A Tesla owner says that Autopilot automatically applied the emergency brake to avoid a crash caught on his TeslaCam last week.

Tesla vehicles are equipped with an automatic emergency braking (AEB) feature powered by the Autopilot driver assist system.

It can automatically detect a potential impact and apply the brakes in order to avoid the impact or limit the force of the impact.

Tesla owner John Anderson says that the feature was put to the test in an incident that happened in Atlanta, Georgia on December 16.

An accident on the highway forced cars to stop and as the Tesla changed lane, the vehicle in front of it crashed into another car.

The whole accident was captured on the TeslaCam, Tesla own built-in dashcam system:

The driver said that the vehicle applied the brakes automatically before he could do it himself – helping him avoid adding his car to the pile-up crash:

‘The Tesla detects the car in front of the car in front of me stopping, and automatically applied the brakes to avoid the wreck,’

He is referencing the Autopilot’s radar technology that is able to bounce under a vehicle in order to detect a potential accident 2 cars ahead.

With the release of Tesla’s version 8.0 software update in September 2016, the automaker announced a new radar processing technology that was directly pushed over-the-air to all its vehicles equipped with the first generation Autopilot hardware.

One of the main features enabled by the new radar processing capacity is the ability for the system to see ahead of the car in front of you and basically track two cars ahead on the road. The radar is able to bounce underneath or around the vehicle in front of a Tesla and see where the driver potentially can not because the leading vehicle is obstructing the view.

We have previously seen other examples caught on camera of the system detecting accidents before they happened.

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