Exactly. It's easy to avoid a stationary object on the road in normal visibility out if your headlights work a damn. Maybe I am just too accustomed to driving on rural third world roads where cows wander at night.

From experience, coming up to traffic jams on highways in the past, you can get deceived by cars ahead either stopped or slowing down - you dont expect that, especially after long monotonous driving, hence need for warning lights.

Indeed. I have never driven more than 4-5 hours at a time. I find driving very taxing for me. I tend to be very focused on the road and drive like everyone and everything is trying to kill me. For this reason I don't use driving aids either not even standard cruise control.

I find they help physically. After a few hours of driving I feel less tired and need to rest arms/legs physically.

The mental toll is nearly unchanged.

So when you stop I feel it’s easier to walk around and shop or whatever since I haven’t been applying as much force constantly.

But you still need that mental brake.

I find adaptive cruise control definitely helps with the mental fatigue as well, because I can concentrate on looking for hazards far ahead instead of having to pay attention to keeping distance to the car ahead. But yeah, I never drive more than a few hours without taking a break anyway.

Especially if they don’t slow down/swerve until the last second. If they had done it earlier you would’ve had more time to start noticing something was going on.

Retroreflectors are good but at a long distance you need a significantly brighter light source/reflection to be visible (intensity falling off with distance squared). At highway speeds that distance for safe stopping is probably in the hundred+ feet range.

It seems like in this case the retroreflectors may have worked. The problem is the car that saw and avoided them blocked the BlueCruise car from seeing them until it was too late.