If you’re talking about other automatic steering features, that’s very different, and your comment makes more sense to me.
One time I was driving behind someone under otherwise normal conditions, and they turned right into a parking lot. As they turned right, they obviously began exiting the road. The screen on my car screamed "BRAKE!" and then the braking system activated. They were about 60% of the way into the parking lot, and continuing to exit. I was at a normal following distance, going a normal speed, and they were just making a right into a parking lot. This was a very ordinary situation, and the emergency warning was unexpected.
Now, technically, if that car had completely stopped for some reason instead of continuing to exit, I guess I could have hit the back corner of the bumper. That is, if I hadn't, you know, shifted a couple feet to the left to avoid it.
Ironically, the emergency braking alarm was so distracting that it might have caused me to hit the car in front of me if the brakes hadn't activated, and if I had needed to steer to avoid an accident.
And if the person behind me hadn't seen my brakes suddenly activate, they might have hit me. Or, if the person behind them hadn't seen their brakes activate, they might have hit them. And so on.
Each time it happens my immediate reaction is "what the hell is wrong with my car" before I see the "BRAKE" on the dash or heads up display and realize this happened yet again. I'm surprised I haven't been rear ended on account of it yet.
If, instead, we kept the roads the same, then congestion would increase, and with it, accidents.
There is a reason that random unexpected emergency braking is a favorite tactic for people attempting to force accidents in order to commit insurance fraud: It’s too expensive for everyone to change their habits in order to guard against it.
Also, if you are following at a distance where an AEB activation will cause you to rearend the vehicle in front of you, you are too close to safely follow any vehicle, regardless of whether it has an AEB.
Vw golf r 2016 the sensor was low to the ground and it would randomly brake for stuff it thought was a threat like a cardboard box.
Subaru crosstrek 2018 - would brake for no reason, cars turning up ahead of me, etc.
VW atlas 2019 - brake for no reason would also scream at me and show a red symbol on the hud when nothing was in the road in front of me.
Subaru impreza 2023 - brakes for turning vehicles up the road, had it brake in a car wash.
On my vw vehicles i bought a can bus programmer so i could turn off as much if the safety stuff as possible because it made the car less safe to drive. In the impreza (current car) turning off the eyesight features is part of the pre-drive ritual.
I also had the lane assist on the crosstrek almost cause an accident on the highway at speed. Roads here are inconsistent and it was violently jerking the wheel trying to stay between lines.
The crosstrek the only orange one available had eyesight.
The atlas was used so there was only 1 option locally
The impreza its standard on anything over base, and the base was missing other things i wanted.
It's very frustrating how tech can be mis-applied. But I also see the regulators point of applied statistics and that even if these systems cause the occasional crash they prevent a much larger number from ever happening.
Another anecdote - I have the exact same car and haven't had it do anything unexpected. It would really help if Subaru et. al. had ways to offer feedback back to them, because experiences like yours should be shared with them so they can understand what kind of corner cases some drivers are getting into.
> I also had the lane assist on the crosstrek almost cause an accident on the highway at speed. Roads here are inconsistent and it was violently jerking the wheel trying to stay between lines.
I've also not experienced this - the lane assist is just a nudge and if it's overpowering you you should take it to the dealership, this is not normal.
Anecdotal, but the alarm before the auto braking in my Crosstrek (2020) saved me two times. And I was in the car with a friend who activated the auto braking when they had just purchased it and weren't used to driving it.
That's because those other comments all assume that "automatic emergency braking" will only do exactly what it's supposed to do and will never make a mistake. But any sensible person knows that's not going to happen. These systems will make mistakes, and some of those mistakes will cause harm. So you can't just make a blanket claim that such systems are good. You have to actually look at the data and balance the harm they avoid by doing what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it, against the harm they cause when they make mistakes.
