The aggregate stats are the most important things to look at, especially for something like AEB which has the ability to save pedestrians, which as of late are getting mowed down more and more frequently.
But faulty EAB caused more trouble for me than any other safety feature to date and I really wonder what caused Mercedes Benz to release this feature in such a horrific functional state. It is beyond belief how broken it is and I would love to see their internal stats for how often their EAB caused - not prevented - single vehicle accidents.
It can benefit people who have reaction times slower than silicon.
It should be enough for everybody on the road. People always say "don't be a statistic" but we are all part of these statistics whether we like it or not. AEB can also protect occupants of other vehicles, so using it or not is not a choice whose consequences only affect the individual making it.
No idea how much truth is in that, though.
This depends on the state:
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/calculator/factshee...
> As of 2021, 18 states and the District of Columbia had universal motorcycle helmet laws, 29 states had laws requiring helmets for certain riders, and three states did not have any motorcycle helmet laws.
Statistics are meaningless to the individual. Sure, emergency braking might be safer across the board, but that means little compared to an individual who already drives safely without it.
This is just blatantly untrue.
> means little compared to an individual who already drives safely without it
Until emergency breaking stops a bad driver from T-boning you in an intersection as they run a red light.
“I’ll just drive safely” was the argument against seatbelts, airbags, and antilock brakes. Motorcycle helmets, too.
Sure, if it was equivalent in capability to a class 5 self driving car, it would see the light was red, and notice the partially occluded other car, then stop in time.
But, with just a front facing radar? I don’t see how it would be able to do much. It would only have a few feet to stop.
The point is even a perfect driver may benefit from safety devices in the hands of other drivers they encounter.
The article notes:
> A metanalysis in 2015 found a 38 percent decrease in collisions for vehicles that utilized such a system, for instance.
That said there's also a balance in safety systems between personal responsibility and systems responsibility. Relying too much on systems responsibility actually causes more harm because the person becomes more careless or is entirely at the whim of the system responsible for their safety. We put railings on stairs in public places but don't require everyone to put on a safety harness and latch it onto the guide to climb stairs for example. There's an expectation that system safety has hit a reasonable limit and the safety harness is too costly in time, money, and attention to implement.
Or sub in a high speed rear-ending scenario.
In a lot of places the outer gate is only chest high which isn’t insurmountable but is enough of a barrier to avert 99% of the bad cases. I think the analogy to automatic braking holds.
I started to get lazy and distracted as the car was mostly driving, my friend was talking at me and the assist disengaged, next minute we were going pretty fast towards a barrier. We recovered but it was close.
I’d just prefer to drive honestly.
Some habitual drunk drivers never have an accident and may even claim it makes them a better driver, but that doesn’t make it the right choice on a population level.
Cheers.
This often means one person’s risk goes up while thousands of others’ goes down. Sometimes that’s hard to balance, but if the 38% reduction in crashes cited in the article is true, this particular decision seems fairly simple.
I don't like enforcing things like this as a band aid, it's fine to try improve a situation, but let's be honest, many people who are involved in these accidents are doing something with their phone.
People will continue to use their phones in their cars. That's a fact we have to accept.
You can go ahead and do that but I think people are justifiably pissed that we require invasive technology to coddle the idiots who can't be bothered.
>This is just blatantly untrue.
I mean, it's not. Statistics describe how society on average acts, not how you personally act. Someone telling you "Statistically you're more likely to drown if you own a pool" doesn't mean as much if you bought a pool and then became a paraplegic, for example.
Saying "emergency braking will bring down average car deaths" is probably true, but that might not make a difference for Joebob who drives his truck down empty County Road 230 once a week to check his mail.
(He might even be statistically more likely to run into the car he’s not used to seeing on the usually empty road via the stop sign he usually blows right through. Who knows?)
That's not how statistics work. Again, statistics mean little to the individual.
I don’t think you’re clear on the definition of “statistically”.
Citing things with >90% probability does not, actually, prove your weak point that "all statistical probabilities are individual certainties".
> This is just blatantly untrue.
This statement is blatently untrue. If a "driver gets in an accident every X miles/km" does that mean if you drive more than X miles, you're "overdue?" No, that's a statistical fallacy. Aggregate statistics are only meaningful if you're within a standard deviation of the mean. If you are a safe driver, it's likely to be meaningless. If you are a reckless driver, you're unlikely to live long enough to find out.
No. You are sharing the road with others, of variable skill, and things like deer and pedestrians who can dart into traffic. I’ve been crashed into from behind while stopped in traffic; no fuckup on my end, but still would have likely benefited from automated emergency braking.
Your car insurance also reflects others’ accident rates. You shoulder some of the medical and fire and police costs via taxes. Lots of statistical impact even in a perfect driver or someone who never drives at all.
Here's one interpretation of "statistics are meaningless to the individual": If X makes people in general statistically more likely to do Y (such as "avoid accidents", in this case), it does not say anything about the effect it will have on a particular individual's behavior, such as you or me. In fact, it could very well make you or me less likely to do Y. As long as it averages out over the population, the statistic is still true. But you need to know the individual in order to know how X specifically affects them.
