Much has been said about the purported tests of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta system by Senate hopeful Dan O’Dowd and The Dawn Project, which claimed the driver-assist software does not detect children and instead mows them down.
The footage was shaky and unfocused, and there were unreadable messages displayed on the screen casting serious doubts on the veracity of the claims made by O’Dowd. This is of course not taking into account the stories and videos from owners that have been testing FSD Beta that show the system is overly cautious around pedestrians.
Several weeks later and one FSD Beta tester in Canada was able to catch on video the system detecting and slowing down for a child that unexpectedly darted out from in front of a parked car.
The incident was captured by Grey Tesla Victoria on YouTube while driving through a school zone in Victoria, British Columbia on Monday. As the video shows the car recognized the school zone and automatically adjusted the max speed limit from 44km/h to 33km/h (27 to 20pmh).
The Model 3 was travelling at around 25km/h (15mph) behind another car as it approached a minivan parked on the side of the road, where a child can be seen walking next to it having just got out of the vehicle.
As the Tesla passes the minivan the child suddenly darts out to cross the road, instead of walking a few more meters to get to the marked crosswalk. As this happens we can see the car detects and displays the child on the visualization, and the path prediction tentacle attempts to figure out a way around him.
Without time to change course the car begins to beep loudly and apply the brakes, slowing from 23km/h (14mph) to a stop in mere milliseconds. Grey Tesla Victoria tells us that he also put his foot on the brake, but it all happened so quickly that the car did almost all of the stopping itself.
This can be verified by the “Automatic Emergency Braking in progress” alert seen on the main display.
Fortunately the car was able to come to a complete stop without hitting the child, but as you can probably imagine this could have been a very different story if a Tesla was not involved.
Even though FSD Beta was active at the time, any Tesla would have performed in the same way because all Teslas come standard with AEB.
The footage in this video also closely resembles footage shared by ANCAP, which recently scored Tesla Vision’s Safety Assist features, including AEB, at a near-perfect 98%.
You can check out the full video below.