The obvious next question is, does the proposed rulemaking here consider the consequences of the system making mistakes? As far as I can tell, the answer is no, with just one qualifier. The claims about crashes prevented and lives saved are not net savings, accounting for harm done by the system making mistakes; those claimed numbers assume the systems will always perform perfectly and will never cause any harm, only prevent it. The one qualifier is that the proposal does include two "false positive" tests to try to spot systems that brake when they're not supposed to. But there is no analysis given to show why those particular false positive tests were picked or why they would justify the extremely high level of confidence in the systems not making errors that the rest of the proposal shows.
You should be safe and free to brake without deep introspective thought, without fear of causing an accident. The real world is not that simple but that's how the law is generally setup.
And as a further point they'd probably say that if that person following had such a system, there's also less chance they'd rear-end you in turn. I was wary of the systems in my own car, but after 6 months of driving they are far more reliable than I'd feared and I'm quite impressed.
The kinds of mistakes described elsewhere in this thread have not been of the form "system mistakenly brakes my car and someone behind me rear-ends me because they were following too close". So your comments, while valid for that particular scenario, do not appear to be relevant to what other posters are concerned about.
Car reviews are largely useless fluff - a real analysis of the differences between brands for this kind of thing could actually be useful.
After that experience, I don't want a vehicle with that functionality in it, and don't want other cars on the road having it. It's half-baked at best.
It had happened enough times to him, and he complained to the dealership enough, that they bought the vehicle back from him. Who knows if these incidents were ever reported to the NHTSA since no physical collisions with other cars occurred.
The dealership tried to fix it several times, and I don’t know if this is a systemic problem, or a single vehicle issue.
Either way, I don’t trust the tech. It can be developed and tested against plenty of different scenarios, but we live in a very uncontrolled and fluctuating environment.
That would have saved me one of two incidents so Subaru may well be the one doing this right.
Also, they still provide physical knobs and switches for the important things; that includes climate controls and, I believe, the stereo.
I'm driving an 11 year old Forester and just as happy not to be dealing with all this crap quite yet. And the various satellite connectivity options on it have been left never activated.
From what I can recall, it’s never gotten to the point of engaging the brake, but it’s super unsettling every time it happens.
People on this forum want it to be a technology issue, and I'm sure it is to some extent, but I think the differences between driving styles is also a large component. If you're a careful driver that usually leaves a lot of separation, many AEB implementations will rarely trigger and you'll usually understand why when it does. Whereas if you're an aggressive driver that cuts between vehicles, leaves <1 s separation, etc., you will notice a lot of "unexpected" braking from these systems. Like the poster above that was upset the system slowed them down when they were nearly clipping a car exiting the road.
Example: living in cold weather climate my outback just stops cuts the engine when exhaust from the car leaves car in front of me on cold day( large cloud of vapor). The visual collision avoidance detects this as car and cuts the engine. This is not the place you want to be leaving an intersection with people accelerating behind you.
Unless this backed by lidar / radar or combination that is more accurate I don’t see this as pro. Top reason I can’t stand my outback is the decisions it makes incorrectly.
Of course there is no way to get any of this fixed in my outback other than selling it. Consumers are getting the shaft on technology in their cars imo and are being treated as test pilots.
Keeping it on at all times sounds like a terrible idea for cars used in the US, because it's a developing nation with extremely poor road quality. In developed nations, it's probably OK because you can count on the road markings being good almost everywhere, but not in the US.
But yeah, you need to make sure there is a physical button on the steering wheel or somehere on the dashboard to easily enable/disable it. Otherwise it can be annoying.
For AEB, the same system is used in the adaptive cruise control and it's been near perfect. One funny thing was that it just alarmed and fully died in outback Victoria - apparently it is coded to do this as a fail-safe if it hasn't detected a car for a long time due to the system potentially not working. The service centre employee said Hyundai are working on a patch to extend the timeout since it's a little low for country Australian roads (approximately an hour at the moment I think).
