Rearview Car Cameras Likely Mandated By 2014 652
Hugh Pickens writes "Every year around 17,000 people are injured and over 200 die in backover accidents involving cars, trucks and SUVs. Now the Chicago Tribune reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will send Congress a proposal mandating a rearview camera for all passenger vehicles starting in 2014. 'Adoption of this proposal would significantly reduce fatalities and injuries caused by backover crashes involving children, persons with disabilities, the elderly and other pedestrians,' says NHTSA in its proposal. But the technology won't come cheap. In its study, the NHTSA found that adding a backup camera to a vehicle without an existing visual display screen will probably cost $159 to $203 per vehicle, shrinking to between $58 and $88 for vehicles that already use display screens. Toyota of Albany Sales manager Kelvin Walker says he believes making backup cameras standard on cars made after 2014 is a good idea. 'If you want to get a backup camera with a mirror in it now, it may cost you $700 to $800 as an additional dealer option or you have to purchase a navigation which is about $1,500 to $1,600. So $1,600 compared to $200? You do the math.'"
Winter/mud/etc. (Score:0, Insightful)
Rearview cameras is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
This, as with all car safety laws, isn't a retrofit law. They aren't saying "You have to go buy this and put it on all cars out there." They are saying (or rather considering saying) "All cars made from now on must include this feature."
Same shit as passive safety systems, window mounted stop lights, seatbelts and so on. You needn't retrofit them on something that didn't have them, manufacturers just have to include them on new vehicles.
What. (Score:2, Insightful)
Would a camera have prevented it?
Or will we find new and exciting ways to get ourselves run over because we can't be bothered by our surroundings?
We should consider reducing the amount of silly, wasteful and frivolous laws on the books, before we add to the pile.
I think that front cover of this weeks' The Economist sums up my feelings quite well [economist.com].
More injuries (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll just (Score:2, Insightful)
But I can see all around the blind spot without one, so if something diappears into it, I'll assume it might be there until I see it re-emerge. solved problem for the last 100 years of driving.
Re:WTF (Score:2, Insightful)
They barely look out the front window. Seriously, most people should not be allowed to pilot a car. It's a deadly projectile and yet people drive like they're in a video game.
Re:Simple, don't walk behind cars backing up (Score:5, Insightful)
And if the person behind you is shorter than the peak of your trunk? Children can and do put themselves right behind cars, and some of them do get killed because of that.
While there may be a way to avoid this by combining a walk around the car before entering the car, with near-constant use of the mirrors from the moment you get in the car to the moment you finish reversing, the plain fact is that it is not easy to know if someone less than 3 feet tall is right behind you. I suspect most drivers have avoided hitting kids while backing up more out of luck than out of assiduous mirror-usage.
I don't often say it, but: think of the children!
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect the problem isn't lack of cameras but lack of people paying attention while driving (to whit I saw someone reading a book while making a left turn. great).
What? You want to blame people? You hateful, hateful person! No one is actually responsible for their own actions these days. Silly person...
Re:Simple, don't walk behind cars backing up (Score:3, Insightful)
my wife is disabled, and last time i checked she fitted just fine into an 88 corolla hatchback.
last time you checked, oooh zinger
because you know, every handicapped person is handicapped the same way
they are also the same size
arrogant asshat...
Re:Simple, don't walk behind cars backing up (Score:4, Insightful)
my wife is disabled, and last time i checked she fitted just fine into an 88 corolla hatchback.
Yes, all disabilities are exactly the same.
And public transport is not a viable option everywhere. For example, if you live in the country, where, coincidentally, F-150 are fairly popular.
Re:My phone has a camera (Score:4, Insightful)
how do you see past the passenger seat, genius?
you must turn your head. i'm not sure how it is in the land of the free, but where i'm from when you want to turn or change lanes, the instructors give you the mantra "mirror, signal, headcheck, move".
as in, first you check the mirror, then you use the turn signal (lot of people miss this one), then you actually turn your head around and look where you're going so you can confirm there's nothing in the blind spot that you DO have no matter where you point your mirrors. when all is clear, then you move.
the fact that people don't even believe they have blind spots makes me not want to drive on public roads anymore.
