New Cars' Pedestrian-Safety Features Fail In Deadliest Situations, Study Finds (wsj.com) 104
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New safety features being rolled out by auto makers to keep drivers from hitting pedestrians don't work at times in some of the most dangerous situations and frequently fail at night, according to a new study by AAA. Testing performed by the association found that pedestrian-detection technology offered in four different models performed inconsistently and didn't activate properly after dark, when many roadway deaths occur. The uneven performance highlights the challenges the auto industry faces as it looks to automate more of the car's driving functions and roll out new crash-avoidance technologies that rely on sensors and software to detect road hazards.
For the AAA study, testers picked four sedan models -- the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 -- and put the cars through scenarios meant to replicate some of the most dangerous situations for pedestrians. One test, for instance, simulates a child darting out from between parked cars, and another involves an adult crossing the road as the vehicle turns right. At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night, Mr. Brannon said, the deadliest time for pedestrians. Three-quarters of all pedestrian fatalities occur after dark, according to AAA. When testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark, however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to provide any alert of a pedestrian's presence before a collision. "Pedestrian fatalities are really becoming a crisis," said Greg Brannon, AAA's director of automotive engineering. While such pedestrian-detection systems have the potential to save lives, drivers shouldn't become overly reliant on them to prevent accidents, Mr. Brannon said.
"It's going to be a little while before the effectiveness of the system catches up with the marketing, unfortunately," AAA's Mr. Brannon said.
For the AAA study, testers picked four sedan models -- the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 -- and put the cars through scenarios meant to replicate some of the most dangerous situations for pedestrians. One test, for instance, simulates a child darting out from between parked cars, and another involves an adult crossing the road as the vehicle turns right. At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night, Mr. Brannon said, the deadliest time for pedestrians. Three-quarters of all pedestrian fatalities occur after dark, according to AAA. When testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark, however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to provide any alert of a pedestrian's presence before a collision. "Pedestrian fatalities are really becoming a crisis," said Greg Brannon, AAA's director of automotive engineering. While such pedestrian-detection systems have the potential to save lives, drivers shouldn't become overly reliant on them to prevent accidents, Mr. Brannon said.
"It's going to be a little while before the effectiveness of the system catches up with the marketing, unfortunately," AAA's Mr. Brannon said.
Maybe the problem isn't the cars.. (Score:3, Insightful)
...but distracted drivers... ...and people with their fucking faces in a phone 24/7 not looking where they're going.
Meanwhile, in the USA we suffer from the gape-mouthed tall-hood syndrome plaguing modern car design since Europa decided to impose their onerous pedestrian-safety regs. And because globalization, our shit has to sell there, so now our cars look as hideous as theirs. And so do the Japs. Toyota in particular lost their shit as of the past 5 years or so.
How about... drivers, pay attentions, and peds get your fucking head out of the cockpit?
Completely false premise. (Score:3)
Are you the Flash, or why do you think anyone can prevent ramming a kid that dashes out between parked cars?
Please go an check your unprepared reaction time to things.
You'll be horrified. A whole second is to be expected.
Without preparation (seeing the ball approach long in advance), and reflexes even playing tennis would be completely impossible.
Now add darkness, maybe rain, other cars, paying attention to lights, and maybe kids in the back ...
It's just plain statistics.
Re: (Score:2)
Please go an check your unprepared reaction time to things.
Under an eighth of a second. Further, when driving I tend to be prepared.
Re:Completely false premise. (Score:4, Informative)
Under an eighth of a second.
An alert driver requires about 1.5 seconds to notice a situation, move their foot to the brake, and depress it enough to start to slow the vehicle.
At 60mph, that is 132 feet to start braking.
Re: (Score:2)
Under an eighth of a second.
An alert driver requires about 1.5 seconds to notice a situation, move their foot to the brake, and depress it enough to start to slow the vehicle.
At 60mph, that is 132 feet to start braking.
Which is why there are no 60mph speed limits in pedestrian locations.
Do you have to math on 25 mph?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Under an eighth of a second.
