Lexus RX450H Incident

The May vehicle was traveling on an unpainted (no center line) residential road with vehicles parked along the right side of the road. The May vehicle passed too close to a parked vehicle, causing the May vehicle's passenger-side mirror to contact the parked vehicle's driver-side mirror. The May vehicle's ground mapping module had fallen significantly behind in its processing of lidar data. As a result, actual objects were being filtered out of the lidar data during object detection. This filtering caused the truck to oscillate between being detected, detecting only the cab, detecting the cab and mirror, and not being detected at all. After assessing the issue, it has been determined that ground map latency alone will not cause safety issues. There is no risk to VRUs, or anything at ground level. The issue was with something in the air (mirror), above the ground. A permanent fix to address the ground map latency issue is in process and will be implemented in the entire fleet within the next 30 days. The second factor in the collision is that we were artificially constraining the vehicle to the right side of the road due to ambiguous and unpainted roadway. If we change that constraint to an advisory line (and allow the vehicle to cross the line to the left), we would have been far enough to the left to avoid collision (simulation success). Solution Implementation: AVO training for extra caution related to protruding items like mirrors (short term), software changes coming in the next update and hotfix (within 30 days), and further improvement in the following update (within 60 days). Until the tested software changes are implemented, we have advised the AVOs to take extra caution in these scenarios and to continue to disengage autonomy when desired. As always, we sacrifice autonomy for safety, as needed.