Re:I'll just (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never had cancer. Clearly cancer isn't a risk then.
Re:More regulations = more regulators (Score:4, Insightful)
They used to do this and people were getting killed left and right on the highways in accidents which today are easily survivable. For example, in the 1960s seat-belts were optional and not very common. My father had to specially order them for his cars because they were not standard. Collapsible steering columns, crumple zones, safety glass, etc. were all mandated because it cuts down on deaths and serious injury. I suspect having this feature will lower insurance costs, perhaps enough to cover the additional cost. Many of the safety features save money by lowering the cost of people in emergency rooms.
Re:Simple, don't walk behind cars backing up (Score:4, Insightful)
i do not want to share a road with you.
simple. if you can't see all around you, don't fucking move until you can!
People make mistakes. So if I'm reversing out of a parking spot, and you walk behind my car, with lights clearly indicating that I'm reversing, and I hit you, you may have the law on your side, but I know it hurts you considerably more than it hurts me.
Especially if I move forward / backward over you a few times to make sure you can't sue me.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
People back over other people because they aren't looking behind them
This is about sight lines. The problem it's trying to solve is backing up over someone who's too short & too close to be seen over the back of the car even if you *do* look in the mirror.
Re:My phone has a camera (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically I could do this, but it's a distraction. If I can't see the side of my own car, then when I look in the mirror I have no frame-of-reference for what I'm looking at. Yes, I guess I can deal with this, but it makes me very unsure while driving. I suspect a great many people are like me in this regard - it's very distracting not to be able to see the side of the car, since you have no real idea what you're looking at or where.
And as you say - since what you see changes based on how you position your head, having a "floating" frame of reference in the mirror means you can never be entirely sure you're see all the important spots.
Re:My phone has a camera (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you do have your mirrors angled right, you'll still have blind spots.
That said - there's nothing wrong with turning your head and looking into those blind spots.
When I was taught to drive, the first thing my instructor did was park up round the corner of my house and showed me how to angle the mirrors. He told me to describe what I could see. Then he told me to look over my right shoulder at the fence behind me. One of the large panels had graffiti on it - which I couldn't see in any of the three mirrors I had. That lesson, out of all them has stuck with me the most.
No - I don't think these cameras will do what they say they will do. I'm not even sure they will save that many of the 17k accidents from occurring because in my experience these accidents are caused by people who aren't paying attention. If they aren't paying attention their mirrors and turning round to look in their blind spots - what makes you think that they will pay attention to a screen on their dash?
Re:Christ, (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond lives, I see potential in preventing "oopsie, I backed into a parked car"-type accidents, avoid just one of those over the life of the vehicle and the camera more than paid for itself.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
But if they really want to reduce child deaths they should maybe look at other causes [cdc.gov] first, since this cause seems to be relatively insignificant compared to other causes. Of course it's easier to raise a "hidden" tax than to use actual tax money to invest in health care instead of say military.
One of our installers ran over and killed his 3 year old just two weeks ago. It would have been nice to have a camera, as th e child darted out of the house as the father was backing out. I know another fellow who killed his daughter that way thirty years ago.
I have a back up camera installed on my RV, along with a fresnel lens, and west coast mirrors. The back up camera is so inexpensive that it seems a crime to not require them. And I'm not even a safety first person
But here we are in 21st century America, where a no brainer like a requirement for backup cameras becomes a political issue like taxes. You've said your part, maybe next up will likely be someone saying that if people can't control their children, then don't make ME pay for it! I think that if we tried to mandate headlights today, someone would be complaining about "Those Damn socialists telling us how we're supposed to outfit our cars!"
Re:Christ, (Score:2, Insightful)
> You're ignoring the costs of the emergency services to deal with an accident
You are right. I was ignoring a lof things. It is called a back of the envelope calculation, to see if a proposal passes the smell test. Take the most optimistic numbers from the article (almost certainly overcounting every minor injury to inflate the problem and seriously lowballing the price of the proposed solution) and Google up the one missing number (number of cars sold annually) to make a first run through. It failed. If you were expecting a detailed, exhaustive cost benefit analysis would be performed on the spot for the benefit of the mindless hordes on what passes for slashdot these days, who would mostly ignore it anyway if it disagreed with their preconceived notions of the majesty and infallibility of the State, you are delusional. Do the word 'perls before swine' ring any bells?
