Tesla (TSLA) electric vehicles are not the safest on the planet only for its occupants but the built-in Tesla Vision AI technology also protects vulnerable road users (VRUs) as well.
This past Friday, when my friend and Tesla owner from Austin, Texas Gail Alfar was traveling in her blue Tesla Model Y (she has named it Saphire). The hour was still dark as the Tesla drove through the highway.
Gail’s Tesla was driven on Autopilot FSD Supervised v12.5.2, the latest public version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software.
All of a sudden, a baby deer and her mom appeared out of the dark from the left side of the road. These deer appeared out of the blue and Gail says that she did not see the deer coming but the car’s vision system detected them. Tesla Autopilot/FSD system brought the vehicle to a complete stop at a fair distance. This allowed the family of deers to cross the road safely.
Explaining the situation, Gail Alfar wrote on X:
Some areas of Austin, Texas have an over abundance of deer, mommy and baby deer just unexpectedly jumped in front of my Tesla, that could’ve been a devastating accident.
I’m so grateful for FSD 12.5.2, it stopped so quickly that the lunch I packed for work flew forward in the car, and the deers were not hurt. I’ll be honest they jumped in front so fast, I personally did not see them.
The thing is that the deer population is expanding and there’s herds of them, it does a lot of damage to the vehicle when they’re hit, but it also kills them, which is terrible. On the other hand, there should be a way to control the population or at least move them to a place where they will be happier
While driving, Tesla vehicles are always capturing video from all of its 1 interior and 8 exterior cameras. In case of an incident, the video clip is recorded on the attached flash/USB drive inserted into the infotainment system. FSD testers can even send voice note feedback to Tesla about the Autopilot behavior in a specific situation as it happens.
Tesla’s vision-based automatic emergency braking (AEB) system is the best in the global automotive industry. In 2022, the Tesla Model Y got an 82% score in vulnerable road user (VRU) safety by the Euro NCAP.
This score was only topped by Lexus NX (83%) at the time. In the past 2 years, Tesla has gotten much better at VRU safety by constantly improving its Full Self-Driving software and thus the vision-based AEB system as well. Overall, Tesla Model Y still earned the top safety score by the authority.
Let us know your feelings and thoughts about Tesla Autopilot saving the deer family in the comments section below.
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 saves the lives of baby and momma deer by detecting them in the dark and braking the car (caught on dashcam).){kind=link}