An alert driver requires about 1.5 seconds to notice a situation, move their foot to the brake, and depress it enough to start to slow the vehicle.
At 60mph, that is 132 feet to start braking.
Where did you get this 1.5 seconds figure from?
Re: (Score:2)
Where did you get this 1.5 seconds figure from?
From this wikipedia page: Braking distance [wikipedia.org].
Re: Completely false premise. (Score:2)
Hence when driving passed parked cars I tend to go slower. It's not just kids, adults will happily walk out in front of cars without looking. Even if I don't have time to react, hitting them at 25 is going to be better than 40 by a long shot.
There are times and places where a bit of speed
Re: (Score:2)
Obvious solution: don't go 60 MPH on a residential street.
Re: (Score:2)
An alert driver requires about 1.5 seconds to notice a situation, move their foot to the brake, and depress it enough to start to slow the vehicle.
I find myself wondering how this could be true.
If I play a game, such as Counter Strike, delays as short as 10 milliseconds seem to matter.
I drive a lot. Needless to say, I have had to emergency brake a lot over the decades. I am pretty sure that my reaction time is significantly faster than 1.5 seconds. That is 1,500 milliseconds... If you reaction time is 1,500 milliseconds in a game like Counter Strike, you are effectively useless.
So how is the reaction time so long when driving?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I have, Baltimore, New York there are places that people don't give two shits about their own safety and pedestrians and bicyclists are the worst. Hell one time I was nearly taken out by a bicyclist in DC and I was was the one legally crossing; he was running a stoplight.
Re: (Score:2)
If at all possible, I would have most of the dash lights a reddish color. Red is more friendly to human night vision than any other color,
What appalled me is that when blue LEDs were still new and all of the rage, I could *feel* my pupils contract when I saw blue LEDs on a car's instrument panel at night.
Not only did they put style above function, but they did it in a way that endangered lives!
Please tell me there there was no "Ford memo" regarding this, because it would set the low
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Although.. using a red filter has long been a military approach to minimising damage to night vision when using a light source in the field.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In nearly 2 million miles of driving, I've never even come close to hitting a pedestrian. You have to pay attention and know what kind of situations could be coming up ahead. Don't drive looking at the 20 or 30 feet in front of you. Drive as far as you can see.
If you're in a residential neighborhood and there are cars parked along each side of the road, your mind should say, "there could be kids playing here". And if you actually see kids playing in their front yard ahead of you, you slow down and watch.
If you're in an area where there are pedestrian crosswalks, that should be a hint that there may be pedestrians.
At night slow your ass down. Headlights illuminate only so far down the road and you don't want to go so fast that you can't stop in that illuminated distance.
Also, at night, turn down your dash lights. Some cars have dash lights so bright it's like trying to see past a 100 watt light in your face. Darken the inside of the car and you'll see better outside of the car. Duh.
Construction zones have a lower speed limit for a reason. Slow down and watch the people working so you don't hit one of them. Better to hit a barrel than a body.
And put down the damned phone!
And you want to be in your mirrors at least 30% of the time. (my dad taught me 50%, but that's just crazy.)
Situational awareness.
Unfortunately the subtle nuance of driving is lost on the simple minded, and honed by the intelligent.
Re: (Score:2)
You sound like you're "driving to conditions". Damn those conditions. The speed limit says 50 so I will drive 50 as the law intended!
- Signed the typical driver with "get out of my way I'm bigger than you" syndrome.
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
You're living in the past, grandpa.
We've already seen some success with radar being able to bounce under vehicles to see what's on the other side and return a signal. Right now, AFAIK it's just being used in highway collision avoidance, where it can see traffic slowing beyond the car in front of the vehicle. Doesn't seem like it's too much of a stretch to incorporate a similar technology into pedestrian detection under/around parked cars.
When you say, "No computer will ever....", you're getting into "Old ma
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Uhh did you not bother to read TFA before you spewed your drivel? They state quite clearly the TECH DON'T WORK in the situations that cause the most fatalities, so you are making about as much sense as claiming "Hey we're still killing people but the cars are self parking now, yay technology!".../smh/
The fact that the article mentioned low light conditions were such a problem for the tech suggests they are using mostly vision-based systems. LIDAR and RADAR imaging are more reliable, but also currently more expensive. As the cost of that tech comes down, we'll see it incorporated into more and more mainstream applications and the reliability of these collision avoidance systems will improve.
