Emergency Vehicle Lights Can Screw Up a Car’s Automated Driving System

While the findings are alarming, this new research comes with several caveats. Instead, they ran their tests using five off-the-shelf automated driving systems embedded in dashcams purchased off of Amazon. The research was inspired by reports that Teslas using the electric carmaker’s advanced driver assistance feature, Autopilot, collided with some 16 stationary emergency vehicles between 2018 and 2021, says Ben Nassi, a cybersecurity and machine learning researcher at Ben-Gurion University who worked on the paper. “Ambulances and police cars and fire trucks are different shapes and sizes, so it’s not the type of vehicle that causes this behavior.” A three-year investigation by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into the Tesla-emergency vehicle collisions eventually led to a sweeping recall of Tesla Autopilot software, which is designed to perform some driving tasks—like steering, accelerating, braking, and changing lanes on certain kinds of roads—without a driver’s help. “We are aware of some advanced driver assistance systems that have not responded appropriately when emergency flashing lights were present in the scene of the driving path under certain circumstances,” Sanchez wrote.