US Proposes Requiring New Cars To Have Automatic Braking Systems (nytimes.com) 142
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed a rule that would require all new cars and trucks to have automatic braking systems capable of preventing collisions. The rule aims to address the rise in traffic fatalities and would mandate the use of advanced systems that can automatically stop and avoid hitting pedestrians and stationary or slow-moving vehicles. The New York Times reports: The agency is proposing that all light vehicles, including cars, large pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, be equipped to automatically stop and avoid hitting pedestrians at speeds of up to 37 miles per hour. Vehicles would also have to brake and stop to avoid hitting stopped or slow-moving vehicles at speeds of up to 62 m.p.h. And the systems would have to perform well at night. About 90 percent of the new vehicles on sale now have some form of automatic emergency braking, but not all meet the standards the safety agency is proposing.
Automatic emergency braking systems typically use cameras, radar or both to spot vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and other obstacles. By comparing a vehicle's speed and direction with those of other vehicles or people, these systems can determine that a collision is imminent, alert the driver through an alarm and activate the brakes if the driver fails to do so. [...] The safety agency will take comments on the rule from automakers, safety groups and the public before making it final -- a process that can take a year or more. The rule will go into effect three years after it is adopted.
Automatic emergency braking systems typically use cameras, radar or both to spot vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and other obstacles. By comparing a vehicle's speed and direction with those of other vehicles or people, these systems can determine that a collision is imminent, alert the driver through an alarm and activate the brakes if the driver fails to do so. [...] The safety agency will take comments on the rule from automakers, safety groups and the public before making it final -- a process that can take a year or more. The rule will go into effect three years after it is adopted.
need to ban makeing this an DLC as that last thing (Score:3, Insightful)
need to ban makeing this an DLC as that last thing we need an back door to remove right to repair and so they can't force an fee just to be able to use the car.
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The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable as possible.
The only time I've ever gotten to experience anything remotely resembling "enjoyable" driving was during the Covid-19 lockdowns when the roads were mostly empty and gas was cheap. For the entirety of my adult life, driving has simply been a necessary evil as part of suburban dwelling. Driving has never been fun, it is a utilitarian chore performed out of necessity, because that city of the future my generation was promised turned out to just be a place to buy overpriced food and drinks and experience attr
Re:The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable a (Score:4, Interesting)
Try getting out of the city and being in a car that's actually designed to be fun. Just because it's not something you personally enjoy, does not mean others don't enjoy it.
It's government fiats like this which have wildly unobtainable goals that do nothing but make everything vastly more expensive and complicated. We can't wrap everything in bubble wrap and eliminate danger. It's far more likely that anything they attempt to do will cause more problems than it solves. This is complex and there's plenty of room for false detections and braking that will cause an accident while not preventing one.
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Most driving is simply a pain in the ass. People are so used to it that they think it's fine but 90% is a nightmare of traffic, assholes, accidents, speed limits, cops, and boring flat streets.
I daily a 20 year-old Miata so I know you can have fun, but it usually involves going out of your way to finding empty curvy roads and breaking the law quit a bit, even in a small low-powered car.
Automatic braking isn't at all unobtainable and many cars already have it. Usually it'll sound an alarm when it detects a p
Re:The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable a (Score:5, Insightful)
No more automated bullshit in my car.
Please let me keep some analog gauges.
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Getting out of the city? Given that cities have sprawled to many times their size as of 50 years ago? And with the population of the US around *doubled* since 1965, all the nice roads are fulled with idiots like you, who want to do 90 on a road made for a sports car (NOT a muscle car) doing 45.
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Then you're buying the WRONG cars my friend.
I've only owned 2-seater sports cars all my life so far....every time I get in to drive, and that engine fires up, I'm off on an adventure!!
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I live in South Dakota and grew up in Minnesota. A wide open, empty highway was never more than a few miles from me. Driving / biking (pedal or motor, either way) on those wide open roads is like meditation. People constantly claiming that they won't be satisfied until self-driving vehicles are the only ones on the road feels very, very much like watching one of the very, VERY few enjoyable parts of my life being attacked relentlessly. And I have zero doubts that within my lifetime, it will become the law o
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By all means have that fun car and maybe use it on a race track. Its much better than as one teen did in front of my house
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Cars are great as a hobby. You can fix up, add bolt-on mods or engineer your own crazy stuff. Driving can be fun. But for 99% of people most of the time it's just a way to get to the mall, and they need to not kill anyone when they inevitably get distracted by something shiny. There's really no reason to get mad over a pretty simple and effective [sciencedirect.com] safety feature.
