There's a difference between tailgating and using one's space though. I'm a Swiss who's driven in France (countryside) and I've always found French driving style quite pleasant. Quick on the outer lane, giving you space on the inner/middle lane. What I mean is: Legal limits usually don't really reflect what's safe with today's cars, so using the space a bit better shouldn't be a problem as long as you're respectful and reasonable.

So yeah, parent raises interesting questions - since autonomous cars will probably have to follow legal limits, what about driving culture? If it were me I'd solve the issue by giving drivers a slider going from the most aggressive yet still safe distance to the legal distance - with legal warnings you have to tap through if you want to change the slider.

"Legal limits usually don't really reflect what's safe with today's cars,"

Correct - Legal Limits results in many deaths a year that would not occur if the Limits were more strict. People who violate even those rather dangerous limits, result in even more carnage.

I find it fascinating how overconfident people are when it comes to cars, and just feel that because they aren't getting into accidents, that cars are safe.

There isn't a single country in the world that believes that human life is worth more than the convenience of speeding around in cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero is a great concept, but until automation is fully extended, most of the traffic laws, speeds, car spacing will continue to result in people dying in numbers greater than if there were more strict regulations.

> Legal Limits results in many deaths a year that would not occur if the Limits were more strict.

Source on this please. Let's take speed limits as an example. Looking at [1], the data for the US doesn't seem to be conclusive to me - some times speed limit decreases didn't have a significant effect, sometimes increases lead to more crashes, sometimes to less crashes. So I don't know about you, but I wouldn't use such a blanket statement. Also, Europe often has higher speed limits, but significantly less fatalities than the US[2], both by miles driven and by number of cars. That may or may not be causal, but the world is not as simple as it's the law so it must be good.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Effectiveness

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Edit: I've been looking for regulations on following distance, but I can't actually find any. There's lots of rules that are given to driving learners but I can't find anything legally binding, whether for the US nor for European country. Obviously keeping a safe distance is necessary for reducing accidents, but lacking any data I can't really say what distance is safe. In Switzerland we learn the 'two second rule', in the US it seems to be three seconds - which seems excessively much to me - at that distance you'd have driver after driver using the gap in front of you since half the distance would seem close enough to the two-second-rule to them - thus creating way more critical situations where you have to be careful.

I was referring to following distance. And yes, three seconds is the "too liberal" version that I was referring to. Once we have automated systems in place, then anybody cutting into a three second gap gets an automatic $xx fine or some type of penalty to discourage them from doing that.

I assure you, that if every driver on the road was a minimum of 4 seconds behind the car in front of them, with mechanisms to enforce that, certain classes of accidents (predominantly rear-ending events, and rapid-swerve events) would be significantly reduced.

The good news is that over the next 3-5 years, a large number of safety automation systems will start to make their way into high-end $50K+ vehicles. The three that I'm super impressed by (having driven in a bunch of vehicles with them) - are Crash Avoidance (your car hits the breaks to prevent it from running into the vehicle in front of you), Lane Control (Your car keeps you in the current lane), and Blind Spot Protection (Your car prevents you from ramming into a car in your blind spot). If, as I strongly suspect, there is a huge drop in car accidents as a result of these three technologies, then we'll start to see them being introduced into the $30K-$50K range over the following 4-6 years, and then, soon thereafter as the technology has been commoditized, the NHTSA will start requiring it. By 2030, all new cars sold in the United States will require those three technologies.

I can only begin to imagine what new technologies will be developed as the march towards self driving cars takes place.

"Doesn't seem conclusive"? I find it hard to believe you could read that table you linked to and claim that speed limits are not effective. Most of the data presented show double digit correlations between speed limit changes and fatalities!

I'm quoting the data entries for the US that are either nation-wide or multi-state:

decreases

* US (22 states) (1992) 5 mph to 15 mph (8 km/h to 24 km/h) decreases No significant changes

increases

* US (1989) 55 mph to 65 mph (89 km/h to 105 km/h) Fatal crashes increased by 21%

* US (40 states) (1990) 55 mph to 65 mph (89 km/h to 105 km/h) Fatalities increased by 15% Decrease or no effect in 12 States

* US (40 states) (1994) 55 mph to 65 mph (89 km/h to 105 km/h) Statewide fatality rates decreased 3-5% (Significant in 14 of 40 states)

* US (22 states) (1997) 5 mph to 15 mph (8 km/h to 24 km/h) increase No significant changes

So no, I don't see the defining answer here. I'm not saying that the limits should be raised across the board, I'm also not saying that decreases aren't good - all I'm saying is that legal limits should be assessed from time to time (which they are), because of changes in society, technology and new data. Laws are not perfect.

How come it's because of speed when every time someone die in a car he's either drunk, on drugs or felt asleep while driving?