Been driving an Ioniq 5 2023 for a couple months now with no phantom/emergency braking issues. I'm not in love with the performance of the lane keep without being on an HDA2 marked highway. I have to fight it just enough for it to not be useful on certain well marked backroads.
Considering tossing in a Comma 3 to give no-hands driver assist a shot.
“In 2020, NHTSA announced civil penalties for the companies—totaling $210 million—for not recalling vehicles in a timely manner. In 2021, a whistleblower who provided NHTSA with information that led to those penalties was awarded $24 million, the agency’s first-ever whistleblower award.”
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/why...
They have great styling that’s comparable to German cars. I wish the US automakers could take some hints. From what I’ve heard the Genesis lineup is very luxurious.
In cases where it’s not possible to disable the feature we better constantly record the car from all angles to have it as a proof against the manufacturer in case something goes bad. Near accidents caused by buggy software should not get a free pass, but require the manufactuter to fully reimburse you or pay you some serious fine.
But in the south? Not a single one of the original poster’s complaints are valid here with the exception of cars who cut you off and then speed away (no need to slam on the brakes, cruise control). Personally, the early brake warning has saved someone else’s property at lease twice.
Right, if I had to condense my issues into something more constructive it is just that: if regulators want to pursue a mandate for these systems, they should also work on establishing testing criteria and specifications that cover the many different conditions drivers face and reduces variation between manufacturers as possible. Not an easy task.
To give a quick example: another commenter in this thread states that lane assist only kicks in at 35mph. That is true in some models but not all which could lead to some nice surprises. Further, the speed limit in NYC is 25mph so it's not unusual if the road surface is decent to be cruising closer to 30. Unless there's a threshold for activation, you might be walking a fine line between "safety on"/"safety off" and any resulting corrections it might make.
If I accelerate into traffic and get close to a car while accelerating, it will start flashing a warning light and if I still don't stop accelerating or braking, it will intervene, but if the other car accelerates it doesn't do anything. So the radar setup is quite well done and it gives very few false positives.
The lane assist system is a bit bad though because once it identifies the lane markings it does not take into account potential hazards that want me to change a lane or exit it for a few seconds to avoid road hazard lights or something similar.
The point I am trying to make is that there should be a high standard to what drives the AEB and it should not rely on cameras, which seems to be what automakers want to implement driving assisted features to save on more advanced tech. And somehow I don't think they're gonna pony up for high-speed cameras that can replace a radar at accuracy.
Maybe the intention is good, but most likely the implementation will suck.
Thankfully it is possible to have the system set to beep only as slamming on the brakes while merging is an experience everyone wants to avoid.
Also, it sometimes panics when coming to a stop on an incline with a car ahead. I guess it is unable to account for the fact that the car will stop by itself just because the road is going uphill?
Recently upgraded to a Chinese ute. I've about the first 1000km driven now, and whilst it's occasionally made some mistakes, if my hands are on the wheel it's easy enough to just stay the course and it let's me do as I wish. I can also turn all the setting to off at the touch of a button and make that the default too. I quite enjoy having these features because they have been implemented well.
- when it works it works so well the car basically drives itself esp. when you throw cruise control into the mix (this includes auto coasting + breaking)
- when it doesn't it's bouncing across the lane + applies too much resistance when attempting e.g overtaking
I did not have any issue with emergency braking (never triggered, any situation where it would have triggered got handled by the driver first), but I did have a few (light) phantom braking events in cruise control.
Not related to lane assist control (uses a separate mechanism) but I did have issues with blind spot alert, it was randomly alerting regularly when no car was present. Mazda identified the cause as winter tyres throwing the sensors off. A software update is supposed to fix that but we disabled the feature so it'll be done on the next scheduled maintenance.
It doesn't turn off when you indicate to change lanes? It does on the Hyundai.
Makes me laugh every time. I mean, at that point, why bother with the signal at all?
There are still scenarios where it can be an issue, for example when you need to "peek" through the lane to see if an overtake is possible safely. In this case it requires driver judgement on when to activate the turn signal. You may activate early or when committed, I don't think either is necessarily wrong.