Re: (Score:2)
The best pedestrian safety feature offered by some luxury cars is an infra-red HUD that highlights pedestrians the driver might not see after dark (Based, IIRC, on similar military tech). For the driver who is paying attention, this can really help.
But ot's always worth pointing out that more drunk pedestrians are killed by sober drivers than vice versa. Pay attention before you step off a curb, no matter how addictive your phone might be. It's your life, whoever's fault you want to say it is.
Re: (Score:2)
But ot's always worth pointing out that more drunk pedestrians are killed by sober drivers than vice versa. Pay attention before you step off a curb, no matter how addictive your phone might be. It's your life, whoever's fault you want to say it is.
Uncle Chuck says that's how we evolve smarter pedestrians.
Re: (Score:2)
mod this up but also in larger cities there's a ton of J-Walking and distracted walkers too. Don't believe me? Drive through New York or Baltimore.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the problem isn't the cars.....but distracted drivers... ...and people with their fucking faces in a phone 24/7 not looking where they're going.
Agree. A simple cellular jammer could be a very effective, but highly unpopular safety measure.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in the USA we suffer from the gape-mouthed tall-hood syndrome plaguing modern car design since Europa decided to impose their onerous pedestrian-safety regs
I'm annoyed because I didn't have safety bumpers on my browser and accidentally closed the window with a perfectly composed response to this nonsense.
But I was genuinely curious about what safety regulations you're talking about, especially those that Europe may have imposed upon us.
I came across Dagmar bumpers [wikipedia.org] which I think look really cool, but I'm not sure European regulations killed them.
In that article they do say:
In 1974, motoring press applied the name of statuesque British actress Sabrina to oversized pairs of protruding rubber bumper blocks added to MG MGB, MG Midget, Triumph Spitfire and Triumph TR6 sports cars to meet strengthened US auto safety regulations.
Which part of the EU is the US in again? I can't remember.
And I found this:
The American [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Dagmars trace to the 40s on US cars, starting with Cadillac, but became most prevalent in the early to mid 50s (after which they started getting bits of rubber on tip, which naturally came to be called "pasties" . . .)
the original purposes were first to protect the car in a collision, and secondly to look sleek.
The same designer is responsible for introducing tailfins, which were styled after/inspired by the P-38 Lightning fighter.
[OK, I have a Cadillac problem :) ]
hawk
Re: (Score:2)
i agree, but have you seen modern car dashboards?
what monstrosities have they become?
up to 3 different big (touch) screens is no longer something special, it's ridiculous.
and what is worse, all controls are being replaced by these screens.
from what i've seen you can't even adjust the ventilation holes on a tesla 3, except with use of the touch screen.
even if you do not want to be distracted, the current crops of modern car control schemes will distract you.
How realistic were the substitutes? (Score:2)
A fully stationary dummy may not cross the threshold of detection which will be tuned against tagged observations to reduce false positives.
Re: How realistic were the substitutes? (Score:2)
The Honda system uses radar to avoid collisions so I doubt it was a matter of recognizing person vs barrel -- it would stop for either.
The test is invalid, the anti collision braking isn't going to stop for a moron throwing the car into a right hand turn at 20-30mph where anything is in the typical sidewalk location. Same situation with a kid running out between cars, the system can only react to literally what is in front of it, not to the sides.
The test scenarios don't sound realistic for what the system
That was my first thought too. (Score:2)
But then, it should not hit other similar things like that either.
(Although leaving an injured deer is vastly more cruel than leaving a dead deer.)
It's like that neural net that made the statement "All humans are celebrities.", because it was only shown pictures of celebrities.
Re: (Score:2)
first thing that crossed my mind! ofcourse the system doesn't stop, because they're not real humans.
then the second thing that crossed my mind;
why does that even matter? the car hit something, it damaged itself, it couldn't have known the impact so it might have even hurt the passangers etc.
there is no excuse for not stopping (or sounding an alarm) for an obstacle on the road.
