Quote:
Originally Posted by nosro  What the eye sees and what radar sees are two different things. A manhole cover and a Coke can both have the potential to look like a car. In the radar world, differentiating between a manhole cover and an 18-wheeler is not necessarily easy.
As I said, this is what happens with first-generation systems. If manufacturers wait until the system is perfect, they'll never get it to production because they need real-world usage to perfect the system. So the approach with bleeding-edge technology is always to get it to high-end users first and use those vehicles to further develop the technologies towards a second-generation system.
Consider yourself one of a few elite beta testers! |
I agree with the beta tester comment. We are all familiar with the concept that almost any complex product has an engineering change line item in the products P&L projection because we sometimes know what we don't know, and sometimes don't know what we don't know but we always know that there is something we don't know that will bite us in the ass after first customer ship. We'll have to fix it after a few data losses, crashes, deaths or however you quantify a failure somewhere along the learning curve of life.
At the risk of repeating myself, this eye did see a police car every time there was an uncalled for alarm and heavy braking with one exception. This old eye may well have missed a nearby radar equipped car on that episode as well.
I have put at least 20K miles on under ACC control and am very familiar with what I consider to be "normal operation" and these episodes are outside the envelope. And of course "normal operation" is sort of a mystery when there are no user specs to finitely state how something works.
Like McCain, I am older than digitized signal processing but I would question anything that lacked the ability to consistently discriminate between an 18 wheeler and a beer can.
Now I am old and feeble and haven't rolled out a nationwide wireless network or participated in the shippment of a new hardware product for several years but I sure do wish I could have had you on my staff to convince the user community that dog food tastes good and shortcomings are "normal operation" and opportunities.
This failure mode is actually quite dangerous as the vehicle alarms and brakes hard for no reason. When I can remember that I am doing the driving I know enough to hit the off button and nail the pedal to get out of the way of the guy behind me with the front bumper down and the tires screeching. I filed a complaint with the NTSB and know that if they see a couple of fatalities they will investigate this issue.
Please pardon this rambling but you know how us older folk can run on.
Seriously, I know you have a lot of good rationale and understanding of problems such as this. But, please don't be the GM advocate as they have a whole corporation full of people who fight resolving or even acknowledging issues such as this due to corrective costs and litigious exposures.
Gee, now that my pulse rate is up from my normal 56 and the juices are flowing maybe I should reopen this issue......Naaaa, Lawerance Welk will be on in a few minutes and I don't want to miss the Geritol and Serutan commercials.
