[phaemon]

> I'm finding it challenging to reconcile your personal example with the images of the smashed windshield

Really? It seems fairly obvious to me. The sensors are in the front of the car, lower down. So anything on the ground in front of the car registers as an obstacle and the car stops. Such as a small step.

The front of this trailer (they keep referring to it as the back, but it's clearly the front) was too high off the ground to register as an obstacle. You'll note that the front of the car has plenty room - there's nothing blocking it - but the windscreen doesn't!

So it needs to be fixed; you could imagine a Tesla running into, say, a small truck with timber sticking out the back when the speed was low enough that the safe distance between vehicles was small. But it hardly seems life-threatening in any way.

[mikeash]

The lip isn't detected by the sensors. The car stops on it when the tires hit it because of the physical obstacle it presents and the extra force needed to climb it.

It's weird, usually the car actually passed over the lip with the front tires, but then stopped when the rear tires got to it. The threshold for stopping must be very close to what it actually encounters there.

[tclmeelmo]

Someone on Youtube had what I thought was a clever solution: a piece of trim (looked like shoe molding) to bridge the 1" step. Cheap, and they claimed 100% effective.