And I don't like them. But only one of us has the government taking away our choice by making them mandatory.
I wouldn't mind them if it wasn't for the fact that they universally seem to be points of failure that shorten the lifespan of the car.
And how many more cars are going to be produced and bought because of "planned obsolescence" when electronic systems in modern cars start to give up (eg. electric cars and their engines should be able to last for a really long time)? Are they going to keep getting security updates for 20, 30 years? Or will we start seeing people doing something to fool their sensors so they crash?
While I like all the technology, it's short-sighted to think that the alternative is desired simply because people don't care about potentially hurting someone with their cars. Like everything else in life, this issue is multifaceted too.
Everyone thinks they're a great driver.
Automatic braking will prevent you from rear-ending the car in front, yes. Although an attentive driver should also be doing that.
Society doesn't allow people to say that they're good enough to opt out of safety mechanisms designed to protect us all.
This is why 'I don't wear a seat-belt I can brace myself' also doesn't cut it.
A seatbelt is a safety mechanism.
Driving assist functionalities encourage unsafe behaviors of drivers more than safety. Why should I pay attention to the road if my car will automatically brake for me? Well, until the one time it doesn't and someone dies.
For example ABS increased crash rates for a good while when it was new, contrary to all expectations.
From this NHTSA report: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
"Analyses of data from the early 1990s showed significant increases in fatal run-off-road crashes with ABS, on the order of 28 percent. The increase was baffling, given the success of ABS on the test track. However, at that time, many drivers did not yet know how to use ABS correctly."
I observed this effect first hand, because from the late 90s to the late 00s I was frequently a car control clinic instructor. One of the exercises of these clinics was to teach panic braking. In the earlier years most people showed up with non-ABS cars so this was a great exercise in teaching proper braking control.
As ABS cars became more and more prevalent we (the instructors and the school) thought that this exercise can go away since there is no skill to learn braking if you have ABS, just mash the pedal.
Alas, no! It is difficult to believe, but approximately nobody that came to these car control clinics with an ABS car was actually able to initially brake hard enough to even activate the ABS. Sometimes it took many many runs through the braking exercise to finally get it: just press hard on the brake pedal.
Was literally an argument people made against seat belts.
(I'm old enough that seatbelts weren't a thing when I was a kid, so I remember well the arguments when they became common and later required.)
https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2020/08/people-once-complai...
> trapping people in burning cars or causing drowning or preventing rescue personnel from being able to free those who are injured
> belts cause internal damage when an accident causes the wearer to slam forward
> folks wear them incorrectly, across their stomachs rather than their waists, where they will do more harm than good
Meanwhile, any driver worth his salt should be checking cross traffic when nearing any intersection. I've avoided several accidents by examining potential cross traffic at intersections.
Accident avoidance should be drivers ed 101, but for some reason, especially in these conversations, no one seems to know how to look for and avoid potential accidents.
Although, I'm dubious there would be enough time in that scenario to help much. The typical case is someone running a red light and intersecting a car from the other direction, both going full speed. By the time the tbonee car enters the field of the tboner car front sensors they are very close and less than a second from impact. So it'd reduce speed a bit which is good, but won't prevent the hit.
An attentive driver on the other hand, can see far wider than the sensors and has more opportunity to avoid the incident entirely. If paying attention, of course.
There are arguments to be made both ways, but there definitely isn't a clear solution.
Automated system would have advantage there only where it can better "see" things (eg. LIDAR in pitch dark conditions, or maybe positioned at the roof of a vehicle and seeing over other vehicles that a driver can't).
My point was that for attentive drivers, "safety features" are more a nuisance than help in their own car (the worst you can do is have frustrated drivers behind the wheel). If that results in drivers disabling them, we are not better off at all: technology does not get developed and never matures enough not to be a nuisance. I keep them enabled, but I can understand that not everybody wants to go through these rough edges.
It's by no means perfect (and the city beta is kind of a mess), but the highway safety bits are very functional and useful.
Reaction time in all the car-braking studies is usually measured at 0.2-1s.
That's indeed the time a computer can use to their advantage, and maybe Teslas do, but many in-car systems today are not that fast, and esp not the one in my Volvo. All the things it does it seems to do them slightly later than I'd like to for a seamless, defensive drive.
It's all a matter of cost of per-unit hardware (processing power), development time and state of the art.
We'll get there, but we are not there today.
The automatic braking seems to be the most dangerous one so far, at least on Teslas. Countless incidents of the car slamming on the brakes at highway speeds for no reason whatsover. Brake checking people at highway speeds is highly dangerous road rager action, now cars are automating behaving like this.
Things like auto lane control seem more benign, but they do suffer the same dangers as the so-called autopilots, in that they lull the driver into paying less attention which will always be more dangerous until true AI level 5 self-driving exists.
I don't trust the features to work well enough to rely on them. And I think other people having them is dangerous.
