfully avoided the collision, and I nearly got hit because of it. Had other drivers not been alert, I could have easily been T-boned by crossing traffic because the collision avoidance system had left me stranded in the middle of a busy intersection.

No system is perfect.

 

I posted a year ago that I wasn't sure if our PCS system was even activated during pre sale inspection, because I've never heard the noise maker and the incident with the deer and the message that flashs on our MID (I'll try to get a shot of the message too). Same as the dynamic grille block, also appears to be disabled in our car. Now that you mention the system limits it's a possibility that my MID messages may also be different if some our cars system features, are / have been since new, disabled.
Sorry if I'm way off from what you experience with your Prime.

Until I find out fore sure, hopefully sooner than later, I'll be sure to mention that possible difference in our car, when posting about the PCS system.

 

I passed very close to a wounded deer this weekend. There was a car with it's emergency flasher blinking on the other side of the road from where the deer was lying on the shoulder. I made eye contact at about 10 feet from the poor animal looking directly at me as I passed withing a foot or two of, at night on a curve in the road at 35 mph.