2024 FREIGHTLINER CASCADIA Forward Collision Avoidance Automatic Emergency Braking Problems

When approaching stopped traffic, sometimes the truck will respond and begin to slow down. At other times, the truck will continue at set speed toward a detected stopped vehicle, and in situations where the time and distance are way too short to justify no reaction by the system. The truck at sometimes acts like it is auto-driving; at others it acts as if it is only in crash-mitigation mode, and will wait for the driver until the last possible second and then slam on brakes. There have been some times where the truck actually gave a collision warning (alarm and display turns red), but in no way attempted to slow itself. This happens with vehicles detected in the truck's headway for multiple seconds beforehand. In short, the truck will sometimes apparently allow itself to rear-end a vehicle in front of itself, even though the sensors detected it and it had...

When driving in highway traffic at moderate to high speeds (as well as low speeds), the truck will often accelerate with (and towards) a vehicle that is less than 1 second ahead of the truck. Certainly this often happens when there is not a safe distance between the truck and the next vehicle. The trucks systems in no way seem to expect that the next vehicle could slam on brakes at any moment. I have had this happen many times when a vehicle merges too close in front of me and then accelerates. The truck will accelerate with the vehicle (that the truck is now tailgating), even though there is slowing or stopping traffic directly ahead of the vehicle the truck is following. The Safety Director at Tyson Foods, Robert Carl, told me in a conference call about the unsafe flaws in the truck, that these Freightliner systems are programmed...

When a vehicle is merging into my lane, the truck will often not detect or react to the encroaching vehicle; this happens even when there is plenty of space, and the encroaching vehicle is halfway into my lane. I have had to intervene several times, since the truck was accelerating toward the previous vehicle in my headway, and ingoring the intervening merging vehicle. In contrast, the sensors in the truck apparently can see when a vehicle is near to the front, and mostly out of the headway of the truck (only part of the front vehicle in my lane, like when exiting). This truck will brake, and continue braking unnecessarily (and unnecessarily hard braking) for a vehicle that is completely out of my lane (by several feet), before continuing and regaining speed. This shows that the sensors are capable of "seeing" and tracking the vechicles, but still does not respond...