I think you are taking a different/broader-scope interpretation of the statement. Something like: if X makes people in general (...as above), then given that we live in a society of various people, it will have some at least some impact, perhaps indirect, on all of us (c.f. your comments about taxes, insurance rates, etc).
Maybe you got that already, but I'm a sucker for helping people be aware of when they're talking past each other (:
It was also (by some stretches of imagination) the argument against the Patriot Act.
https://udayton.edu/blogs/erma/2022/06/lakewobegon.php
My 'boomer' relatives refuse to wear a seatbelt, regardless of how many fines they've incurred, exactly because they already drive safely.
I don’t even want to know what situations I’d need to be in for my vehicle to actually emergency brake, but I don’t want to find out. It seems like I’m already going to be hitting something anyways so any speed it can bleed off is better.
Honda had a recall for an older AEB system 2017-2019 Accord and CRV:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/nht...
I appreciate your informed opinion!
I'm the driver, I should be in control and there's literally no need to justify it any further. Anything that forcibly takes away control is automatically wrong from a basic human dignity perspective. I couldn't care less what governments or insurers think, I'm the goddamn human and I should have total control over this machine. I'm driving, not being driven.
For another, the NPRM being discussed assumes that essentially 100% of new vehicles will eventually come with AEB systems in the near future. The proposed rulemaking is just formalizing that situation and setting performance standards.
The emergency braking system will automatically stop the car without your input whenever it wants. Judging from this thread, that could be due to anything. False positives have been reported. People should absolutely be able to turn this thing off if they don't trust it.
The proposed rules include false activation tests, monitoring/reporting of unnecessary braking, and NHTSA retains the ability to order recalls if false activations are unreasonably common. It also includes a request for comment on whether manual disablement should be allowed at high speeds. Feel free to submit one if you feel strongly about it.
Snow and gravel are the only valid situations where ABS can increase braking distance.
However, disabling ABS is still a really poor idea.
ABS increases braking distance in the snow because it allows the wheels to rotate so they can grip the road. ABS allowing your front wheels to rotate is why you have any marginal ability to steer and brake simultaneously. Without ABS in the snow your front wheels will lock while steering before your rears and you will lose control of the vehicle.
On top of that, disabling ABS usually disables the vehicle's entire suite of driver aids like traction control and stability control which are extremely helpful in snow.
I can't think of any situation, however contrived, where I would willingly disable ABS on a vehicle in snowy conditions... unless you were trying to slide a car around.
Note that these are all very niche concerns and I think ABS is a fantastic safety feature, but it's still a compromise to improve the averages. This is true of virtually all safety technology.
Absolutely not. There are other people on the road. Families. You don’t get to kill other people in a preventable accident because you believe you’re an above-average human who can outperform a computer.
> What if it being optional increases death statistics massively?
What else would you like to make mandatory to satisfy your death reduction statistics, I wonder? Vaccines?
Let's just go all the way: you're talking about eliminating human agency, autonomy and free will. You want to replace it with decisions made by committee with optimized outcomes and make them mandatory with force of law.
> Should we really be ideologically driven instead of relying on data and measurable effects?
Yes. Do you not have principles, values you won't compromise on?
The argument isn't that a human is better at avoiding accidents than an automated system, the argument is that, as an average human, I'm good enough and the marginal difference isn't worth the complexity and risk that the system introduces.
Vehicle regulation should be based on the overall safest option, not 'dignity' or freedom or individualism anything like that.
These precedents are also creating risk by the way. It hasn't been that long ago since news was posted here of security researchers remotely cutting off car engines or cars repossessing themselves if you don't pay on time. That's the sort of existential risk you're paving the way for by accepting "safety" in exchange for control. It's not really your car anymore, it's the government's car, the insurer's car. What other policies would they like to set, I wonder?
Aren't you notice, my dear safety fan, that the thing you are propagating is effectively adding one more person/actor on the road - a programmer of potentially buggy software, totally not FOSS and without any responsibility for any possible outcomes of possible bugs?
Because nobody has drawn a red line and Ron Jones in 1967 has shown us how vulnerable our freedom is.
We already has a lot of mandatory non-FOSS software in cars which use to phone home which effectively is a streaming (not a video yet, but amount of data is never decreasing). And a lot of so-called safety (surveillance in reality) devices are around us nowadays - phones exposing a lot of uncertain data about us, bank cards which allows banks know where we are right now, etc. If some crackpot politician proves to safety-demanding influencers that video streaming from every moving car helps us to prevent $bad_things_list so that kind of demand is totally possible, especially if using cars for mass killings would become more common than mass shootings.
> I'm just suggesting that regulators should compare accident rates of cars with and without automated breaking.
It's impossible because you have not 100% of the data.
Anyway, I'll add my anecdote when my Toyota surprised me with a panic brake in a blind corner which probably saved my life by not ending up under a stopped bus. But the kicker is that my insurer gave me quite a steep discount when I originally bought the car, specifically due to the emergency brake feature. They may have more data comparing collisions for cars with/without this feature than anons on internet forums, who knows?