Phantom braking in the Tesla Model 3 is very real and can be scary, I've experienced it several times. I've noticed that it seems to occur if it sees shadows when going under bridges on the highway.
If you're alert you can override it pretty quickly by hitting acceleration. The problem is when using driving assists you get a false sense of security, you put too much trust in the system, relax, pay less attention - unfortunately this can be fatal.
Do you mean after it sees the shadow up ahead but not under it yet, or once it enters the shadow?
If the latter... Then Tesla is in a tricky situation with camera-only Autopilot.
With the low dynamic range of the cameras, if you make the software ignore big white (overexposed) rectangles, the car drives straight ahead into white trucks. If you make it recognize big white rectangles normally as obstacles, then the car sees overexposed bridge/tunnel exits as obstacles and gets rear-ended.
Agreed wrt overexposures and thresholds, just to speculate aloud, and thinking of the HDR mode on smartphones, is it possible to rapidly switch from a 1/1000 sec exposure to 1/60 sec exposure, interwoven, such that you receive 2 video streams? And it could still be adaptive, like the duty cycle of a PWM signal, could just use whatever frame has the highest entropy, don't necessarilly have to fuse them (maybe impossible under realtime constaints, I'm no CV expert)
If you're alert you can override it pretty quickly by hitting acceleration. The problem is when using driving assists you get a false sense of security, you put too much trust in the system, relax, pay less attention - unfortunately this can be fatal.