I don't know the other commenter's scenario but don't doubt what they described. To pull another example out of my hat: bendy mountain roads (e.g. western Connecticut, minimal elevation changes), car ahead is moving slowly due to lack of power, heavy load, etc. Assume driving conditions and road lines are clear, no camera or sensor obstructions. The system is automatically active while following the bend and will attempt to keep on course. As you approach a rather wide curve (lanes are also widened, with extra shoulder) it is an opportunity to ride closer to the centerline in order to see past the vehicle and overtake. If you do that without putting on your blinker first, the system will attempt to correct while you're in the turn. Depending on how you react this can be jarring as the wheel is vibrating and you have to decide whether to commit to let the system correct, correct the correction, or commit to the overtake.
I chalk this up more to my own lack of familiarity with the system early on and not a defect per se. The wheel vibration is a very odd sensation to me on turns likely because on older cars I'd start to worry about tires or mechanical issues.
I've been making productive use of the "textarea cache" extension lately. Sites and browsers lose text a lot more often than they should.
I’m more interested in this
They'd need to be implemented and then turned off for 15 years until 99% of the old cars are off the road and then flipped on simultaneously for every car.
If a car suddenly breaks then the car behind it better be able to suddenly break too.
Now I drive another car that will hit the brakes in parking garages when going around corners if cars have backed in and I am going 5mph or more. I've learned to drive 4mph in parking garages.
Btw, where'd you find that old car? Locally or get it shipped to you?
the NHTSA is a pretty cautious organization, and they like numbers. if they've studied it and found that automatic braking will prevent 24000 crashes and 360 deaths per year, i'd be inclined to believe them. having the car brake for me when i'm not expecting it sounds kind of scary to me too, but i'd rather experience that than let 360 people die every year.
I can easily imagine a scenario where it might prevent 25000 crashes a year that are caused because 5% of drivers are staring at their phones, have a high chance of rear-ending someone, and this software makes that far less likely. While also containing bugs causing 1000 crashes a year for the larger number of non-distracted drivers, resulting in a net change of 24000. This would mean that adding the software would be better for society, while making the majority of drivers slightly more likely to crash into someone.
The scenarios and questions you ask are easy to explore in the data. If the number of crashes goes down, contrived scenarios don't really impact things. If they stay flat or go up, then you have to answer why.
To emphasize, for your imagination here to be relevant, the number has to do one of those. If the number goes down, even if it shifted some situations into a wreck that would not have been before, it must have done fewer of those than it moved wrecks to non-wrecks. If it somehow causes more situations to be wrecks, the number, by definition, goes up.
The problem is precisely a lack of imagination, or perhaps more accurately, critical thought.
The parent is precisely engaged in the kind of interrogation that is necessary. If you are aware or an analysis that bears on his questions, now would be the time to share it.
But more to the point, there is a track record of narrow interpretation of studies and missing of the big picture. It’s hardly sophistry, it’s critical thought.
I, personally, am a much lower risk than the typical driver. Putting a drivers' aid device in my car may well increase the danger to me and those around me, even while having it in other cars decreases danger.
BTW - my car's traction control is evil. It's a rear wheel drive car, without limited slip. So when I pull out onto the road from a driveway, if there's the slightest bit of sand on the road, I get enough spin to engage the traction control. The car deals with this by vastly cutting engine power. In Texas, where the regular surface road I'm pulling out to is commonly 60mph, and often faster, I need to accelerate quickly to avoid the guy approaching - yet the traction control has just left me wallowing, dead in the water, unable to accelerate strongly. Except in wet conditions, disabling the traction control is always the first thing I do when I sit in the car.
It terrifies me that people are so oblivious to their own flaws that they would willingly disable features such as AEB if they could. I’m extremely thankful for regulations that prevent such life-saving safety features from being disabled.
