Tesla is no stranger to safety features. In fact, Tesla has received some of the highest safety ratings ever given. All Teslas have earned a 5-star rating in every category.
Tesla, like most manufacturers, includes Forward Collision Warning and Automatic Emergency Braking safety features. The first option gives you a visual and audible warning if the car feels that you’re going to strike something, while the latter option will brake the car for you if it’s certain the car is going to hit an obstacle.
Up until recently, Tesla used radar to determine how far away an obstacle was and calculated based on your speed, whether you’d have time to stop before hitting the given obstacle. With the introduction of vision-only based vehicles, Tesla now needed to determine object distance using only the cameras mounted on the vehicle in order to still provide Forward Collision Warning and Automatic Emergency Braking. Tesla recently showed off at their AI Day event how they were able to accomplish this.
Up until these breakthroughs, Emergency Braking has only been available when going forward, but now that Tesla is able to achieve emergency braking through vision, are other things possible?
That’s exactly what Jason asked Elon Musk on Twitter. Could Tesla add ‘Rear Emergency Braking’ using the rear camera for improved safety when going in reverse?
Good point. We do have torque reduction if an obstacle is detected, but active braking would be better. Prime directive is: do not crash.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2021
Elon responded with, ‘Good point. We do have torque reduction if an obstacle is detected, but active braking would be better. Prime directive is: do not crash.’ Elon has been cautious not to over promise recently, but we feel this is a clear indication that Tesla will at least be looking into adding this feature in a future update.
We may very well see options for ‘Rear Collision Warning’ and ‘Rear Emergency Braking,’ in a future software update.