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The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable as possible.
That's certainly the reasoning behind the mandatory auto-stop/start bullshit that nobody actually wants.
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Especially for this guy, I propose that all US cars (with ones currently on the road, be retrofitted) with a governor, so that they cant go over 82.5mph.
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I did not know that crashing into things was what made driving a car "fun"
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And if you compare those numbers to the total number of trips taken per year, it's a very small percentage. Taking numbers that look big out of context of the total is not a good argument. It's the argument of someone that wants to control every facet of everyone else's lives.
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Forty thousand people. Each and every year.
Is NOT a small number.
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Well, why not divide by 7.8 billion? Obviously you can choose any number of different denominators, but which ones are the relevant ones?
Your choice of metric depends on what you are using the metric for. If you're trying to regulate the maximum risks an individual can choose to be exposed to, then risk per exposure is the right metric, and you should get right on outlawing cave diving.
If your trying to minimize the cost to society, the correct metric is *preventable deaths*, and you focus on the things
"I'm for anything that reduces that number" (Score:3)
Hmm, i'd be careful what you wish for. The obvious route would be to disable all smart screens while the vehicle is in motion. Introduce 20 mph limits in all built up areas, 40 mph on country roads and 50 mph on multilanes.
Enforcing the above will be accomplished by various intrusive methods, none of which are rocket science.
Do you really want that?
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Give me a completely self driving car and it's a deal. Until then, everyone proposing that is free to fuck themselves with a rusty pineapple. Keeping my old ass car is looking like a better and better deal all the time.
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And, just for the record, I really don't care for most of the people who "drive" for fun, as they're usually the ones speeding, passing, and swerving in and out of traffic with visions of auditioning for the next Fast and Furious movie dancing through their feeble little minds.
It sounds like you are a perfect candidate for mass transit. Let someone else handle those people. The rest of us will manage just fine without bidding up the cost of already overautomated vehicles.
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Another proposal you might like that's making the rounds is one that suggests merging vehicle electronic driving systems with GPS data to throttle vehicle speeds to match the speed limit within city limits.
That would absolutely kill vehicle sales. What good is having a decent engine if it's auto-limited to 30 MPH?
Once bureaucrats can control everyone's speed, they will steadily lower speed limits until cars move little faster than bikes. Though there would be a downside for those little speed-trap towns, as their cash cow would get slaughtered since nobody will be able to speed anymore.
Re: The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable (Score:3)
"fake & gay"
I bet you kick a dead toad around like a hackey sack with your middle school chums in the stairwell and boast loudly for the other students to hear about how 'edgy' you all are.
Re: The purpose is to make driving as unenjoyable (Score:2)
OMG great comeback. Sure wish I could invoke the power of the middle school enviroment to come up with something so thoughtful.
Damn What could possibly go wrnog? (Score:3)
If this is a mandatory always on/no override system, you can bet that people will find ways to cause these cars to brake check the big semi that's right behind them. Done from a pedestrian overpass or other location at a safe distance but within view of the show.
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I've hated ABS with a passion ever since it was thrust upon me.
I'm not sure how we are going to swing that (Score:3, Interesting)
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There is also insurance to think about as the total cost of ownership. I have seen lower insurance rates due to a car being very hard to steal, for example.
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People are choosing to buy fancier mor expensive cars.
Mostly that's because what you can afford has more to do with your credit score than your income level. If you have excellent credit, you can stretch out the loan until the heat death of the universe to get the monthly payment within your budget. Sure, you're paying through the nose in interest, but lots of people don't care about that. Hell, the entire concept of leasing a car is basically just pissing away all the money you're spending and that's still an incredibly popular thing to do.
Same thing happe
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I think my last ca
I'm not so sure (Score:2)
That probably means that people who still make good money are choosing fancier cars, but the bottom 80% are forced to make due. The lower end that your retail or restaurant worker would buy is gone, but they still need cars. So they're driving older and older cars.
