No. You should brake. The intended and authorised safety regime for automobiles assumes you will maintain a situation where you can reasonably brake before foreseeable impacts.
This is quite different from say, an airliner or a railway train which couldn't possibly brake, and so those need completely different safety environments. "Absolute block" is an example for railways, there is intended to be no possible way for two trains to be in the same section of track, so, you always have at least an entire section (it will often be more on fast trains) to brake even if you can't see far at all.
In a car you don't have that environment, you should always be prepared to stop in the distance you can see. If you're thinking, "But nobody drives like that" then you're part way to understanding why so remarkably many people die on roads.
In fact, the law requires those behind you to be able to brake to avoid you regardless of what you do in front of them. If the car in front of you skids to avoid a family of ducklings, you're going to be the responsible individual if you rear-end them.
With large farm animals such as horses and cows, or with larger wildlife like moose and elk, your life is at stake - there are plenty of drivers killed just hitting moose (look at the size of the mother in the embedded video and you can easily imagine her sliding up the hood and through the windshield: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=livewith.drivingm.... This video also shows something that's true of elk and deer as well - they have very little traction on pavement.
Small correction: you should brake until just before impact if it is going to happen because you want your car's nose to be up as high as you can in this case because otherwise you might get a double helping of windshield+deer into your car.
Thanks. This was advice dispensed by multiple locals in Canada where the deer were so thick on the road that these encounters would happen at least once every week, I didn't actually set up a scientific side-by-side test to see what the difference would be. Braking hard transfers a few hundred pounds of load (depending on the weight of the vehicle, typically about 25% or so) to the front axis, and how far it dips depends on how stiff your suspension is. A typical family car (say, a Caravan or Windstar) will drop quite a bit more than an inch or two but even then I agree it may not make much of a difference because of the way the nose of the vehicle is shaped.
Its worth noting that when I was taught, they also said not to break.
Ironically I did actually end up having a encounter with a deer. I did break, and swerve, but at the time I had a car without anti-lock breaks. I lost control of the vehicle and flipped it (which is also why they tell you not to swerve, unless you have good awareness).
Brake hard, swerve if possible, that is if no oncoming traffic. Pretty much standard training in driving school here, were we expect deers and moose to be on road.
Small animals you drive through, bigger animals you try to avoid by breaking, elk/moose you actively try to aim right and behind the path if you have time to react, mainly because those things will kill you when they slam through the window.
The car would have had time to come to a stop if it had started breaking when the deer became visible. That said the collision only became inevitable when the deer dashed forward in the last second (literally the last second of its life).
The car could have reacted better and likely prevented the hit, but if a human had been the only driver nobody would have even suggested that the driver was at fault.
I've hit several deer but only killed one animal precisely because I slow down when I see them walking. I've NOT hit dozens that have wandered into my lane so I'd say I have a pretty good track record.
Honestly, I disagree. A human could've spotted the deer from far away and could've made the decision to slow down or stop so that the deer could cross safely.
When there are other cars around or when the animal would've jumped in front of the car before you could react, I'd say the driver can't be blamed for hitting the animal because there was no reasonably alternative. In this case, breaking and turning on the hazards would've been a perfectly fine solution. This deer didn't have to die and a human driver could've (should've) avoided a collision.
The deer is just an example of the system failing, though. It shows that Tesla's wannabe-self driving is incapable of dealing with animals near the road. A small deer like this could be hit safely, but when a car doesn't try to break for something bigger and heavier, people could easily die. You run over birds and bunnies, but don't even try to drive through a horse. That thing is going straight through your windshield when you hit it, so you'd better risk getting rear-ended when a runaway horse walks onto the road. You're going to need one of those death mobiles like a Cybertruck that doesn't do those fancy "crumple zones" or "safety glass" to make it through anything larger than an adult boar without risking a crash, so any full self-driving system should be able to anticipate large animals near the road (or shut down in areas where large animals are known to cross roads).
I've totaled a car because of a deer jumping in front of my vehicle. Swerved, and flipped the car right over. That's not out of the realm of possibility in this video. If the car had swerved, and hit a decline, it takes remarkably little to flip a car.
