Car crash - safety systems did not seem to work well

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was in a car crash recently; I got away unhurt, but my car was totaled. I want opinions from folks here on the car’s safety systems that did not seem to work as advertised.

From the 3-lane roadway, I entered the leftmost lane to take a legal U-turn. Activated left-turn signal. After a successful U-turn, I would merge into a very busy 50 mph, 3-lane roadway, just ahead of a large intersection.

  • I arrived at the yield point, did not fully stop but slowed down to check for oncoming traffic, saw nothing, and began to merge.
  • A truck hit me as I was nosing into the merge lane.
  • The impact was directed almost entirely on my car’s front as I was at an angle to the road.

At the point of impact, the left-turn signal was still activated.

It was a 2025 Hyundai Tucson. It had features like emergency automatic braking, collision warning, cross-traffic alert, the whole 9 yards. And yet there was no audible collision warning, or automatic braking. Was it due to the left-turn signal being activated at that point? Maybe the car was confused about my intent? I’d have expected a collision detection system to brake regardless of turn light setting if a collision was imminent.

I have occasionally experienced behavior where the blind-spot warning (side mirror and HUD - visual only) seemed to not work when merging into a freeway lane with wider separation with the ramp (slower/gentler rate of merge), as was the case here. Maybe the car interpreted this situation as not a threat because it thought this was not a lane change at all?

I have both front and rear dashcam videos and remarkably the oncoming truck is not visible in any frame up until the point of impact. So, this was a really visually challenging blind-spot situation for me, but I’d have expected the car to see better with its radar sensors.

I am also wondering if/how I can make a report to Hyundai or NHTSA, but I do not have any data except my dashcam video.

I am looking for my next car and am chary about buying the Tucson again, which I otherwise enjoyed driving.

ETA: I am looking for a similar hybrid to Tucson, any suggestions are welcome.

2

Emergency automatic braking and collision warning is usually just looking for forward and near-forward oblique obstructions. If you didn’t see the truck coming at you that hit you, the system probably could not either. These are driver assistance functions to warn you if you are inattentive or their is an obstruction below your line of sight, in your backup path, or in the near field in an obstructed view but cant be relied upon to scan all around the vehicle or anticipate that you will put yourself into a path of a vehicle moving at you in the far field. These systems are intended to help keep you alert to issues in their sensor range but they are not a replacement for awareness and cautious driving.

I don’t mean to suggest that you were not being cautious or weren’t aware; your description makes this sound like a complex intersection where there is traffic coming from multiple directions. There are a shocking number of intersections and roadway features permissible by local, state, and federal highway construction guidelines and regulations that can produce exceptionally dangerous intersections and other choke points that are prone to dangerous traffic interactions notwithstanding how American roads are often built to encourage driving at unsafe speeds for the area (i.e. wide suburban streets, intersections that don’t have a dedicated turn lane or indicator, multi-way intersections with obvious blind spots, et cetera) and relatively lax driving restrictions or penalties even for chronic violators or people who are just terrible and accident-prone drivers. But you really can’t rely upon driver assist systems to compensate for all of the multitude of roadway and urban design ‘sins’ that create unsafe streets and highways.

The car will have a ‘black box’ recorder with all of its sensor and control (accelerator, brake, steering) data which can be pulled down by a forensic technician. If you the safety systems did not perform as advertised you can ask your insurance company to include vehicle forensics in the investigation or contact the NHTSA to inform them of your concerns, but the agency only directly investigates a small number of automotive accidents (usually those involving roadway safety failures, obvious or egregious defects, or large multi-vehicle or multi-modal accidents) so unless you have something substantive to present they are likely to default to whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over the accident site. Hyundai may or may not be interested in the accident but I would not rely upon them to release information or conclusions from an investigation to you.

Stranger

3

Exactly this. The collision warning and automatic braking system is there to keep you from plowing into slowing or stopped traffic more or less dead ahead. Merging into an occupied lane is well outside the system’s scope of control.

You might have a point about the blind spot warning, but those tend to work best in the case of truly parallel path situations, like a lane change on a crowded freeway. Depending on how steep the merge angle was, they may have not be part of the equation at all.

Additionally, doing a little ‘research’, I see that the blind spot indicators on my car do not engage until 30mph. Dunno if that’s a factor for you.

4

30 MPH? That’s … very high.

AFAIK, for Hyundi it’s:

Blind-Spot Collision Warning operates when your vehicle speed is above 20 km/h and the speed of the vehicle in the blind spot area is above 10 km/h.

That is, it’s disabled while parking.

5

you can set it as low as 17 miles an hour, but I’m seeing people in the message boards saying not to do that. Too many false alarms when you’re in left turn lanes and such.

6

I would imagine if the car can show the red triangle on the mirror, it can also apply the brakes, especially if the radar calculates higher speeds and/or vehicle trajectories indicating a possible collision. The Tucson has sensors all over the place and I imagined it had strong situational awareness. Apparently, it did not, as I found out the hard way.

I strongly feel the Hyundai line-up has problems with collision warning/avoidance systems. I have been surprised more than once by a seeming failure to warn me of fast-approaching vehicles in my blind spot. But if it’s largely a waste of time I would rather not reach out to Hyundai or NHTSA.

7

The devil is in the details. Where exactly were you in the U-turn? If you hadn’t completed it yet, then the truck was coming at you from a ≈ 4-5 o’clock angle. That may be too far afield for blind spot warning, especially given the vast difference in closing speeds. You were doing what, 15 MPH & the truck could have been doing 55? Does (did) the blind-spot warning activate for a car two lanes over if you were both going parallel on that three lanes in each direction road, which might give you a clue as to how wide/narrow an angle it looks at?

8

I would imagine if the car can show the red triangle on the mirror, it can also apply the brakes, especially if the radar calculates higher speeds and/or vehicle trajectories indicating a possible collision.

This is where you are wrong. Each driver assist feature is a separate system, they do not talk to each other. The car does not have any awareness of what’s happening around it.

In the situation you described, the incoming car may have been approaching too fast for the blind corner monitoring to go off. And even if it did, it would only give you warning, not apply brakes.