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.
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.