Meanwhile, they all can be toggled off, so I still won't be using the feature. It's just another point of failure shortening the lifespan of a five-figure environmentally costly purchase.
They're not there for you to like - they're there for the people you might kill with your car.
> the government taking away our choice...
...to plough into people with your car.
Good for you. But society disagrees and requires them.
Do you have a source for this?
JK!
These system do save lives though. Driving is a privilege, not a right. So I’m fine with these mandates as they don’t really get in my way.
- in some situations you can lose control of the vehicle, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCObYDxa3Do
- if you crash, your body will be flying freely in the car, creating danger for other occupants of the car
Why is that?
One example is Anti-lock braking (ABS), which they made mandatory in 2004. If you bought a car without it in 2003 and have it inspected in 2013, no problem. If you bought a car with ABS in 2004 and the controller for it breaks in 2008, you will fail the inspection - even though your braking is no worse than the 2003 car (ABS was wisely designed to fail safe..).
Abs actually very slightly reduces the stopping potential of your brake system. But being able to steer and control your car is a bigger benefit under these circumstances.
I certainly agree that you want ABS, it's just to illustrate the pitfalls it creates when you have these additional systems. You can tell much the same story around emissions controls; newer cars pass stricter emissions standards and require extra parts and technology to achieve them.
That‘s not true. Going in a straight line, blocking wheels will stop you in less distance than with active ABS.
However ABS allows you to brake and go around an obstacle without losing control of your vehicle.
Most certainly not. The sliding coefficient of friction of a tire is quite a bit less than the static coefficient of friction. Shortest stopping distance is achieved by keeping the tire rolling, just on the very edge of lockup, for the entire braking distance.
Early ABS systems had slow pulse cycles and couldn't control wheels individually, so a good driver could outbrake them but the ones from the last 20 years are quite good.
ABS is one rare example of a safety technology that doesn't have much drawbacks. Very much unlike newer technologies like lane assist and self braking, which have benefits but also clear drawbacks.
Even for ABS though, there are edge case dangers that a non-ABS car wouldn't have (like ice mode disabling brakes when not on ice).
There's no magic answer with tehcnologies. Every time a system increases complexity, it increases failure mode potential as well.
From Wikipedia[1]:
> Kinetic friction, also known as dynamic friction or sliding friction, occurs when two objects are moving relative to each other and rub together (like a sled on the ground). The coefficient of kinetic friction is typically denoted as μk, and is usually less than the coefficient of static friction for the same materials.[40][41]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friction&oldid=10...
Since most people don’t know how to panic stop without ABS I think it’s reasonable that it cause an inspection failure.
I’m not aware of a jurisdiction where you would fail an inspection because your rear park assist or lane departure warning didn’t work.
Alternatively, computer control of real world systems (e.g. acceleration and braking) can lead to actual accidents, totaling the vehicle. There was that lady who claims her Tesla's software caused a crash, and, without commenting on if that is true, it's plausible.
All the other times, it's causing me frustration and pain. It signals a collision as I am avoiding potholes in a tight one-way street and cars parked on both sides of the road (yep, I am going to slam into that parked car for sure — at least it did not forcibly brake which would definitely cause cars behind me to slam into me).
It brakes when I am backing out of a parking spot into a street and vehicles appear from the other direction (a lane I was not getting into) — this happens so frequently that I am tempted to turn it off.
Pilot Assist on the highway seems to wait too long to slow down as I approach a car in front of me and then it abruptly slows down, yet it requires me to use the turn signal way too early if I want to overtake someone I caught up with: my drive was much more fluid with a simple stay-at-this-speed cruise control of my previous car.
I keep all of the "helpers" on (those that can be turned off) just in case I lose focus and because crashing once might be once too many, but I worry how much unpredictable behaviour is going to mess with other drivers causing them to make mistakes instead and crash into me.
Perhaps it works well for US roads, but European old-town driving is way too complex for safety features to keep up (esp as Volvo is considered to be among the best manufacturers for safety features, including these new-fangled ones).
Edit: and blind spot monitoring — the sales guy was so high on it, yet I don't see the purpose: it's right there flashing on your side mirrors so you have to look at them, yet side mirrors are large enough and concave (like on all modern cars) that if you set them up properly, there's really no blind spot a car or bike can fit in. And I still prefer to look over my shoulder to top it off.
Not in the US unfortunately. All my European cars had almost no blind spot. Then I moved to the US and was really surprised.
The only time I've gotten false positives on the collision avoidance was when I was going too fast for the situation. Now it's gotten me to drive slower on these narrow lane situations, which is a good thing!
> It brakes when I am backing out of a parking spot into a street and vehicles appear from the other direction (a lane I was not getting into) — this happens so frequently that I am tempted to turn it off.
I haven't experienced this personally, but a false positive here doesn't really have any downsides. Ideally every driver would be skilled enough to not back up so far and go into the other lane, but I do see drivers that back out further than necessary and get a corner of the car across the divide of the road. The cross traffic avoidance when backing up is one of my favorites, it's saved me plenty of times when somebody is going way too fast in a parking lot and I'm backing up slowly.
