Recently, a Xiaopeng car P7 collided with a truck in front while driving on the highway. After the collision, the owner suffered a concussion and was admitted to the hospital. A friend of the owner of the accident stated on the social software that when the accident occurred, the owner turned on the NGP intelligent navigation assisted driving function. When a large truck appeared in front of the vehicle, the vehicle did not significantly slow down and directly crashed into the large truck.The video of the Xiaopeng P7 driving recorder in the accident showed that after the accident vehicle drove hundreds of meters after completing the lane change, it encountered a large pallet in a slow lane. The vehicle did not significantly slow down, but directly hit the vehicle in front.
On September 26, a person from Xiaopeng Motors told a reporter from China Business News that the company had conducted a preliminary analysis based on the driving data detected in the background. Before the collision, the front vehicle identification and vehicle control, seat belt vibration reminder, vehicle warning, AEB and other functions of the accident vehicle system are in normal working conditions. Xiaopeng Motors will conduct a review together with the owners after the owners recover to further analyze the results.
NGP is called “NGP Intelligent Navigation Assisted Driving”, which is the assisted driving function of Xiaopeng XPILOT 3.0 system combined with navigation path. According to the official introduction, NGP can guide the vehicle to the destination by intelligently assisting driving along the navigation path under suitable road conditions. Specifically, after Xiaopeng Automobile turns on NGP, it can not only realize ACC adaptive cruise, LCC lane centering assist, ALC automatic lane change assist, etc., but also automatically select the optimal lane, automatically overtake the slow car, and automatically adjust the speed limit. , Automatic ramp switching high-speed, traffic cones and faulty vehicle avoidance, night overtaking reminders and other functions, with the ability to achieve point-to-point assisted driving under certain road conditions.
Zhang Kang, head of forward-looking research and development of a joint venture brand, told reporters that from the video screen, the rear-end truck was a flatbed truck with a long part of the tail that was not loaded with cargo. This may have caused a misjudgment by the Xpeng P7 system. “Xpeng P7 uses a vision and radar fusion perception scheme. In this accident, it is very likely that the camera did not recognize the large truck, and the radar may have detected it. The result of the fusion perception is that the system did not consider the alien truck to be If you need to avoid it, you just ran into it.”
Zhang Kang believes that for any car company, special-shaped trucks are a problem. In the accident, Xiaopeng P7 had no deceleration strategy at all, indicating that the entire ACC system chose to ignore this goal. The reason for this situation may be that there is no such sample in the vision training of the camera of Xiaopeng Automobile, and the vision system cannot reasonably judge the nature of the target. However, the truck was a relatively moving object at the time, and the millimeter wave radar recognized the confidence that the target was a vehicle. The degree is quite high. When there is a conflict between vision and radar, Xiaopeng Automobile’s system chooses to believe in vision and shields multiple active safety functions. This situation should be called a BUG, but objectively speaking, no company dares to say that it is absolutely in any condition. There will be no problems with the next step, and Xiaopeng Motors may be a bit more aggressive in its strategy.
“The reason behind this may be the smoothness of the driving assistance system.” Zhang Kang said that, unlike ordinary people’s understanding, the biggest difficulty in vehicle active safety/driving assistance is not detecting signals, but how to filter these detected signals. . The inability to accurately identify and screen the target means misjudgment and reduced smoothness.
In recent months, new power companies such as Weilai Automobile, Xiaopeng Automobile, and Tesla have successively experienced traffic accidents caused by driving assistance systems. Cars successively canceled the words related to “automatic” and “premium” in official propaganda. Take Xiaopeng Motors as an example. At the end of August, Xiaopeng Motors changed the Chinese name of NGP from NGP Auto-Navigation Assisted Driving to NGP Intelligent Navigation Assisted Driving.
At the same time, at the launch meeting of Xiaopeng P5 in mid-September, Xiaopeng Motors Chairman He Xiaopeng once again emphasized to the outside world that if Xiaopeng Motors users want to unlock the relevant intelligent driving assistance system, they need to pass the “driver test” set up by Xiaopeng Motors. “. The test questions mainly focus on the use scenarios of NGP and scenarios where users need to intervene in driving.
“This exam is more like a disclaimer, and the prompting effect for users is very limited. In the future, if there is an accident in the related product, Xiaopeng can say that I have trained the user. The responsibility for the accident is not me, but the user’s improper operation. “Qiao Chi, an autonomous driving R&D engineer at a domestic car company, said.
He also said: “None of us will fully believe in the so-called autonomous driving system. Sometimes when we test automatic parking, some trailer systems just can’t be recognized and just go directly to it. At this stage, it’s really not completely reliable. Even if driving assistance is turned on, the driver must be ready to intervene at any time.”
(At the request of the interviewee, Zhang Kang and Qiao Chi are pseudonyms.)
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