Bottom line, even if you are obsessed with safety and totalitarian enough to believe in ordering everyone else to implement your pet notions, there are thousands of better places to be a busybody do gooder where you save more lives per million of other people's money spent. If a billion dollars (and that is a ball park of the annual price tag) on cancer research couldn't save 200 lives I'd be really shocked. And yes it really does work that way, money seized and spent on this misguided project of government directed spending isn't available to be taxed and directly spent on research. Do the math. A billion dollars of research or save two hundred people who couldn't see the reverse lights or the new government mandated backup alarms and get out of the way. One or the other. We don't live in such prosperous times we can ignore economic reality any more, we live in an age of limits and can no longer afford to be stupid.
> But I suspect you already knew that and were just trolling.
No, the first post was simply being brief. THIS post is a troll. Please compare and contrast. Just so you will know the difference in the future.
Stupid to mandate technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a car with a rear backup sensor. I feel like this is better than a camera, because rather than having to interpret what I see visually on a small screen, I get a simplified display of objects anywhere around the rear of the car along with an audio alarm as things get closer to the bumper.
So I don't feel like mandating cameras is a good idea, when there are other possible technologies that could work as well or better.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most RV cameras are wide angle lenses, and being mounted at the very rear of the car, they are in a position where they have a much better view of what is about to T-bone you than the driver seat with its view obscured by the truck, wall, etc you are parked next to.
Cost/benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't the number of people that die that determines whether it is worthwhile, it is the cost/benefit ratio. Fortunately, TFA provides some of the needed information, but it doesn't seem very consistent.
"But regulators say that 95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle." (Compared to the 200/17000 numbers, it looks like they believe the cameras will about halve the number of accidents.)
"...regulators predicted that adding the cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year, or $160 to $200 a vehicle." Wikipedia says 5.5 million vehicles sold in USA in 2009. (I presume this is new sales only.) This would imply about $500 per vehicle to reach $2.7 billion.
"For the 2012 model year, 45 percent of vehicles offer a rearview camera as standard equipment." Is that 45% of vehicles sold, or 45% of models? If 45% of vehicles, then only 55% are going to have extra cost if the cameras are required.
Optimistic cost/benefit ratio: 112 deaths prevented per year, 55% of 5.5 million vehicles at $160 per vehicle = 484 million dollars per year = $4.3 million dollars to save one life and 75 injuries. (75=8374/112)
Pessimistic cost/benefit ratio: 95 deaths prevented per year at a cost of $2.7 billion per year = $28 million to save one life and a bunch of injuries.
(Note that the cost is up-front, but the benefit is spread out over the ~10 year lifetime of the vehicle, which makes the investment a little less attractive, but I'm not trying to account for this.)
Re:My phone has a camera (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do I have to buy one because you want one? How about if you want one, YOU buy one and leave me the hell alone.
More targets for your angst:
air bags, turn signals, High and low beams, secondary hood latches, center brake lights, brake lights, child restraint seats, removing hood ornaments, crumple zones. tipover fuel line cutoffs, lap seat belts, shoulder belts, reverse lock-outs, rear view mirrors, side lights Gas tank connection isolation. Safety testing, collapsible steering wheels, non-metallic soft dashboards, laminated windshields, tempered rear and side windows, side beams, roll cages, Bumper heights.
Why should you have to pay for any of this stuff? You won't ever need any of it if you aren't in an accident.
Re:What. (Score:5, Insightful)
what idiot lets their toddler out in the driveway alone to wave goodbye to someone?
They're called "toddlers" because they know how to "toddle", i.e. walk around by themselves. That means that all it takes is you looking away from them for 5 seconds and they could be behind the Canyonero before you look back.
if the kid is too young to not know that standing behind a backing up car is dangerous, he's too young to be out running around by himself and it's 100% the fault of whoever is supposed to be watching them.