> Pilot Assist on the highway seems to wait too long to slow down as I approach a car in front of me and then it abruptly slows down, yet it requires me to use the turn signal way too early if I want to overtake someone I caught up with: my drive was much more fluid with a simple stay-at-this-speed cruise control of my previous car.
This situation sounds like you may be driving faster than the flow of traffic, or the follow distance is not set far enough. You can also do the simple stay-at-this-speed cruise control, or adaptive cruise control without the automatic steering capabilities.
I am on the west coast of the US so the roads here are well planned and well marked, so maybe that helps.
> Edit: and blind spot monitoring — the sales guy was so high on it, yet I don't see the purpose: it's right there flashing on your side mirrors so you have to look at them, yet side mirrors are large enough and concave (like on all modern cars) that if you set them up properly, there's really no blind spot a car or bike can fit in. And I still prefer to look over my shoulder to top it off.
Depending on the car, the driver, and how seating position and mirrors are setup, there can still be blind spots despite your best efforts, or have a driver in the next lane in a dark car at night with their lights off accidentally. Nothing wrong with looking at your mirror and still checking over your shoulder, but the blind spot monitoring is still very helpful. That's why the indicator is on the mirror anyways, because they know we are already going to look there before changing lanes.
From my experience the safety features are all supplemental to also having good driving habits, they don't replace the need for good habits entirely.
I find the braking is far too abrupt. I can see the car in front of me slowing down, but the system will continue accelerating until some magical distance threshold before it begins to brake.
In addition the follow distance doesn't seem to be dynamic relative to my speed. When I increase the follow distance, the car leaves too much distance at lower speeds, but increasing the follow distance causes tail-gating at higher speeds.
I may have been going too fast for the collision avoidance system, but not for the situation: cars are parked on both sides, and frequently one or two cars will stick out a bit more than the others (by eg. 70cm) — I wasn't going faster than 30km/h (20mph) in dry, daylight conditions. If you avoid a pothole that turns your car into that parked car sticking out which is a bit ahead (at least 50m), it could signal a collision. At least that was my guess what was happening, I never felt at any risk whatsoever.
> I haven't experienced this personally, but a false positive here doesn't really have any downsides.
Oh, it does. When it happens, I worry if there's something I missed, so I spend another few seconds re-evaluating the situation around the car. As I didn't miss anything, cars do show up behind me in the lane I was entering into, and since my car is stopped only third of the way into the lane, most drivers coming up behind me start "overtaking" my protruding car, and I am in a much worse position. In city driving in traffic-heavy streets, one's got to use any time they've got available or impatient drivers around you start making even worse situations for themselves and you.
> This situation sounds like you may be driving faster than the flow of traffic, or the follow distance is not set far enough.
The situation I am describing is actually from a very low traffic situation on the highway, so there was no "flow of traffic". When a truck going 100km/h decides to overtake another truck going 95km/h on the highway, my car going at the speed limit of 130 km/h seems unable to see that from way ahead like a driver does, and it maintains the speed until way too late.
Contrary to that, if you are driving 130km/h and approach a car driving 125km/h, it starts slowing down probably at the same distance, which is now too soon.
Not to mention that my experience on European highways is that the when there's a lot of traffic, the "flow of traffic" speed is ~140km/h on roads with 130 limit (when I was driving 110-130km/h, I'd be constantly slowing down and speeding up, making for a much more exhausting drive — you can probably go down to 95 km/h to achieve a similar "flow" behind a slow-moving truck). Pilot Assist, however, only works up to exactly 139km/h even on really well-marked roads — this is perfectly fine if you ask me (the limit might be too high even), but we are talking about the state of assistive tech.
> You can also do the simple stay-at-this-speed cruise control, or adaptive cruise control without the automatic steering capabilities.
FWIW, the behaviour I was describing is part of the adaptive cruise system that seems to behave the same whether Pilot Assist is turned on or off.
But sure, you can still turn most of these off. I was just commenting on how bad the current implementation is in my car (2019 high-specced Volvo sedan), and that I can understand why someone might not want any of these today.
The collection of driver behaviour, and GPS, data is not
And here I am puttering along in my 2003 VW Golf with a manual transmission. :)
Unfortunately the rear-cross-traffic is very useful and I can't turn off one without the other.
I'm on the opposite side of this. All the new safety & driver assist features are the best part about getting a new car. I wouldn't buy a new daily driver that doesn't have blind spot monitoring, collision avoidance, lane keep assist, etc. Once you have these features and you are accustomed to how they work, you can't go back.
I drive a 2019 XC40 and these safety features are my favorite part about it. Being able to turn on Pilot Assist on the highway makes driving so much more comfortable, it's like having two people driving at the same time! I don't let my guard down completely of course, but it definitely takes the edge off. I don't find these features getting in my way.