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Volvo Self-Parking Car Hits People Because Owner Didn't Pay For Extra Feature
schwit1 writes: A video that recently went viral shows a demonstration of a Volvo XC60's self-parking feature. It reverses itself, waits, and then confidently drives into a group of people at a non-negligible speed. (Two were hit, and while both were bruised, they were otherwise OK.) The situation was presumed to have resulted from a malfunction with the car — but the car might not have had the ability to recognize a human at all. A Volvo representative said the car was not equipped with the "Pedestrian detection" feature. That feature is sold as a separate package.
That didn't look like a parking attempt. How is "ramming speed" the first step of parking?
I don't quite the understand the situation. Even if the car is unable to recognize pedestrians, should it just drive into 'unknown' obstacles like that?
The car did not hit people because the owner didn't pay for an extra feature. The car hit people because the driver made an error, assuming the car had a feature the car did not have.
Get stuck while offroading? It's not the car's fault you didn't buy the 4WD version.
Damage the engine by filling up with diesel instead of regular gas? It's not the car's fault you didn't buy the model with the diesel engine.
Injured because your car didn't notify the manufacturer when it was in an accident? It's not the car's fault you didn't pay for the accident monitoring service.
Don't dry your poodle in this microwave oven. Do not look into laser with remaining eye. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Not to be used as a flotation device. This packet of nuts may contain traces of nuts. Look out for pedestrians when engaging the auto-park feature.
There's always a better idiot to beat your safety system. Also, wasn't this caused simply by the driver stepping on the accelerator? This did not look like the kind of driving any self-parking car would do, pedestrians or no.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This would be a very valid rant if the reporting here were correct. The car wasn't trying to park--it wasn't controlling itself. From T 2nd FA: "It seems they are trying to demonstrate pedestrian detection and auto-braking", which is what he didn't pay for. Even that feature is overridden if you keep pressing down on the gas. This is entirely driver error.
The pedestrian avoidance is a completely separate piece of kit. The parking system is made of short range ultrasound sensors and/or cameras around the car. The pedestrian detection is a longer range *radar* detector looking forward, used when driving at city speeds. It's a much more expensive system so it's understandable that it isn't standard (yet).
Of course the parking system also detects humans like any other obstacle. It's just dumb sensors and cameras like cars have had for many years).
The article seems to indicate that hammering the accelerator bypasses the pedestrian avoidance system. So, whether or not one was installed, activated and functioning correctly the driver still would have hit those pedestrians because of the way they were driving.
Sigger than your average
City-safe (city safety really) is a system that automatically applies the brakes when it detects another vehicle within 6 meters of the front of the car with which a collision is imminent. It's designed for stop-n-go city traffic to avoid or at least reduce the severity of the relatively common low speed rear end accidents.
It has nothing to do with parking so avoiding pedestrians in that context is irrelevant.
The driver is a dumbass.
Volvo has a "automatically brake when a pedestrian collision is predicted" feature which costs a bunch of money and hence "not plowing through human beings" is an optional extra just like it is in almost every other car ever made. Of course it isn't even optional in most cars - though I'm sure you could retrofit the LIDAR and computer and so on.
Self parking is irrelevant, since that was not being used in the case in question.
Summary from TFA:
(1) The car isn't self-parking, it's under driver control.
(2) Pedestrian detection wouldn't have helped because the driver was overriding the automatic features of the car.
Pedestrian detection costs extra money because it requires installing a radar and camera.
This is a video of a person driving into some other people. The car was not "trying to park itself" nor under any other sort of autonomous control. It is speculated in TFA that the driver mistakenly thought the car would automatically stop him from ramming the people he was intentionally accelerating towards. There is further speculation about why it didn't work, including that the car may not have had that functionality installed, and that maybe it did, but even if so the way he was driving (i.e. significant acceleration) would override the pedestrian-avoidance function. Sometimes it seems like there is a faction with an agenda against self-driving cars spreading as much misinformation as possible.
Except, of course, that it wasn't a self-driving car, simply a self-steering parking mode, and the driver had full control over the speed at all times. Le sigh...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!