They're intended to reduce damage, not prevent imp (Score:2)
20-30mph right hand turn? Kid rubbing out between cars?
These systems aren't meant to replace experienced and attentive drivers who also know when they intend to turn and can observe sidewalks and anticipate.
They're intended to reduce damage by applying full stopping force after the collision is all but inevitable.
If these systems were tuned to prevent vs reduce damage then they'd be self-slamming on brakes all over the place as most drivers tend to operate extremely unsafely.
Re: (Score:1)
>If these systems were tuned to prevent vs reduce damage then they'd be self-slamming on brakes all over the place as most drivers tend to operate extremely unsafely.
That's how they designed them originally, but the self-driving cars kept getting into accidents because people were rear-ending them when they slammed on the breaks.
No control group (Score:3, Insightful)
This info isn't really useful if we don't know how well do humans respond in these situations, or whether the car even physically capable of reliably stopping in time.
Re: (Score:2)
No need for a control group to gauge if a car can stop in time if the car doesn't attempt to stop in the first place.
You don't need to compare to a human driver, just to the advertised feature. It's the same reason we criticise Telsa's "self driving" features. If the feature is better than a normal driver than say so. If it improves safety then say so. But if you're going to say the car detects pedestrians you may want be sure it is actually capable of doing so.
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, accidents wit oxen and horses happened in the farms before the mechanization. Automated system are an aid to drive the car, like the ABS and the traction control and could help the driver to avoid the accident, but the solution to avoid accidents is make people use less the car and ma
Total BS (Score:5, Funny)
Elon Musk says his cars will be robotaxi capable by next year. The tests must be bad.
Re: (Score:2)
And Elon has never missed an announced deadline before.
Oh wait, I meant made an announced deadline.
Re: (Score:2)
What?
Elon Musk Just Met That 100-Day Deadline to Get Australia a Giant Tesla Battery [sciencealert.com]
I don't follow Musk that closely and Tesla has had a few issues, but what car company hasn't had a few down quarters or production issues?
What's their point? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what percentage of the time did an average human driver hit the child when they weren't aware they were on a test and bracing for it?
Technology could reduce the 45,000 annual vehicle fatalities by 99.9% and the headlines would still read that self-driving cars murder 45 people a year.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
One test, for instance, simulates a child darting out from between parked cars, .... The child was struck 89% of the time
And what percentage of the time did an average human driver hit the child when they weren't aware they were on a test and bracing for it?
Technology could reduce the 45,000 annual vehicle fatalities by 99.9% and the headlines would still read that self-driving cars murder 45 people a year.
This is missing the main claims in the article.
First, in the case of the child darting on the street between parked cars, only 89% of the cars hit the child, meaning that 11% avoided hitting the child, which means that the experiment was set up so that there was actually a possibility of the car avoiding the child with proper perception and decision making. So, this was obviously not a case of setting up the cars to fail with a situation that Newtonian physics couldn't avoid.
Second, the article described a
Re: (Score:2)
And what percentage of the time did an average human driver hit the child when they weren't aware they were on a test and bracing for it?
Completely irrelevant. A human isn't making a claim they can avoid something. The whole point here is that manufacturers should make realistic claims to their technology so that drivers know what to expect (e.g. Not falling asleep in a Tesla on autopilot).
So a kid runs out into the street (Score:4, Insightful)
So a kid runs out into the street from between two cars at night....and it's the car's fault?? Sounds more like a Darwin Award is in order here. Next up: If a kid falls off a cliff, it's the cliff's fault.
Re:So a kid runs out into the street (Score:5, Funny)
My name is Cliff, you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:2)
(Ah, still the /. that I know and love)
Re:Roads Should be Private (Score:2)
Correct, it's called driving too fast for conditions, specifically visibility conditions. It's a violation of the Basic Speed Law, just like overdriving your headlights or driving too fast in fog or slippery road conditions.
They don't teach the Basic Speed Law in driving school, do they?
