A safer following distance is crucial too, fwiw. It honestly feels like 90% of the vehicles on the highway travel at insanely close distances to each other.

My mom got in an accident due to driving too close to the car in front of her. It caused me to really take heart to my Driver's Ed teachers word of wisdom to always leave enough space in front of you to be able to safely brake to prevent that. I wish everyone would do that. It also makes driving in traffic less stop-and-go

yeah i try to do that but then other cars just merge in between the space i leave in front of me and force me to be on their tail. meanwhile the guy behind me never leaves enough distance either. safe driving doesn't mean anything when others drive recklessly

Precisely the problem.

Safe follow distance isn't an evolutionarily-stable strategy. The number of accidents avoided by people following it is more than offset (at least psychologically in the minds of the drivers) by the perception that people are constantly cutting you off if you adhere to it. Since punishments for failing to adhere to it are few and far between, drivers get sloppy.

It's the sort of thing you could, however, program into a robot and expect the robot to adhere to it.

> It's the sort of thing you could, however, program into a robot and expect the robot to adhere to it.

I've often wondered what people will initially do when being driven around by a robot. How anxious will it make them feel, not to give up control, but to see a robot driving "so slowly". Not going 10 over, letting other drivers in when possible, always slowing to keep a safe distance, not passing aggressively if someone is going a few miles under, etc.

In the far future, i suspect people will be so used to being driven that they won't care how fast they're going. They can browse, work, surf, do whatever they like. But the first wave of drivers being driven.. it's going to be interesting to see how people respond to it.

And that's not even accounting for the drivers who still driving, but seeing robots on the road. I bet they'll always want to pass robots asap.

The latest OS upgrade of the Tesla prevents the autopilot from going faster than the speed limit. I wonder what owners think about that.

I think that you were fooled by the news coverage. It's only on non-divided highways that the new restriction applies, and there was already a restriction to speed limit + 5mph on such roads. On divided highways, you can set any speed up to 90mph.

Here's an accurate article, which (alas) still has an inaccurate headline: https://electrek.co/2016/12/22/tesla-autopilot-speed-limits/

The freight vehicle or bus is pretty similar to a robot today. They have much stiffer penalties for speeding, much more difficulty changing lanes (including often being banned from passing lanes), and much more difficulty stopping. Experienced truckers and bus drivers do all of these things.

No surprise, everyone hates them.

Other peoples poor driving shouldn't make you drive worse. In the Drivers Ed classes I've taken, the recommended advice is that if someone is tailgating behind you, you should leave EVEN MORE space in front of you so that if you need to hit the brakes, you won't have to hit them as hard and thus won't be as likely to be rear ended.

and then pushed into the car in front of you.

Same reason to use the handbrake at a crosswalk/zebra crossing: You don't want someone reckless behind you to make you cream some poor folks.

That's not a reason to use the handbrake over the brake pedal. Typically the brake pedal is more effective (all wheels, ABS) than the hand brake (sometimes 2 wheels, probably no ABS). The handbrake is just for emergencies and parking.

When I learned to drive in the US (Washington state) I received advice similar to that, however when I took lessons in the UK, I was advised that when you are rear ended, you will have a hard time keeping pressure on the break pedal so you should do both.

Fair enough.

When people behind don't respect the safety distance (and, for me, 1s is my level of tolerance), I switch on my warning lights. I keep them on for 20km if necessary. I know it's illegal, but if that's what it takes to make others respect my safety distance, I think it's worth it. And it's better than other (bad) solutions like hitting the brakes to test the guy's safety distance...

We should just be allowed to carry police-verified dash cams which issues fines in live ;)

> yeah i try to do that but then other cars just merge in between the space i leave in front of me and force me to be on their tail.

Which is perfectly fine - it's safer that way. Not wanting to feel like a 'loser' is understandable - but when it is life and limb that's on the line; I know which side I'd rather be. On the other side is road rage and stupid games of chicken with your life on the line.

How is it safe? You now have almost no distance from the car on your front, and it is almost certainly slower than you.

Well first and foremost, i don't think a safe following distance is "just barely enough for one car to squeeze in in-front of you". If a car merges in front of you and you're suddenly in danger mode, you probably were already following too close.

Secondly, even if you are following a safe distance to the car in front and someone merges, causing a now less than safe distance, it is expected that you'll have to move back to a safe distance.

The only way that could be any different is if you somehow always kept 2-3 "safe distances" in front of you, and that way you were never at an unsafe distance if someone merges in front of you.. but that seems a bit of a slippery slope.

Regarding "how is it safe"... it's a safe following distance... i don't understand how you could even not consider it safe. What you seem to be suggesting is that "it's not safe enough, so i never want to be safe", which just seems a bit asinine. Ie, because if someone merges in front you now feel unsafe, you'd rather feel unsafe all the time by never leaving enough room for someone to merge and always driving at an unsafe distance.. that is just crazy, imo.

It likely is slower, you are correct, but safe driving isn't about shaving off 3 minutes from your morning commute. It's about safety, pure and simple.

You brake some more.

  If following distance < braking distance:
    Brake
    ...

It's kind of hard to tell with the low camera and no depth perception, but it looked to me like the hatchback did between one and three unsafe things there. An autopilot would presumably just not do these things, thereby avoiding the accident. A good driver would do the same, though.

1) Approaching the SUV too closely (can't be sure of this one, it's possible that the SUV moved into the left lane just prior to the start of the video). Even at the beginning of the video, the hatchback was too close to the SUV.

2) Attempting a lane change while too close to the vehicle in front and the vehicle to the right. Lane changes are the most dangerous maneuvers in highway driving, because they divide your attention and may not be anticipated by other motorists. You want more space than you would normally need both in front and to the side you're merging toward.

3) Accelerating during to the lane change. I'm not sure that this is what happened; it's difficult to tell without stereoscopic depth perception. What I think happened is that the driver of the red hatchback accelerated during the lane change, approaching the speed they wanted once they were in the clear lane. This is very commonly done, but it trades away a lot of safety in exchange for a little time. In any significant traffic, you should complete the lane change first, then accelerate to the desired speed for the new lane.

That's not what I got from watching the video. It looks like traffic was slow/stopped in the passing lane. You can see brake lights in front of the pink car, especially in the slowed down clip. The driver of the pink car seemed to be in the process of passing, but didn't pay attention to traffic ahead of them, and thus crashed into the SUV.

Autopilot isn't even necessary. Any car with Forward-Collision Warning With Braking would likely have not gotten in an accident, or at least one not nearly as severe. Fortunately, many major manufacturers have committed to eventually making this technology standard.