If my airbag is missing my car won't crash into traffic by itself, if the airplane system fails the airplane points you into the ground.

No, but, say you don't pay for the automatic breaking system. You may rear end someone that the car might have otherwise saved you from.

The difference here is that MCAS is an automatic feature that Boeing needed to mimic the existing 737 flight characteristics. They Created the need for the automatic system in the first place, then sell the safety redundancy as an option.

To extend (torture?) the automotive analogy, it would be as if the manufacturer substituted a new braking system that required preheating the rotors, installed software to automatically ride the brakes for the first 2 miles of driving in order to get that preheat done, then sold an optional safety feature to verify that the brakes were at the proper temperature.

The old way worked just fine without need for “emulation”. The new airframe required some software to mimic the old one, but they decided to charge you for the add-on to make sure that their band-aid worked reliably.

Again, yes, you may rear end someone, but this is not the correct analogy here. In this situation, the car rear ends someone while you are fully breaking because you didn't pay for the automatic breaking upgrade. This is a fail.

But here it was: pay to know if the automatic braking system will speed up the car for himself every time you first press the brake and then stop pressing it as you see that it's seems to be better:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/13/world/boeing-...

Look at the charts above. Both pilots "fought" with the controls, correcting the plane course, then believing "it's corrected now" and then the plane sunk again and again.

Most of the safety features that keep the car out of an accident (ABS, ESC, rear cameras, TPMS) are mandated by law in the EU and USA.

Yes, lane-keeping and auto-braking are not mandated. I expect they will be within a few years.

Somewhat related to this thread and topic ... I'm driving a rental car right now and its the first time I've driven a car with a lane-assist feature (sensors help steer car back into lane when drifting out of lane). In France you are supposed to give 1.5m margin when passing a cyclist so I drifted left and out of my lane to pass - and really freaked out when the lane assist feature kicked in and steered me aggressively back toward the bicyclist...

I think I could have avoided this situation by turning on the left-turn signal to disable the lane-assist and generally its a good idea to use the indicator even when just passing a bike -- but that's not something I normally need to do to avoid this particular failure mode ...

> I think I could have avoided this situation by turning on the left-turn signal

That's exactly what you had to do according to the regulations.

People shouldn't drive drunk, but disabling the airbag when the driver is drunk is not acceptable.

Well, LKA would actually help to stay in lane while drunk, no?

That thing has a good default that is still overridable by the brute force (force that's less than the force needed to steer if the power assist fails altogether).

My point is that unexpected hazards when people break regulations is a problem. Because people will break regulations.

Yeah, that's the way it works on my dad's Subaru.

The adaptive cruise control in my VW actually gets confused sometimes. Drove through a puddle at the beach last year and it jammed on the brakes. Glad nobody rear-ended me.

As soon as an auto safety feature is proven effective for 5+ years, it’s made mandatory.