Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Vi Bilägare (Sweden's largest car magazine)
Imagine driving on an empty road at night. You are familiar with this road, and the drive has been uneventful ever since you started driving. This is the point where your brain might trick itself into lowering the level of attention after presuming nothing can go wrong.
In many countries around the world, if not all, driving during the night poses various risks. One of the most dangerous things that can happen is having an animal run into the road in front of your vehicle. In the case of large animals, such as cows, horses, and moose, the accident may prove fatal for the humans inside the vehicle, not just for the animal.
With that in mind, the moose test was devised. The idea was to see how cars behaved when they were forced to avoid an obstacle quickly while driving at road speeds and then return to their lane. In the situation you will see in the video below, there was no chance of swerving to the left, as the road had center-line dividers meant to prevent head-on collisions between vehicles if drivers fell asleep behind the wheel.
Recorded by an unnamed Tesla Model 3 driver, this video also shows that the automatic high beam assistant got tricked by the reflective center-line dividers. The array of cameras that alert the system of incoming traffic seems to have noticed the powerful light ahead and confused it with a vehicle instead of a reflection.
As the folks at CS note, the automatic high beam assistant in the Tesla is not the only one that is easy to trick with reflective road markers placed at low height.
It is fair to say that we have previously driven other vehicles that came with the system and were also easy to trick. We are confident that these systems will be improved in time, but there is always room for improvement, so refrain from speeding, as this would have had a different ending if high speed was involved.
Fortunately for the driver of the Tesla Model 3 in the video and for the moose, the former managed to slam on the brakes and swerve to the right to get as far away from the animal as possible while slowing down. While the reaction may appear slow, it was cautious, and the driver refrained from running off the road or doing anything else that might have proven to be more dangerous.
Before judging the driver's reaction time, read the first paragraph of this article again. The reaction was on-point, and we think they did a good job. As long as the accident was avoided, nobody was injured, and there is no damage, you can call it a win in our book.
Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland. Full profile
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