Re: Roads Should be Private (Score:2)
It's a phenomena called Risk Compensation.
It's just that with seatbelts and ABS the risks they removed were greater than the ones we started taking because people understood how the technologies worked. This is why larger cars tend to be involved in more collisions despite there being less fatalities.
With these dr
Re: (Score:2)
So a kid runs out into the street from between two cars at night....and it's the car's fault??
Yes. In fact in many countries the driver is legally culpable and unable to resolve their liability in such a case. Incidentally those are the same countries where drivers are more courteous to pedestrians, don't drive 50 through a narrow alleyway with blind spots because "fuck it" that's the speed limit.
A cliff can't cliff in a way to prevent a kid from dying. You can however drive that way. It's called "driving to conditions".
Re: (Score:2)
The point is that these features lull the driver into a false sense of security. That's the problem with all these features that only half way to making the car self driving.
Years ago someone suggested that the way to make cars safer was to replace the airbag with a big spike. A bit extreme perhaps but the point stands.
Cars don't belong in cities. Plain and simple. (Score:3, Insightful)
Population density is too high. To waste resources like that, too.
Even the US used to do normal pervasive public transport that made a car pretty much obsolete. (Trucks still make sense unless you have a heavy goods equivalent.)
There were even plans to ban cars from cities, precisely due to pedestrians being killed, on streets that belonged to everyone, not just cars.
It's funny, how putting up posters that call people on streets "${insult}walkers" turned US cities into a public transportation wasteland.
And now it is deliberately kept that way with excuses like "It's too late". Stupid jayvoters.
Re:Cars don't belong in cities. Plain and simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Population density has little to do with it. The problem is lack of grade separation:
The biggest difference? Calgary has the one of the world's most extensive systems of skyways, spanning more than 11 miles in length, with 62 bridges over roadways.
And if you're not willing to add grade separation, even just adding simple time-based separation would yield big wins. I drove up in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and just like the other couple of times, I swore I would never do it again, mainly because the stress level was insane. I was constantly having to sit there in completely stopped traffic, and nearly every time, this was caused by a pedestrian lackadaisically strolling across the road while some car ahead of me was waiting to turn at the intersection.
This problem was made even worse by San Francisco's bizarre decision to let pedestrians start crossing several seconds before the light turned green, which completely eliminated any possibility of ever turning right on red before the pedestrians blocked the intersection, resulting in often getting only one or two cars out per cycle of the light. You literally cannot get any more inefficient than most of the traffic lights I saw, short of blocking the roads off entirely.
If, instead of allowing pedestrians to cross the road during traffic cycles, pedestrians consistently had their own cycle at every single intersection across the entire city, traffic would flow much, much better, and pedestrians would approximately never get run over. Literally everything that is wrong with both pedestrian collisions and traffic flow can be pinned squarely on trying to have pedestrians and traffic in the intersection at the same time.
What I don't get is this: The solutions to these problems are blatantly obvious, and have been known for years. So why aren't things improving? How many more people have to die before our politicians take this problem seriously?
Re: (Score:3)
Ah, the Waymo solution: redesign and rebuild cities to prohibit human beings from walking. A simply brilliant Silicon Valley idea.
Re:Cars don't belong in cities. Plain and simple. (Score:4, Informative)
That works great at the one intersection near where I live that implemented it, except for those drivers who know that there is no enforcement (thank you NYPD) and who therefore blow through their red light anyway - pedestrians be damned.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile London has 73 deaths per year despite being twice the size of both of those put together.
You failed to factor in population, availability of public transport, public driving standards, road laws and the weather.
What I don't get is this: The solutions to these problems are blatantly obvious, and have been known for years. So why aren't things improving? How many more people have to die before our politicians take this problem seriously?
Because the solutions aren't obvious at all.
For instance,
This problem was made even worse by San Francisco's bizarre decision to let pedestrians start crossing several seconds before the light turned green
I live in a country in which pedestrians can cross the road at any point. We don't need fucking permission.
Drivers know this, so drive accordingly.
