Video: Side Collision Warning and Side Collision Avoidance

This happened to me on Saturday:



I was in the left lane of Interstate 40 west bound through New Mexico with Autopilot engaged (TACC + Autosteer), passing an 18-wheeler in the right lane. The 18-wheeler driver apparently got distracted, and began drifting out of his lane to the right. You can hear his tires run over the rumble strips on the right. He overcorrected back into his lane and partly into mine. The Tesla sounded the Side Collision Warning alert, and I believe also did a slight Side Collision Avoidance maneuver by nudging the car to the left side of the left lane. I then sped up (you can hear the speed limit warning chime) to avoid being next to him.

I cannot say for sure whether the car nudged the vehicle to the left or I did. When I looked at the video, I don't think I reacted that fast, leading me to believe that the car did so. It's also possible that both actions occurred, with one or the other first.

I wasn't going to contact the trucking company, but someone on the Tesla Motors forum suggested I should. The owner of the company commented on the video and says he will forward the information to their safety department for review. I told him I didn't want the driver to get into trouble, especially since there was no collision.

Anyway, I found it very interesting and reassuring that the car's safety systems appear to be this good.

LetsGoFast said:

I noticed that someone from the van line posted a comment. Did he find his truck that fast or did you send him a link to the video?

Click to expand...

I did send the company a link to the video, I thought they should be made aware of what happened. But I specifically told them I didn't want to get the driver in trouble. The reality is that these near-misses occur all the time every day across the country.

I fixed the embedding issue, the video should play in the post now. This was really odd, and the first time it's happened to me -- when I first uploaded the video to YouTube, I uploaded the entire file from the dash cam, which was 3 minutes long. After the video was up, YouTube brought up a warning in my video manager that embedding would be disabled because of copyright concerns -- it actually identified the Chicago song that I was playing on the radio, recognized it as a copyrighted work, and disabled several features for the video including embedding.

I went into the YouTube editor and trimmed the video down to only 30 seconds, and this removed the copyright restrictions, but the "Allow Embedding" checkbox stayed unchecked, so I had to go back into the video settings and turn it on again.

Apparently YouTube has gotten quite sophisticated at identifying copyright violations.