You're right -- but blaming the grieving parents for their 5 seconds of inattention won't bring their dead child back, or save the next one either. In particular if your solution is to demand that parents never make a mistake, ever -- well, that's not a solution at all, it's just a way to make yourself feel better by blaming someone else.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Captain Obvious says (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh, I'd much rather someone sold a car without all the extras. Even if you don't have the extra, the added cost of supporting the option of many of the add-ons makes cars cost a lot. I'm sure it's possible to make a $5000 car that meets all safety and emission requirements, but I guess nobody is interested in buying a vehicle. Everyone wants to buy a lifestyle.
This makes me wonder...if the camera breaks, am I then mandated to get it fixed or fail my next inspection? What if it costs several grand to get a broken camera fixed or replaced?
Re:Christ, (Score:4, Insightful)
Put some more numbers to it:
in the 80s it was calculated that those high rear taillights (in the middle of a car) would prevent 50% of accidents. Later they recalculated it's a lot closer to 5%.
Rearview cameras will get dirty & will prevent some people from using their own eyes in some cases. Who benefits?
Probably somebody has a ton of shitty old TFT resistive panels left to unload, or some other ulterior motive that will come out years from now.
Another example of legislation without a factual basis was the "headlights on all the time" mandated in the 1990s. Someone did a study and found that drivers who turned their headlights on in the daytime were far less likely to get into accidents. They confused correlation with causation and arrived at the wrong conclusion, that it was the headlights preventing accidents. In reality, headlights didn't change the accident statistics at all, but cost us millions of barrels of oil powering them all. What they really learned was that a person who voluntarily takes actions for their own safety are far less likely to get in accidents. "Headlights on for safety" was only a side effect of a careful driver.
It's also why Volvos are such "safe" cars. Someone has to be pretty desperately concerned for their safety before buying something that ugly. :-)
However, in this case, I have to agree with the backup cameras directly adding to safety. Every new car I've sat in for the last few years has had high side and rear windows, and poor lines of sight to close-up obstacles. Our new car has a backup camera, and there is simply no comparison in terms of visibility. The lens doesn't show too much peripheral vision, however, so it also has ultrasonic detectors that pick up motion and warn of external objects approaching from the rear sides. These also add to safely backing out of perpendicular parking spots, which are especially problematic when stuck beside a giant blind spot created by an SUV, truck, or van. I can't tell how many actual accidents they've prevented in the past year, because they probably would have been avoided by traditional means (sight, brakes, honking, flipping of fingers, etc.) but I know I've had no accidents when using them.
I've also been involved in a dual rear-end collision in a parking lot. My little pickup met a Mercedes Benz at about 4-5 MPH. I had checked over my shoulder before moving, and was backing out using the mirror, and the car in the slot opposite mine was simultaneously backing out and was hidden from my line of sight below the level of the tailgate. We both were backing our tails out to the west, so each of us entered the other's mirror blind spot almost immediately. Turns out the final score was steel bumper: 0, engineered crumple zones: -$$$$. While no lives were threatened, a backup camera would have saved both of us from having to deal with a collision that cost far more than any camera system on the market.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose that these cameras could prevent half of all backup deaths.
TFA says that 200 people are killed by backover accidents, so that's saving a hundred lives a year.
TFA also gives a range for the cost of these things. Let's take $200, since we all know government tends to underestimate cost.
Per Wikipedia, 5.5 million cars are sold this year. Multiplying, that means that mandating these cameras on all of them will cost about a billion dollars.
I guarantee you that you can save a lot more than a hundred lives if you spend a billion dollars on any number of other things (diabetes education, suicide prevention and mental illness care, cancer screenings for the poor, medical research in general, take your pick).
Re:I'll just (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of "you should learn to be a better driver" doesn't work in practice. A disturbingly large number of drivers are mentally the equivalent of children who are baffled by a parent playing peek-a-boo, yet most of them are issued drivers licenses anyway. Unless you're going to revamp the driver's license system to be biannually test-based, like pilot's licenses, hoping for them to improve is a fool's hope. So any tool you put in their stupid hands that makes the world a tiny bit safer for the rest of us is a good thing.
It'd be different if they only risked their own lives, but in this case they're only risking the lives of others. Darwin's theory doesn't help us out with this problem.
