Can Autonomous Emergency Braking Cause False Braking and Sudden Stops?
4 Answers
Autonomous emergency braking can cause false braking and sudden stops. Here is an introduction to autonomous emergency braking: 1. Autonomous emergency braking refers to a technology that enables the vehicle to actively generate braking force to decelerate when encountering unexpected situations during normal driving (non-adaptive cruise control), thereby improving driving safety. 2. The active safety system refers to a safety system that includes electronic devices such as ABS and ESP. When the vehicle ahead brakes, stops, or encounters other obstacles, this system automatically applies additional force to the braking system to help reduce the braking distance before the driver responds. 3. Automotive safety systems mainly include active safety systems and passive safety systems. The role of active safety is to prevent accidents; passive safety provides protection for occupants inside the vehicle or for the impacted vehicle or pedestrians in the event of an accident.
I often drive in the city and worry most about sudden automatic emergency braking interventions. Once under a bridge shadow, the system mistook a guardrail for a pedestrian and slammed the brakes, nearly causing a rear-end collision. Now, my palms sweat in complex road conditions: fogged-up cameras during rain, glare from tunnel backlighting, or reflections from roadside billboards can confuse the system. Last month, driving through a puddle during heavy rain, wheel splashes triggered false radar alerts, resulting in sudden braking that spilled milk tea all over my pants. While it's meant for safety, an overly sensitive automatic braking system feels like having a jumpy co-driver. I recommend turning off the lane change assist and lowering sensitivity when reversing, especially in supermarket parking lots full of speed bumps that easily trigger false alarms.
With a decade of car repair experience, I've seen too many cases of false braking. Some owners slammed on the brakes due to floating plastic bags on national highways and got rear-ended; others triggered automatic braking while carrying wedding arch models. The core issue lies in recognition logic: millimeter-wave radars mistake stationary vehicles as obstacles, cameras misjudge shadows at night, and monocular vision systems can't distinguish between flat advertisements and real cars. A Mercedes owner complained last week about AEB being triggered by tree branches in a green belt while reversing. It depends on the vehicle's positioning: luxury cars usually have fused perception systems (radar + camera + lidar), but models under 150,000 yuan rely solely on visual solutions, struggling even with traffic cones. The key is regular maintenance: moldy lenses or displaced radars significantly increase false braking probability—remember to ask the car wash staff to clean the sensors.
As ADAS system engineers, our lab conducted extreme testing: false braking in an 80km/h speed-limited environment could lead to a 12% risk of rear-end collisions. The current technical pain point mainly lies in low-feature target recognition – suddenly darting wild cats are harder to detect than pedestrians, and plastic road barriers under strong light reflect over 80%, equivalent to metal objects. When you have time, you can check the FCM parameters in the manual: the EBP response threshold for pedestrians is generally within 30 milliseconds, while small animal recognition takes 200 milliseconds, which explains why the system reacts slowly to cats and dogs but is overly sensitive to speed bumps. OEMs are addressing this with a dual-radar solution: the Continental ARS510 has a detection range of 150 meters but lower accuracy, while the Valeo SRR30C mid-range radar complements it perfectly. The next OTA update is recommended to upgrade the collision algorithm, which can reduce false trigger rates by approximately 65%.
