Radar has a cool property that it can sense the relative velocity of objects along the beam axis too, from Doppler frequency shifting. It’s one sense that cars have that humans don’t.
To this point, one of the coolest features Teslas _used_ to have was the ability for it to determine and integrate the speed of the car in front of you AND the speed of the car in front of THAT car, even if the second car was entirely visually occluded. They did this by bouncing the radar beam under the car in front and determining that there were multiple targets. It could even act on this: I had my car AEB when the second ahead car slammed on THEIR brakes before the car ahead even reacted. Absolutely wild. Completely gone in vision-only.
To this point, one of the coolest features Teslas _used_ to have was the ability for it to determine and integrate the speed of the car in front of you AND the speed of the car in front of THAT car, even if the second car was entirely visually occluded. They did this by bouncing the radar beam under the car in front and determining that there were multiple targets. It could even act on this: I had my car AEB when the second ahead car slammed on THEIR brakes before the car ahead even reacted. Absolutely wild. Completely gone in vision-only.