And not only is that base assumption wrong, but his statement fails utterly to take history into account: 100 years of driving has created a new category of fatality rate bested only by our improvements in weapons and war. "Solved problem for the last 100 years of driving" is simply false. It's really a new problem created by the last 100 years of driving.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cars are not a "right". They have to integrate with the rest of the transportation system on a giant grid of shared roads. If they aren't integrating properly, they should not be permitted to be in the system at all. Safety is just one attribute they need to have.
If it were just your car in just your driveway, fine. Back up around your property all you want, drive around it blindfolded, I don't care. And if this was something that affected only your personal safety, and not that of other people, I wouldn't care either. If you don't want to pay for a car with a driver's side airbag, and would rather die in a head-on collision, I'm all for it. Sayonara, cheapskate. But when you are on the public roads, you damn sure better play well with the other drivers. That means a vehicle that minimizes the risks to the rest of us.
If the cost of these keep the price of cars unaffordably high to 0.001% of people, and makes them take buses instead, I'm good with that. I'd rather have you on a bus than driving a piece of shit that's not safe, and endangering me and my friends with it.
Re:Winter/mud/etc. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, 200 kids a year are killde becasue they can not be seen.
"The Darwinists would be pretty happy:"
A) There isn't any such thing as a Darwinists . It's a term used to set up ad hom attacks against Darwin tin a vain and omronic attempt to deride evolution
B) No one is happy about it.
C) You lack of understanding evolution is appalling.
"Maybe it's cheaper and just as effective to have these people and their victims appear in an ad telling parents and drivers to be more careful? e.g. "You don't want to be like me - someone who squished his own daughter"."
In what way does that magically gift the driver the ability to see through a car? Because people whoa re talking all the safety precaution they can also back up over children.
"The USA isn't as rich as it used to be, so it should seriously consider spending the money in more bang for buck stuff For instance fixing its education system - that would save more lives than these cameras."
While true, we need to makes some changes to the educational system, the government doesn't pay for this, the consumer will.
PLEASE TRY to think through the problem.
Re:I'll just (Score:5, Insightful)
What an absurd statement. There are all kinds of flashing lights and gates that raise and lower at railroad crossings. Probably billions are spent on installing and maintaining them every year.
Re:I'll just (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you see on the ground directly behind your rear wheel? I thought not. A small child lying down to reach something, or fallen down, is way way below any site line from the drivers seat, no matter if you swivel your head 360 degrees and use all three mirrors. You would have to work the side mirror controls extensively; even then it's very dubious you could cover all approaches; and by the time you'd examined all achievable areas, there would have been plenty of time to miss things in the areas your mirrors weren't pointing.
Unless you are staring at ALL approaches to the blind areas 100% of the time (good luck driving), there is a risk someone or something can enter it without your noticing.
Re:FLIR (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this is from a country that now has ordered a private business to give a product away for free. That is, ordered insurance companies to cover birth control without any co-pay. Why no co-pay? Because it's so cheap to begin with ($20-$50/month). When do I get my free drugs for conditions that aren't voluntary, like my glaucoma meds that cost me over $100/month with insurance??? But get some special interest group together (like maybe people who make backup cameras and birth control pills???), and suddenly a government mandate shows up.
I'm really getting tired of the federal government deciding what is best for others, and making me pay for it. Sure, it only costs $200. Now, add on anti-lock brakes, 5mph bumpers (which don't work), and a host of other things that the government has mandated 'for your own good', and the cost of just the government mandates for a car probably easily adds another 3 or 4 thousand dollars to the price. Pretty soon those little lights on mirrors that detect someone in your blind spot will be required. Isn't it interesting that people will buy those things that want them anyway, but for some reason the government decides that people that don't want to pay for them have to have them anyway
Enough already. I'll put up with the pollution stuff, since there is an effect on everyone. But seat belts, safety mirrors, and the rest?? If you want it
But the government requiring backup cameras is just going too far. If you are so stupid that you can't look behind you and make sure where your kids are, buy one. If a parent is so stupid they let their kids run around parking lots or down streets without watching them, maybe evolution does work.