The only time I ever came close to having a crash is when lane assist tried to drive in the dividers on a highway with construction going on, so lane assist is the first to go in a new car.
Not everyone. I don't think I'm an above average driver at all.
Unless you are proposing that they should require it in everyone's cars except yorus.
Yes they do impact things.
Consider a pill that, given to a wide population of test subjects, reduces heart attacks by 20%. That's great! But when you look at the data more closely, it strongly reduces the risk for people older than 40, and it increases the risk for people under 40. Should you prescribe that pill to everyone at risk of heart attack? Of course not.
Does AEB have a pattern like this? Who knows! Someone should test or cite a good test!
Can they make the system even better by finding cases it didn't help? Almost certainly. Progress isn't a straight line, but increases are increases.
Where did anyone say "isn't worth it"? The sentence I see is "The problem with numbers is that they don't tell the whole story."
Though in a more general sense, if someone does invent a system that has strong average safety gains, but makes the majority of people less safe... that's a hard sell.
Logical fallacies like the base rate fallacy are real, and they fool all of us frequently, myself included.
Literally the same arguments were and are made against seat belts. Often. And is why I am not too willing to give way here.
Now, if you are just saying, "I hope they keep their eyes on the data and are willing to keep improving," great. I agree. If you are trying to angle it that this is not a safety improvement, I will loudly disagree.
This sounds like the beginnings of the McNamara fallacy: that there is some abstract "data" where all the relevant variables can be explored to decide the best course of action. The reason it's a fallacy is that data is itself only a reflection of conscientious decisions about what to measure and how to measure, and these are invariably limited to what we already appreciate and understand, not accounting for the things we don't know how to measure and don't know we should be measuring.
To be more concrete, let's say we follow your suggestion and focus on crashes. Maybe it's found that automatic breaking reduces the number of crashes so it's mandated. But maybe automatic breaking also increases the likelihood that a crash is deadly in some sub-population like pedestrians, construction workers, and motorcyclists. So overall we see crashes decline because a large number of minor crashes are averted but we also see deadly crashes increase because pedestrians, construction workers, and motorcyclists are killed more frequently.
So data isn't a free lunch. Every decision about what to measure and what to optimize involves some prior contextual understanding. A misunderstanding of the context means the data will misrepresent some aspect of the problem and you'll overoptimize yourself into a local maximum.
Someone else mentioned airbags. Airbags are great overall but increase danger for some people, and that's without obvious signs of anything being wrong.
With AEB we know it makes dangerous mistakes in significant amounts. So we very much should analyze different implementations under different kinds of weather, road, and driving style.
Is it a new behavior and jarring when engaged? Certainly. Should we keep watching the data for problems? Certainly. Should folks report all problems so that they are tracked? Certainly.
Do most people actually have trouble driving safely? Despite their insistent view of how great they are at driving? ...
I have been in a car where the alert went off that it was engaging aeb. The driver was far too close to the car in front of us...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLRRBHNjCn4 There's a car that it's reasonable to worry about, but it was clearly braking and almost stopped by the time AEB kicked in, and AEB kept going as that car went to zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO6tJnM_HSs Adaptive cruise was already in control and working fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCk6yrN453c Absolutely nothing in front.
And whatever happened here probably counts: https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
Yes. This was my movivation for questioning the "data says" logic. The NHTSA has made decisions based on data that were poor decisions because they misunderstood the problem domain and became overly reliant on specific metrics. Here is a copy-paste of an earlier comment in this thread:
--
> the NHTSA is a pretty cautious organization, and they like numbers.
They may be cautious but they're not necessarily smart. Their vehicle safety ratings only measure the safety of occupants in that vehicle. Result? An arms race where cars keep getting bigger, heavier, and taller to do better in crash tests against bigger, heavier, and taller cars. These "safer" vehicles are now more deadly to everyone else, especially pedestrians and bicyclists.
McNamara fallacy in action.