So your solution is to stop pedestrians crossing the road, my solution is to stop peopl
Re: (Score:2)
That works fine when pedestrians are rare. It falls apart in a place like San Francisco, where you can literally have a continuous flow of pedestrians that will block the road indefinitely if you don't limit the pedestrians to fixed time windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you been to fucking London? Or Sydney? Or Berlin? Or indeed most of fucking Europe, where pedestrians are plentiful.
Shit, try fucking Kowloon, population density of 43,000 per square mile. Pedestrian deaths in the whole of Hong Kong: 64/year and trust me, San Francisco has fewer pedestrians in the entire fucking city than Kowloon has on a single fucking street. I've been to both.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I've been to London, and lots of other cities in Europe. I even drove in Paris. Maybe there are some parts of those cities that can compare, but my experience is that driving SF feels markedly worse than Manhattan or Boston, much less any European city that I've been to or driven in (though actually finding your way around Boston when the road down by the Esplanade is closed for Independence Day is quite another matter, and I'm of course ignoring the flood of pedestrians at the end of that celebrat
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for correcting the density in Kowloon. I think it's reasonable to state that Kowloon's average is substantially higher than San Francisco's.
If you adjust for the number of cars, Hong Kong would look about as bad as SF fatality-wise.
That would be the Hong Kong that has raised pedestrian walkways over half the island?
The raised walkways you were saying would save lives in San Francisco?
https://www.theguardian.com/ar... [theguardian.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is lack of grade separation:
The problem is people attributing things to a single problem. The fact is there are many factors at play, especially when you look at different countries (or even states). Honestly I was amazed when I first visited the Netherlands at how slow cars drove in built up areas and how they would often senselessly give way to pedestrians. The cities separate pedestrians and cars far worse than major Australian cities do, yet somehow the country has 1/3rd of the pedestrian fatalities.
It turns out teach people to lo
Re: (Score:2)
In a perverse way, perhaps codd
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need a full "No right on red". You just need to ban right turns during the pedestrian part of the cycle. The way you would normally do that is with a flashing red turn arrow. You use the flashing red arrow while vehicular traffic is moving in some other direction, with a sign that says "Right turn after stop on flashing red arrow. No right turn on solid red arrow." A
Re: (Score:2)
Houston drivers are idiots and assholes though, I can tell you that with some certainty.
As someone from Houston, I can attest. Our douche:tolerant driving ratio is pretty bad.
Not enough "I" in the "AI" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how all of the initial posts on this subject are missing the point. Sure, people would be safer if they didn't get in front of cars, but the the fact remains that these cars have an advertised feature that apparently doesn't work well, and probably can't work well with existing "AI" tech. And it may not be "better than nothing" considering that "busy" people may use it as extra license for distraction and complacency.
Re: (Score:2)
How do the numbers compare to unaided drivers? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Is the aided number lower? Then the tech is helping. Perfection is not required to be helpful. Is the aided number higher? Then is the driver relying too much on technology and failing to turn their head and use eyeballs? That would be a driver failure not a tech failure.
What if the aided number is higher and the driver is not relying too much on the technology?
Then you know the robot uprising has begun.
Re: (Score:2)
Today's advertising for autos is touting these safety assists and is very likely convincing drivers to presume the devices are infallible, leading them to relax and let the auto handle things we'd formerly been taught to be vigilant for.
I expect that every safety assist device or feature has a disclaimer warning the driver about a lack of vigilance. That these devices/features supplement, not replace, driver vigilance.
Re: (Score:2)
Unluckily, people have been trained to pretty much ignore disclaimers as too many are useless.
Re: (Score:2)
How do the numbers compare to unaided drivers?
Not relevant. The manufacturers aren't making a claim comparing to drivers. They are only making claims that the car can avoid hitting pedestrians.
child was struck 89%? (Score:2)
A distracted driver would have hit a child 100% of the time before.
89% saves 11 out off 100 lives. That is still a win.
Re: (Score:2)
A distracted driver would have hit a child 100% of the time before.
89% saves 11 out off 100 lives. That is still a win.