Well not a tesla. You have to really work to flip them, but the point stands.
This despite being taught about danger of animals, and living in a place with a large wild population.
Your brain does not process images outside of the immediate distance in front of you nearly as fast as you think it does. I had a good four seconds that I could have "seen" the dear, but it was only when it was directly in my path that I realized what was going on.
When you are watching youtube, you are staring right at it. When you are driving a car, chances are you looking straight ahead.
No!? You're supposed to not swerve, but you sure as shit are supposed to brake! If you can't safetly slam on the brakes because somebody was tailgating you or because the road surface is too slippery, then you already fucked up before the deer appeared!
Thats only part of the problem. If you swerve and don't hit it straight on, you are likely to hit someplace where the engine block doesn't give you as much padding. You car will be totaled and have a bad day if you hit a large buck head on. You and/or your passenger will be dead if it comes through the windshield or side window glass.
As I understand it, the purpose of ABS is to let you slam on your brakes and NOT swerve. If your wheels lock up then you lose all steering authority. ABS lets you slam your brake to the floor and still be able to keep your car on the road using the steering wheel. If your car doesn't have ABS, then you should know that and know to "pump your brakes" instead, to maintain control of the car.
If a child jumped in front of my car, I'd swerve even if that meant risking a tree. If I ran over a child I don't know that I'd be able to live with myself anyway, so the choice is clear: I risk myself to improve the odds of the child making it away unscathed. But a deer? No way in hell. I'll slam on the brakes, since my car has ABS, but I would not take my chances with swerving.
I was taught that unless you are really really sure that there is no impediments and/or cliffs to either side of you, to hit it straight on, and only to dodge if you were sure you could make it.
Of course, they also said to break as much as possible but hit it straight on. You would total the car, but cars are designed for that, versus your body not being able to take a deer going through the windshield if you clip it on the side. The engine block is padding, use it.
Looking at the video, it looks exactly like the videos of horrible car crashes I saw in school (less blood). As usual with Tesla, the headlines are sensational, the hacker news comments breathless, but it's a fairly straight forward physics and recognition problem. 300+ people die a year, and billions of dollars in cars are destroyed each year. A neural network mimics the way human brains work. If a animal goes in a unexpected direction (or if it wasn't recognized at all), its going to be a problem.
> As usual with Tesla, the headlines are sensational
The headline is "Tesla Autopilot Hits a Deer" which is as bland and unsensational as you can get while being true.
> A neural network mimics the way human brains work.
This is like saying a drawing of a circle mimics the way the sun works. NNs are vaguely inspired by a high-level neuron topology, but the similarities pretty much end there. Gradient descent and backpropogation don't take place in the brain at all, and we don't know enough about the brain to mimic the way it works.
Yes, if you are driving responsibly then using the brakes is always an option. All cars have brakes; they're required to by law. If using the brakes is not an option then you already fucked up (e.g. you were going too fast on a slippery road.)
I've lived in deer country for five years. It's quite literally impossible to brake every time a deer hits the road in front of you because they have the ability to teleport into and out of the space in front of you with a speed that is frankly unbelievable until you have it happen to you. I managed to avoid all but one of these encounters and I chalk it up to luck rather than reaction speed or driving skill and that was at fairly low (< 40 mph) speeds.
Deer standing safely by the road side will happily panic and jump in front of your car at the last possible moment. In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
Agreed. The deer I hit lept out of a ditch that I couldn't see into, on an unfamiliar highway, and landed less than a car-length in front of my car. About 10 miles later, I drove my blood/hair/shit-encrusted car past a "deer area" sign. Thanks...
No. You should brake. The intended and authorised safety regime for automobiles assumes you will maintain a situation where you can reasonably brake before foreseeable impacts.
This is quite different from say, an airliner or a railway train which couldn't possibly brake, and so those need completely different safety environments. "Absolute block" is an example for railways, there is intended to be no possible way for two trains to be in the same section of track, so, you always have at least an entire section (it will often be more on fast trains) to brake even if you can't see far at all.
In a car you don't have that environment, you should always be prepared to stop in the distance you can see. If you're thinking, "But nobody drives like that" then you're part way to understanding why so remarkably many people die on roads.