TESLA

The company's seat belts can now prevent passengers from having minimal injuries in a head-on collision

The seat belt pretensioning function helps prevent injuries to passengers in a collision caused by their body vibrations after impact. Normally, the signal to pre-tension the belts is given by impact sensors, but Tesla improved the algorithm by entrusting this function to a proprietary machine vision system. According to the developers, this allows you to save valuable time and better protect people in the car.

The nuance, as Elon Musk explained, is that the machine vision system can detect emerging preconditions for a collision in advance, without waiting for the impact sensors to actually trigger. The pretensioners still take some time to adjust, so the sooner a collision is determined, the more protected both occupants and driver are. According to the Tesla boss, the onboard cameras determine the probability of a collision with 100% certainty. The information received from them also allows you to control the deployment of airbags, as not all of them must deploy in different situations.

Elon Musk called this solution "a key security advantage that Tesla can now deliver." It can be practically implemented on all electric vehicles equipped with a third-generation hardware platform based on Tesla's own processors, which started rolling off the assembly line in 2019. To implement the belt pretensioning function accordingly with the data from the cameras, it will only be necessary to update the on-board software “over the air”, without a visit to the company's service.

Image source: Tesla