The irony is that this is actually a good reason to drag the car manufacturers to the table and compel them to fix it from their end.<p>But pragmatically, they likely don't answer the phone. Or email.<p>So, it is still easier to fix the road. And hope the issue doesn't resurface elsewhere and inadvertantly injure or kill too many people.
This feels like the physical world version of writing at the top of your autopilot function<p><pre><code> if(thisSpecificCattleGrid)
return True //Skip the autopilot for this case
</code></pre>
Like... yeah, that will stop the autopilot from crashing when you come across that cattle grid. It doesn't change the fact that your autopilot has some known bad behaviour and you've got no idea where else it'll show up.
It's not actually stated that automatic braking is the reason for the change. It even gives a different reason: 'To create a "virtually smooth ride across the grid"'. They straightened out a step-shaped road into a straight one which is surely just a better experience for all cars and their occupants. I almost wonder if the vehicles that left the road did so by making a jump using it as a stunt ramp.<p>This article has before and after pictures from the same angle: <a href="https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/farmer/18996741.cattle-grid-replaced-minehead-cars-crash-off-road/" rel="nofollow">https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/farmer/18996741.catt...</a>
It would be nice if there was a sign post for "auto drive failure ahead". You could put that a minute up the road, the car could see it, ping at the driver until he take over, cross the grid and then re-engage.<p>This seems to be the correct solution for 99% of these Edge cases...
Apparently, some cattle don't have a problem with them.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/zTNZEl6" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/zTNZEl6</a>
My wife and I were out driving looking at Christmas lights a few weeks ago and I tried to reverse the car with no other cars around but the car did an emergency stop because the lights confused the system into thinking someone was behind me or going to cross behind me. Automatic can be good but also too easily fooled.
Seems like cars get spooked by odd things in their paths just like cows, huh?<p>Well, I see 2 aspects that make this a "good" failure scenario, regardless of how they solve it.<p>First, having the sensor+algorithm interpret something conservatively as "should stop" for it rather than "ok to go through" at possible grave cost, is the right behavior.<p>Second, this is already (as you can tell by the exceptional nature of the story) a very rural and special case where the driver should be driving alertly (and slowly) anyway. From the photo, this is not something meant to be gone over at high speed blindly.<p>As for the cars going off the road, that needs more explanation as the only action cars should be applying automatically is braking, not turning.
The UK already has some of the safest roads in the world. We achieved that by spending money on good road design and education. Now we are having to spend even more money to "fix" the roads for car safety features designed for other countries who didn't spend the money to make their roads safe? How frustrating.
I assume this is because the metal bars in the cattle-grid appear as a very reflective object in the cars' radar sensors which it interprets as an obstacle?<p>I can see this would be a problem with cars that use only radar or radar+ultrasonic. Besides Tesla (and Waymo) cars which do sensor-fusion with vision, what other cars attempt to corroborate radar data with confirmation it's an obstacle and not a coincidental highly radar-reflective object?
What is going to stop someone from putting up a sign on the side of a highway that looks like a photo of a red light? Very cheap to deploy and extremely dangerous.<p>I remember seeing a post on HN (but I can’t find it) where simply flashing such a photo for ~100ms was enough to get cars to come to a sudden stop
This is for the auto-brake feature in cars presumably? This is the future. We'll modify our road networks to accommodate vehicles with improved features. One day we'll have radio car-info-beacons along the roadway and wonder why we ever considered only visual road signs.
Though I think the fault lies with the car manufacturers, I wish they would find an alternative for these cattle grids because they can be quite hazardous for motorcycles in the wet.
Does this mean sudden level changes in roads, like this tile road pictured here, will also trigger braking?<p><a href="http://cms.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2019/jan/17/wanna-get-that-sinking-feeling-ride-through-this-deadly-stretch-1926076.html" rel="nofollow">http://cms.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2019/jan/17/wan...</a>
The concept people would vilify automatic braking systems is horrifying. They, like GPS mapping save countless lives.<p>And we as a society need to change our environments to further optimise them. Which good engineers have been doing forever, this is part of engineering.<p>It was surprising the BBC article actually was neutral, it was a pleasant surprise. The council realised their interesting mistake and fixed it. But it would be nice to see the BBC going to neutral good and mentioning the lives saved and other measures councils can do to improve these technologies.
It was on a quick steep incline, with a real fence (with matching slats spacing) that actually was going across the road right up to the dashed center line. They fixed it by regrading the road like they should have done in the first place, as cattle guards like this must be level, and the local codes required it.<p>Editors getting desperate with their TSLA puts.