Volvo accidentally smashes new car in safety demo

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/07/video-volvo-accidentally-smashes-new-car-in-safety-demo

by shrikant • 16 years ago

42 42 16 years ago

wired.co.uk

While a non-programmer might think "geez, it should have stopped, it was going to hit that truck!", I can only think how complex the system must be to detect an oncoming collision and brake only when necessary. I'm sure they could tune it to be more sensitive to oncoming objects, but I'd rather defer to the drive in those circumstances..

dagw• 16 years ago

The story I've read was that it wasn't a problem with their the collision code as such, but that the car battery died completely shortly before the demo and the computer systems didn't start up right when the battery got recharged.

gvb2• 16 years ago

Draining the battery could be argued as "human error", but it is a pretty common error.

There is no "human error" in the "computer systems didn't start up right" half of the excuse. That is a design error.

Having said that, I've worked with avionics. Avionics power systems are absolutely horrible with respect to voltage regulation and glitches. The power source is switched between a ground cart, APU, and multiple engine generators at various times and causes glitches each time. Creating hardware and software that is able to start reliably when hit by multiple glitches with random intervals and random duration plus power brownouts and surges is extremely difficult. We used a programmable power supply that was able to do random glitches (it was affectionately known as the "widow maker" because the engineers' wives would become a virtual widows while the engineers worked out the bugs ;-). When the systems engineers would assure us we would have clean power, guaranteed, we would just roll our eyes and roll over the widow maker... (The battery bus actually is reliable and glitchless, but only flight critical hardware gets to hook up to that.)

Just to complicate life, power glitch testing (and brake system safety testing) is an instance of the halting problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

dcurtis• 16 years ago

What would have happened if the collision avoidance system malfunctioned and slammed on the brakes while you were driving fast on the highway, causing an accident?

I am kind of scared to give software control of critical aspects of my car. Do they test this stuff as well as the space shuttle software?

_delirium• 16 years ago

I have some similar sentiment, but at the same time, I wonder if it's a psychological issue? In theory, I should be willing to accept even flawed software, so long as the likelihood and severity of any flaws are less bad than my own. And humans are not actually all that good at avoiding car accidents, as the rather appalling crash statistics point out, so the bar isn't even all that high for "well, at least it's better than humans" software.

hugh37• 16 years ago

Yes, but this system seems to be worse than my driving. For instance, I wouldn't have hit the back of that goddamn truck.

lsc2• 16 years ago

it doesn't need to be better than the space shuttle, it just needs to be better than /me/ and really, I'm not that great.

I think this incremental approach to the self driving car (starting with ABS, then moving up to radar braking, etc...) is a good thing.

sokoloff• 16 years ago

Mercedes had a crash during a demonstration of Distronic a few years back as well: http://www.mbworld.org/forums/w211-amg/128286-distronic-demo...

I interned at Mercedes's advanced vehicle group in college. The culture was very safety conscious and the bias in developing driver aids was "Minimize the chance that your system will cause or increase the severity of collisions as compared to if your system wasn't there."

mst• 16 years ago

Which nicely shows what is pretty much a fundamental rule of thumb - adding complexity to a system has to be carefully managed to ensure that the end result is going to perform better on average than the simpler version would have done.

I'm reminded somehow of caching overly aggressively and the resultant code spending more time in the cache logic than it saves through not having to do the calculations.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Actually, watching this is really good, it shows you how much energy is present in a relatively low speed collision.

One down for the demonstration effect.

hugh37• 16 years ago

There's no shortage of crash test videos out there, though. It is, however, a good demonstration of the safety of a modern Volvo that there was no damage beyond the A pillar.

Compare to this rather disturbing crash test of a Chinese car:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHZqcKj7jNM

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

That hurts.

Slight difference though, this is an 'offset' crash, the volvo is straight, makes you wonder how well the V60 would have fared in an offset crash.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

Compare that to an F150 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB0araA0T_k&feature=relat...

Not at all what you'd expect. or is it?

saetaes• 16 years ago

I can't tell if it's just the angle of the video, but it doesn't look like the airbags deployed. Maybe they were intentionally disabled, but yikes, seems like a car you should stay away from until they work the bugs out.

MikeCapone3• 16 years ago

If I understood what I read correctly, the car came out of the gate at 30 MPH. It hit the truck a bit slower than that, it seems. Airbags might be set not to deploy under a certain speed because there might be more risks from the airbags themselves than from the crash below a certain velocity.

hugh37• 16 years ago

Alternatively this may be a prototype with airbags disabled for some reason. Frinstance if you're going to remote-control a car you'd probably wind up fitting something over the steering wheel, so you'd probably disable the airbags for that.

lsc2• 16 years ago

I thought most modern cars had a sensor that detected if someone was sitting in the seat, and only fired the airbag if there was actually a person there. I know my last rental car (I drive an ancient jalopy) had a little 'passenger airbag disabled' icon that went away when a passenger sat in the passenger seat.

js2• 16 years ago

Direct link to video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ6z3IArINI

thirdusername• 16 years ago

At least Volvo aren't claiming they are the safest car in the world in Sweden anymore, after our courts ruled it was non-verifiable: http://www.thelocal.se/25492/20100312 :)

Volvo accidentally smashes new car in safety demo

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