That said, I could cede this point if you can show evidence of it in these studies. The org is a bunch of people, so I grant they could make mistakes. Without specific concerns, this is the definition of fud. You aren't giving criticism of these studies and actions, but seeding doubt on their data.
For such people, these policies suck. And it's strange that there are those that demand they either be happy about it, or at least be quiet about it.
I'll keep my 30yo car with no computers as long as I can thank you very much.
A seat belt is basically the same for everyone. It makes things safer when you look at all drivers, and it makes things safer for just about any subgroup of drivers.
But a buggy AEB might not fit that pattern. Imagine a system that reduces crashes by half, but then adds an extra X crashes per million miles. If someone's unassisted crash rate is 5X, then this system reduces it to 3.5X and is a great help. If someone's unassisted crash rate is .5X, then this system increases their crash rate to 1.25X and is a terrible trade.
I think that may be true in all cases - for example seat belts and airbags requirements may affect people differently depending on height and weight?
I also agree with this:
> If the government wants to immediately improve car safety they should outlaw touchscreens instead.
I experienced it multiple times and not even once it triggered in a correct situation. Usually a weird angle on a t-junction triggers it unnecessarily.
[1] https://www.regulations.gov/document/NHTSA-2023-0021-0004
207.2172772719495
Not quite pure statistical noise but close.
> A metanalysis in 2015 found a 38 percent decrease in collisions for vehicles that utilized such a system, for instance.
Barring massive fuckups in methodology, that should account for false positives that cause an accident. The number of non-collision severe injuries (are we theorizing folks get their head banged against something when it brakes heavily?) is likely to be pretty small versus that 38% stat.
> The number of non-collision severe injuries (are we theorizing folks get their head banged against something when it brakes heavily?) is likely to be pretty small
(People can be injured directly by the seatbelt, and there's also whiplash to consider.)
I don't doubt it's possible, just like it's possible for a seatbelt to trap you in a burning car... but common enough to offset a 38% drop in crashes? I severely doubt it.
If someone can demonstrate that people driving these cars have a dramatically increased incidence of whiplash or seatbelt injuries, by all means, but I'm comfortable saying the burden of proof is on them there.
On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would see automatic emergency braking become a standard feature on all new light passenger vehicles.
And the actual numbers should include the opportunity cost (in lives saved or QALYs, if you like) of the increased price of vehicles with these systems. Could that money have been spent on smoke detectors or healthier food or ?
In response I said:
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Then mhb said:
What's your point?
Can you explain what my point was to mhb?
ChatGPT:
It seems like you're suggesting that the responsibility and scope of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is primarily focused on improving safety on the roads, specifically through regulations related to vehicles, rather than other broader public health initiatives like smoke detectors or promoting healthier food.
Your comment may imply that while considering the opportunity cost is a valid point for an overall public health or policy perspective, it may not be directly relevant to the mission and function of the NHTSA. The NHTSA's mandate is to ensure the safety of vehicles and roads, so they would prioritize improvements and regulations in that area, even if those funds might have a higher impact if spent elsewhere from a wider public health perspective.
In other words, the comment might suggest that each organization has its own scope and priorities, and while we can consider overall opportunity costs, we also need to consider the specific roles and responsibilities of different organizations. However, without more context, this is just one possible interpretation.
That point being: maybe NHTSA's advocacy of a requirement for all new vehicles is beyond the scope of its mission and it should confine itself to providing information to the policy makers who might possibly understand the tradeoffs.
They may be cautious but they're not necessarily smart. Their vehicle safety ratings only measure the safety of occupants in that vehicle. Result? An arms race where cars keep getting bigger, heavier, and taller to do better in crash tests against bigger, heavier, and taller cars. These "safer" vehicles are now more deadly to everyone else, especially pedestrians and bicyclists.
McNamara fallacy in action.
At least part of that effect will show up in these vehicles being rear-ended themselves (as they're exhibiting that exact sudden-stop behavior), and that sort of accident should be reduced if all cars come with AEB.
