Mark Rober just set up one of the most interesting self-driving tests of 2025, and he did it by imitating Looney Tunes. The former NASA engineer and current YouTube mad scientist recreated the classic gag where Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel onto a wall to fool the Road Runner. Only this time, the test […]
Are there any other car brands that are relying on only cameras for their assisted driving features?
If you mean like, self-driving then I don’t know. Subaru has lane-assist and adaptive cruise control that uses only cameras though. They use two cameras for binocular vision though so it might not fall for this, I don’t know. Would be a good test.
My experience with two different brands is that ACC is unable to detect static objects. Its only strength is detecting moving vehicles in front of you. So even if you come to a stoplight with cars already waiting there, it will just continue going. Other systems must then engage emergency breaking if they detect something but at regular speeds that would be too late.
I probably should have said “only cameras”. Subaru, like the rest, backs the cameras up with radar to avoid situations like in the video.
Edit: welp, apparently not in the front
I think I accidentally deleted my post so sorry if this is a duplicate.
I can poke around in my wife’s outback to verify again, but as far as I’m aware, Subaru doesn’t have any forward radars. Having a set of properly calibrated stereo cameras works amazingly well though. Whatever Tesla is attempting, while still kinda impressive, isn’t nearly as polished with the number of phantom breaking events and stuff like this I see complained about online.
Blind spot I believe is radar, and backward is a combination of sonar and radar if I’m not mistaken.
Well, then it would be interesting to see if Subaru fails these tests too. Especially the visual impairment ones.
If the speed difference between the car and the object is over 32mph (at least for 2018 model year if I’m remembering the number in the manual correctly), I believe it will fail because it doesn’t have enough time to identify the object. It will do it’s damndest to stop, and should be able to scrub off a solid amount of speed, but there will still be some sort of impact just due to pretty clearly spelled out system limitations.
Just because you seem to be quick to read these and I wanted to mention the vision limitation one after I understood it better.
In my experience with the Outback, it should either work just fine, or if visibility is too bad for it to work reliably, it won’t let you engage it (or warn you and turn itself off it conditions deteriorate while engaged.)
I can poke around in my wife’s outback to verify again, but as far as I’m aware, Subaru doesn’t have any forward radars. Having a set of properly calibrated stereo cameras works amazingly well though. Whatever Tesla is attempting, while still kinda impressive, isn’t nearly as polished from what I see with the number of phantom breaking events and stuff like this I see complained about online.
Blind spot I believe is radar, and backward is a combination of sonar and radar if I’m not mistaken.