That's literally trivial for a car with radar to detect.”
That crash occurred on a car which was using radar. Automotive radar generally doesn’t help to detect stationary objects.
Further, that crash occurred on a vehicle with the original autopilot version (AP1), which was based on Mobileye technology with Tesla’s autopilot software layered on top. Detection capabilities would have been similar to any vehicle using Mobileye for AEB at the time.
Maybe it's difficult for reasons of false alarm detection (too many stationary objects that are not of interest) but you can get very good results with tracking (curious about these radars' refresh rate), STAP, and classification/identification algorithms, especially if you have a somewhat modern beamformed signal (so, some kind instant spatial information). Active-tracking can also be of help here if you can beamsteer (put more energy, more waveform diversity on the target, increase the refresh rate). Can't these radars do any of those 'state of the art 20 years ago' stuff?
There's something I don't get here and I feel I need some education...
The issue is the number of false positives, stationary objects need to be filtered out. Something like a drainage grill on the street generates extremely strong returns. RADAR isn't high enough resolution to differentiate the size of something, you only have ~10 degree resolution, and after that you need to go by strength of the returned signal. So there's no way to differentiate a bridge girder or a railing or a handful of loose change on the road from a stationary vehicle. On the other hand, if you have a moving object, RADAR is really good at identifying it and doing adaptive cruise control etc.
Edit: it looks like some of the latest Bosch systems have much better performance in terms of resolution and separability: https://www.bosch-mobility-solutions.com/media/global/produc...
RADAR can have high(er) angular resolution with (e.g.) phased arrays (linear or not) and digital beamforming. I guess it's the way the industry works and it wants small cheap composable parts, but using the full width of the car for a sensor array you could get amazing angular accuracy, even with cheap simple antennas. MIMO is also supposed to give somewhat better angular accuracy, since you can perform actual monopulse angular measurement (as if you had several independent antennas). There's even recent work on instant angular speed measurement through interferometry if you have the original signals from your array.
And with the wavelengths used in car RADARs you could get far down on range resolution, especially with the recent progress on ADCs and antenna tech.
I'm not saying you're wrong, you're describing what's available today (thanks for that).
Wondering when all this (not so new) tech might trickle down to the automotive industry... And whether there's interest (looking at big fancy manufacturers forgoing radar isn't encouraging there).
Personally I've never seen these claims come from the mouth of an automotive radar expert, and many cars do use radar in their adaptive cruise control, so I present it as a rumour, not a fact :)
I’m in the same boat as to not understanding why, but from what I have read the problem indeed isn’t that it doesn’t detect them, it’s that there are too many of them, and nobody has figured out how to filter out the 99+% of signals you have to ignore from the ones that may pose a risk, if it’s doable at all.
I think that at last part of the reason is that spatial resolution of radar isn’t great, making it hard to discriminate between stationary objects in your path and those close to it (parked cars, traffic signs, etc). Also, some small objects in your path that should be ignored such as soda cans with just the ‘right’ orientation can have large radar reflections.
Some of the newest car radars can do some beam formimg, but not all.
Most models have multiple radars pointing in multiple directions as that's cheaper than AESA.
Only just recently have "affordable" beamformer's come to the market. And those target 5G basestations.
So the spec in most K/Ka-band models starts at 24.250GHz, where the 5G band starts. While the licence free 24GHz band that the radars use is 24.000-24.250GHz.
If this was not bad enough there has been consistent push from regulators to get the car radars on the less congested 77GHz band. And there's even less afforable beamformers for that band.
