Self-driving vehicles are about more than sitting back and being lazy while your car gets you from point A to point B. They’re about preventing accidents and making the roads safer as well—something Elon Musk touts as an important part of Tesla (TSLA)’s Autopilot.
New footage from the Netherlands shows this in action. In a video uploaded to Twitter, a dashcam on an autonomous Tesla films as the car pumps the brakes when a red hatchback and black SUV collide ahead. With the audio on, you can actually hear Forward Collision Warning sound an alarm and predict the crash even before it happens. Watch here:
Original video, authorisation from the owner. Essential, no one could predict the accident but the radar did and acted by emergency braking. pic.twitter.com/70MySRiHGR
— Hans Noordsij (@HansNoordsij) December 27, 2016
On Twitter, Hans Noorfsij, the driver who posted the video, wrote, “the car did before the driver could.”
In September, Tesla rolled out the latest version of Autopilot, meant to focus on “the use of more advanced signal processing to create a picture of the world using the onboard radar.”
“The net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions,” a post on the company’s blog read.