Not to mention people die less because today's cars are also millions times more safe, not because we put speed camera on the side or because people drive slow.

The current model Subaru already has this feature for it's "adaptive cruise control". It has 4 presets for distance it will follow the car in front.

It's obviously only appropriate on the freeway of course. On my commute I will have it set at the second shortest distance because it's frankly a little disconcerting when the person in front of you stops in a hurry. It does, however, mean that people merge in front of you... but somehow, with adaptive cruise, I no longer care.

It's not about the performance of the car that your driving, but about giving you enough time to react. In theory, if your car and the car you were following had same stopping distance, and you could react instantaneously, then you could drive bumper to bumper without incident.

Even with anti lock brakes, the car in front of you probably has them too, so you still have the same time to react as you always did.

Pile-ups still happen pretty frequently, and they could be avoided completely if people were following at a safe distance, and were alert.

You could definitely argue that autonomous cars should be able to follow closer than human operated ones, and I'd buy that.

I agree with everything you wrote. My post was meant to be a reaction to GP's post that implied tailgating to be equal with driving in a way that minifies cars cutting in front of you. I maintain that there is a sweet spot that is both safe as long as you're alert as well as keeps the traffic around you in sort of a steady state where everyone can just keep following. If you let the gap become larger, others will start cutting in - if you then have to use the breaks you basically rely on the guy behind you doing the right thing as well, thus increasing the risk of accidents.

And you can't have legal limits reflecting anything useful because traffic authorities play catch-up with drivers who are so full of themselves they think they're smarter than everyone and can ignore the rules because they know better. You need people obeying the rules, however bad they may be, for traffic engineers to be able to optimize said rules. That's why I think traffic laws should be enforced ruthlessly and in automated fashion.

Intelligence-driven cars will likely fly "under the radar" for a half-decade or so while regulators catch up. Once they do, the industry will be more than ready to accelerate traffic 100% to 300% and ultimately flip the regulatory pressure from machine to human. Humans will need to prove their ability to drive at something like 500 kph.

This actually just gave me an idea. A little rear mounted camera matched with some software that detects tailgaters, records them, automatically uploads the video to Youtube and lists their license plate on a searchable public shaming site.

And enables their insurer to increase the cost of the insurance.

A future, in which even minor offences (of whatever kind) are automatically reported to the police, will bring us one step closer to dystopia. I am not sure your "best case" is desirable at all. (Even if I sometimes wish humans would drive more carefully and patiently.)

Of course, it will likely be a dystopia in which tens of thousands a people's lives will be saved, so there is that.

True, but it's a dangerous precedent. The fact is that a lot of law in areas such as traffic, waste management etc is basically meant to be fluid and a deterrent; if everybody that littered where it was illegal, drank from open containers where it was illegal, fly-tipped or sped was instantly caught, then we'd just have tonnes of people in prison for relatively minor offences.

I think there's a desirable degree of pragmatism to be favoured in lieu of unbounded technological utopianism on this point.

You don't (shouldn't) put people in prison for stuff like this, you keep fining them increasing amounts of money until they stop doing the thing they are not supposed to be doing. The world would be a much better place if the traffic (and waste) laws were more, maybe even automatically, enforced.

Case in point: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/singaporean-man-fined-...

I think a point system is better than fines. Fines are effective deterrents for most people, but they are unfair on the poor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_system_%28driving%29

You could also have fines proportional to income. Both fines and point systems have their caveats though.

Philosophically speaking, no one will be saved. We are all basically dying. Of course it would be nice to reduce traffic deaths, but we should carefully consider in what way our actions will affect society.

We should not assume this will only affect how people behave in traffic, as well. Other offences will likely also be included.

How is that worse than a dash cam? Should those be banned so that you can have privacy when travelling on public roads?

They are illegal in Germany.

If you want to merge on a lane, what is the workflow then ? Activate the blinker, then wait for the car on the merging lane to give me (security_distance * 2) before merging ? I could wait a (very) long time for this to happen.

Wow, automatic highway surveillance? That's actually a frightening aspect of smart cars that hadn't crossed my mind.. like the driving equivalent of a "thought police" society from 1984 -- but automated.

> like the driving equivalent of a "thought police" society from 1984 -- but automated.

Except in this case it's reporting a crime that you have actually already done - you broke a traffic law. It might not be an extremely serious crime most of the time, but it's absolutely not the same as punishment for thinking about breaking the law.

Depends if it's recording general indiscretions or driving indiscretions. Once all/most driving is automated, I don't think we'll have many driving indiscretions, and you could potentially put them back on the manufacturer in some cases rather than the occupant.

Especially so when the majority of people do not own the car in which they're travelling but are hiring it for the journey like they do a taxi or plane.

   > automatic highway surveillance 

As someone who has lived in the dystopia that is the UK, who've been doing this for ages, it's not so bad.