To the Community,
I had a situation where in traffic car stopped and my foot slipped off the brake petal My car did not slow down and crashing seemed inevitable. Fortunately I saw the left lane was open and avoided the crash. I'm really freaked out that my car did not slow down or react and I would have crashed.

Steven

 

Depends how fast this all went down, speed, and how close things actually were. First off, avoidance steering can potentially cancel any actions the car will make on its own, so the instant you started turning out of the lane the car may assume you are handling the situation and take no actions, you were on your own at that point. Second, the pre-collision braking system's first stage is to enhance existing braking effort if it deems it insufficient. Since you did have your foot on the brake up to a point, but removed it, this would have limited first stage from working (and possibly affected the logic tree the car goes thru when determining if it should take action - is the driver taking alternative action?). The last stage would be, the driver has not taken any action and a collision is reaching the point of guaranteed, then you'll get the final response, a full on application of brakes, screeching to a halt, rubber smoke in the air, old ladies fainting on the sidewalk, etc. Well, maybe not that dramatic, but you get the idea. Even with this, the tolerance is very low to the point where a collision might still occur just less deadly. There is no slow down safely on its own option just to be careful such as what you get with dynamic cruise control. Generally, the car won't do anything with brakes outside of cruise control until the situation is almost beyond saving. At least in a forward direction. Automatic reverse braking is a little more generous.

And of course, sometimes the computer is just not able to recognize the situation well. Needs more training time on the AI simulations. The one in Teslas is probably one of the most advanced, but even they manage to kill a driver now and then when overly relied on.