Audi driver says their car's Pre Sense safety feature stopped the vehicle in the middle of a highway and almost killed them
An Audi driver claimed their car's driver-assistance system almost killed them.
The driver said the car detected a threat and stopped in the middle of a busy highway.
New safety technologies have reduced crash rates, but errors have exposed companies to lawsuits.
An Audi owner claimed her car's collision-detection technology put her family's life in danger when it caused the car to suddenly stop in the middle of a highway.
"Audi explain this?" the woman wrote on a TikTok post with the dashcam footage of the incident.
"Our car stopped in the middle of the highway because of your pre sense feature. Apparently this has happened to many other people and you almost killed me and my whole family," the on-screen captions read.
In the video's description, the woman wrote that she was in the car with her husband, dog, and 4-month-old child.
The Pre Sense feature is Audi's collision-avoidance technology meant to detect potential dangers around the vehicle.
It prepares the brakes for an emergency stop or decelerates the car if nothing happens.
Some comments suggested they'd been trying to change lanes at a dangerous time and that the car had saved them.
In response, the woman said in a second TikTok that she had been trying to respond to another car's reckless driving.
"To everyone saying why did we change lanes: firstly we didn't change a lane, we swerved left because the car behind us was about to hit and they swerved right," she wrote.
Experts, including the CEO of an autonomous-vehicle company, have said the widespread use of fully self-driving vehicles is "decades away," but advanced driver-assistance systems have become standard software additions to newer vehicles.
These safety features include blind-spot detection, road-sign recognition, automatic emergency braking, driver-drowsiness detection, and collision intervention.
The crash-involvement rate in lane-change crashes for vehicles with blind-sport monitoring was 14% lower than for cars without the technology, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
But errors with the technologies have left carmakers vulnerable to legal challenges.
Tesla is facing several lawsuits over crashes linked to its Autosteer feature, while the self-driving-car startup Cruise recently recalled its entire fleet of vehicles following an accident involving a pedestrian.
In 2022, another Audi driver claimed the Pre Sense technology on his 2021 Audi Q8 caused his seatbelt to tighten so much that it collapsed his lung while he was at a stoplight, the Miami New Times reported.
Audi did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours.
Read the original article on Business Insider