I drove an old car for a long time, and it was a constant stream of problems. I had a very understanding boss and a job I could work from home as needed,
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It's not because cars have more tech in them though. It's because vendors have moved away from outright sales to finance. The retail price doesn't matter to many buyers, only the monthly cost of the loan or lease agreement.
It works out great for manufacturers, who are often the ones providing the loans. They get the interest, and at the end of the finance/lease period they often get the car back so they can sell it again.
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This is essentially a software update and one more button on the dashboard as far as modern vehicles are concerned. I doubt it will move the needle as far as new car affordability goes, and as it is, the main reason the US lacks affordable new cars is because it's more profitable to sell expensive cars to the well-to-do folks.
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They won't make cars less expensive. They will make them vastly more so. Every safety feature that's been mandated since seat belts (those actually were cheap) has both added expense to manufacture cars and have increased weight making them less efficient.
It's almost as if the Lefitists in this country want to make everything they dislike too expensive for the common person so that only the wealthy elite can still afford convenience and freedom. Everyone else will be stuck on public transit and be living
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You will own nothing....and be happy.
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Eh... cars are completely affordable. All you have to do is blow all your savings and live like a pauper to afford the important stuff. The reason why these things are so damned expensive is because people find ways to afford them whether they can or not.
I remember when I was working in a warehouse a long time ago. It pissed me off to no end how I was saving in a 401K while my colleagues all had shiny new iPods and drove used F150's and BMWs... and then whined all days about how broke they were.
'Merica!
Re: I'm not sure how we are going to swing that (Score:2)
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You will own nothing...and be happy.
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Don't worry. Once we get fully automated vehicles, they'll outlaw ownership and you'll have to rent per trip. It'll be a glorious when only the richest of the rich can own their own, and the rest of us have to use yesterday's puke-stained non-cleaned auto-driver to get to work each morning, and pay for the privilege.
Alternative (Score:3)
Whose fault is it that people can't afford cars?
The government for not building up infrastructure making not necessary to own a car?
Oh, I forgot: Your country considers that "Having a public transportation system that is actually usable" is [Trigger warning: scary words!] Socialism! [/trigger] and thus not something you would allow in the Land of Freedom(tm). That's only for us evil Euro-communists.
You keep increasing the minimum wage and things get more and more unaffordable. Your solution? "Double down on increasing the minimum wage." How about trying to figure out ways to increase, rather than reduce, production?
And then, once Jeff Bezos has quadrupled his personal fortune, somehow the Invisible Hand will magically make it better for the poor people. Yes.
Somebody dra
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Yup, poor people making too much money is why they can't afford things. Can't find any flaw in that logic. Gold star for you.
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Increasing the minimum wage reduces production because companies hire less, the resulting reduced production means less things available to buy .. and that reduced supply causes an increase in the prices of things so that low wage earners can't afford anything.
Forward cross traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of accidents are caused by forward cross-traffic collisions when crossing an intersection (9,000 deaths per year in the US, countless injuries). Very few cars seem to have safety features to address that, and the few that do seem to be inadequate. If a car can detect that somebody is about to run a stop sign or red light .. the car should be able to brake or even accelerate such that the passenger compartment is protected. I get that it might not be able to prevent the accident entirely .. but a couple seconds or even a few hundred milliseconds ought to be enough for it to save the passenger compartment. The key would be side facing cameras and radar on the bumper.
Re: Forward cross traffic (Score:2)
The idea of breaking or, in particular, accelerating on imminent side impact is good. But as someone who's caught themselves actually doing it, this is one decision I would never, ever, want my car to make for me.
Too many things play a role: available emergency flight path, eye contact, pedestrians, curve-ahead etc. In this regard I'm a fairly attentive and reflexive driver, and I'll rely on that. And I don't want my car interfering with my split-second decision, e.g. break when I've decided to accelerate (
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What I applaud, OTOH, is e.g. using front parking distance sensors on unavoidable imminent high-speed crashes to trigger the breaks a few fractions of a second earlier, e.g. as soon as the sensors register the other vehicle. That's about 3-5 meters, can take away a lot of energy. Or even use front-facing cameras and lidar to increase the range. But it's a wire dance trying to augmented early enough, but without entering the range where the driver might still have a legitimate different option.
That's how automatic braking works now. It'll sound an alarm and pre-charge the brakes. If you don't do anything, it'll engage them when the collision is (almost) unavoidable.
