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.
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.