You'll never be able to wipe out all variables in this sort of study, but I don't think the methodology's as flawed as you're asserting.
While the costs of phantom breaking are decreased if everyone has AEB, I don't think this makes the roads safer for me unless I want to buy a newer vehicle and I don't want to have to do that.
Properly implemented AEB is an essential safety feature that saves lives.
We've disabled lane assist on our car as it seems to always take the wrong action, but we've never had an issue with the emergency brake which is the subject of the article.
My Tesla, which is probably the leader here, regularly makes mistakes - though never really to the point of forcing braking. Often it will warn me on my narrow street of objects like parked cars it thinks I will hit, but it seems a little more polished than MB.
If regulators want to force this on all car manufacturers, they really need to also mandate certain tests and features - plus OTA updates to recall any bugs... My guess is that most car makers just don't have the workforce to develop these features, so forcing them to roll them out will mean even worse bugs!
OTA updates for braking systems will result in hackers wreaking havoc. The security implications of this are enormous; it's like putting your country's nuclear reactors on the internet.
Updates should only be done in-person at the dealership, for free.
So the rule needs a rule to fix it, which needs another rule to fix that, and so on.
All that said, I do like the autosteer on the Tesla, with the caveat that you need to treat it like cruise control, NOT like "autopilot". And I'll pretty much only use it on divided highways. In other situations its insistence in sticking to the dead center of the lane can be disconcerting at times (like the ones I listed above!)
Pretty sure our 'democratically elected' representatives are working on a plan to outlaw anything that can't be remotely controlled and shut down at the mere thought of mutiny. Canada's trucker strike comes to mind.
I second your motion!!!! I was happy with my 1986 Chevy S-10 Blazer until it was badly rusted out by winter road salt.
Now I have a 2001 GMC Yukon. I prefer the Blazer since the Yukon has too many attempts at automation and is too big. But apparently the new cars have so much in automation that they are to be avoided, and cars of the future promise to be worse still.
If both cars have AEB even that unsafe condition becomes a non-issue.
Just because humans have adjusted to regularly driving in an unsafe and illegal manner does not make it the safest way to use roads.
I've been driving a Honda with the all the safety assists for several years and while it does do the occasional erroneous "you need to brake" pre-warning, I've never had it brake unnecessarily.
Anecdotes aside, I'm fairly certain automatic braking is a net reducer of accidents.
Just like you are responsible if you used a gun, you are responsible on how you drive a car.
If my car has been destroyed by the driver behind me because they were looking at their phone, it's little consolation that they shouldn't have.
But I do think these safety features are important if implemented correctly. I think the crux of the issue is: when someone _is_ paying attention, safety measures feel like they overreact and get in the way of subtle human reactions to things happening. If the driver is _not_ paying proper attention, then the safety systems are the only thing that react in time.
I feel like this requirement is important, but requires better software, including lessening the impact of safety systems engaging when the drive has been actively steering/accelerating/braking during a period of time, making it obvious that they are indeed paying attention. But there are plenty of drivers who pay almost no attention at all, many people go into auto-mode when driving and aren't ashamed of it.
I've almost been run over by drivers who have been directly looking at me before, then sudden braking when their eyes have stopped glazing over.
On the other hand, maybe the benefits outweigh this drawback? Pedestrians get hit all the times by cars where drivers aren't paying attention (looking at their phone, etc.). So for the general population, it is probably a net positive.
That being said, I do think that touch screens are a terrible design decision on almost all devices.
We found a 1996 Buick Park Avenue for less than $5k and keeping it running might be an adventure in maintaining American cars but boy is it a sweet car and it gets 29 mpg on the highway which is not bad at all for a large car.
Now I drive a 27 year old car that has none of these 'features'. It does what I tell it to and when I tell it to, it doesn't phone home, and has no touch screen, but old fashioned buttons.
If the government wants to immediately improve car safety they should outlaw touchscreens instead.