But it's not a completely independent statistic -- drivers may feel confident paying less attention when they "know" the car is watching and will stop if it sees something. So eliminating 10% of the accidents, while enticing 20% of the drivers to pay less attention may lead to a net increase in accidents.
Re: (Score:2)
That's my main issue with these things. Give people safety features that help them identify and react to issues, not ones that try to also control the vehicle.
Too many people will - consciously or not - get used to allowing the vehicle to make those decisions, and (as this study demonstrates) the technology just isn't capable yet.
It's bad enough being stuck on a major road behind some cunt with adaptive cruise control, their car constantly braking and accelerating to stay a fixed distance behind the vehicle
Re: child was struck 89%? (Score:2)
The answer is no.
Risk Compensation is the reason it is no.
Sounds like a win? (Score:2)
Front-side protection too (Score:2)
Another area that seems to be lacking is looking for objects coming from the side at the front of the car. Rear blindspot detection works well, warnings when pulling out of a parking space while a car is approaching are very helpful (and seem to be pretty accurate).
I wish they put the same effort into front-side protection as well -- I was riding my bike down a hill once and a car pulled right in front of me, I managed to avoid him mostly, I clipped the side of his car. He stopped, I yelled something to the
Perhaps they only detect real people (Score:2)
Not plastic ones? Lots of countries have life-sized 'dummies' of school-children on each side at the most important crossings so that people pay attention.
Re: (Score:2)
Not plastic ones? Lots of countries have life-sized 'dummies' of school-children on each side at the most important crossings so that people pay attention.
That sounds like a good idea!
They don't have those here is the U.S.
No one sets them on fire or paints them in black-face or anything?
Cars war on Kids (Score:1)
The thing is these "safe" cars can't detect:
Kids
People on skateboards
People on solowheels
People who aren't white or light shades
Women who aren't 5'6" or taller
and pets.
Just get real and admit the coders and designers are tall white and asian men who test this stuff in empty flat places with little to no weather.
Re: (Score:2)
You provide a list of small things and something which can be described as 'hard to see at night', then use that to make racial assumptions.
Perhaps instead you should consider that small dark objects are hard to see, whatever the height or skin colour of the person performing tests.
But no, you had to be racist. Don't be racist.
Easy fix (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Just Wait.... (Score:2)
Until someone finds a dark remote location and repaints lines that lead off the road into a giant boulder or river.
Obviously you'd have to paint over the existing lines with black paint....
And you would need to paint a mural of a tunnel on the side of the boulder.
I learned it from watching .. WB cartoons as a kid (Road runner)
Re: (Score:2)
And you would need to paint a mural of a tunnel on the side of the boulder.
I learned it from watching .. WB cartoons as a kid (Road runner)
From watching Road Runner, I know for certain that the autonomous vehicle will then be able to drive through that tunnel without problem. Then, when I attempt to follow it, I will get hurt - first when I walk into the side of the boulder, and then again when the large truck drives out of the tunnel and runs me over.
I have an idea (Score:1)
I have a great idea. Instead of pushing the burden of protecting inattentive, texting pedestrians to motor vehicle operators, let's pass a law granting total criminal and civil immunity to drivers who hit pedestrians who are too involved with their phones to pay attention to where they are walking. We should also make a felony out of jaywalking that is the result of being distracted by an electronic device.
I don't see why pedestrians are these models of innocence who deserve all the protection and immunity
Data Point (Score:2)
There were 6,227 pedestrian fatalities in 2018. For scale, this is 2.4% of the estimated 251,454 deaths due to medical errors in the same time period.
Non Paywall Link (Score:2)
Here's a link to the AAA article, rather than the paywalled WSJ:
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/... [aaa.com]
Re: (Score:2)
...and even better, the AAA article links to the actual report (pdf):
https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common... [aaa.com]
Stupid pedestrians. (Score:1)
The kid from between the cars could happen if a human was driving. Even if this is the 1970s. I know, I watched it happen. 25 MPH speed limit and the driver probably was doing 25 MPH. Same thing at night. Car coming? Be careful crossing the road.
Not Sears. No guarantee. Watch out for cars just like we always have.
Yeah, but how did it do compared to humans in the (Score:1)