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This is a difficult problem to solve. In many cases, the car running the red light is masked by other traffic (stationary lines e.g. waiting to turn left) until you're already in the intersection, and then you're too late do do anything.
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Hm that does make sense and I agree, there are many such situations where it cannot do anything but there also should be many cases when it can be helpful in at least reducing crash severity.
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Those are much better prevented work better road design. Cars have got very wide for side impact protection, but there's a limit.
Who gets sued if there's an accident now? (Score:3)
If auto-brakes weren't enough to prevent a collision, or they weren't applied (due to sensor failure, local conditions, programming edge case), then who gets sued now?
The manufacturer?
The mechanic?
The driver?
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Same people who get sued when airbags and crumple zones aren't enough to protect the occupants.
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In that case I would say the driver, and to be honest I don't see why it would be anyone else. If for whatever reason my ABS fails and I crash into someone in a situation that system would avoid it, it would still be my fault for driving in a way that put me in that position.
When you look at systems like Volvo's city safety there are plenty of disclaimers to warn you this is not a flawless system, it's just there lurking in the background so that under certain conditions when people get distracted and mess
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The manufacturer did sufficient testing to show that, at road-legal speeds, the braking system is adequate ; the mechanic (should) be able to document his maintenance work on the brakes to keep them within the manufacturer's design spec. Which leaves the driver (or possibly the owner, for hired cars) who has to be able to prove that they reacted in a timely manner, weren't speeding, and had kept the vehicle properly maintained at manufacturer-approved maintenance shops all the time.
Co
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then who gets sued now?
The driver. This isn't some new technology or untested legal ground. The driver is the operator of a vehicle and is 100% responsible for its actions. We're talking about a driver assist function, not a fully self driving car.
Hereâ(TM)s a better solution (Score:2)
If you are at fault in a car accident then its a US5K fine for the first and a 30 license suspension. Second offense increases by US2500 and a 90 day suspension, third offense is 10k and a 6 month suspension. This is in addition to whatever civil damages are warranted.
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Draconian cracking is not a good solution.
America has, largely speaking, awfully designed roads. In addition, heavy tricks and SUVs which are light trucks are exempt from many safety regulations. In addition they have poor visibility and are dangerous to others in a crash: for s some reason the safety tests only include same category collisions.
Finally the act of assigning blame to individuals prevents those problems being addressed.
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Clearly your previous exposure to "driver education" did not work - you were either driving wrongly, or you were insufficiently attentive to other road users and made bad decisions. Therefore you need to go through "driver education" again, then re-sit and pass the driver's test in order to gain a license to drive.
Obviously, your insurance is invalid during the suspension so will be cancelled (refun
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Re:Hereâ(TM)s a better solution (Score:5, Informative)
Keep it up (Score:3, Insightful)
At the rate all these new addons are going, the cheapest autos will cost $200,000 brand new in today's dollars. Already new cars are too expensive and seems we are heading to be like Cuba in the 80s, everyone driving 30 year old cars.
From memory we have backup camaras, internet tracking, proposed breath analyzers now this.
I am in a 17 year old car, and I guess I will need to keep it longer, maybe never by new again. I hope the auto companies are listening.
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Except Teslas can be had new for ~$35k and come standard with this technology.
The "increasing deaths" part is pedestrians and can largely be blamed on the move towards SUVs and Trucks for everything.
We're moving on from "accident mitigation" where the car sacrifices itself to save the occupants, to a system of "accident avoidance", where the goal is to not hit anything in the first place. Which is drastically cheaper. Hell, ask the military - which is cheaper: An abrams surviving an RPG hi
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Except Teslas can be had new for ~$35k and come standard with this technology.
$41,880 for a base model 3 [tesla.com], but otherwise your point stands.
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https://electrek.co/2023/06/01... [electrek.co]
I remembered seeing the above, vaguely. $37k. Add in some state level rebates or such...
Hell, my corolla has this tech, even if it probably isn't as capable as the legislation wants, and it's around $25k.
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AEB can be done if your car already has sensors for it - notably cameras and radar for things like lane keeping and smart cruise control.
That's really what it is - the cameras and technology are already there and being built into vehicles today. AEB was something that only fancy cars had maybe 15-20 years ago, now it's trickled down into cars everyday people use, so the marginal costs to add i
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Pre-built cars are cheaper than made to order at this time.
It seems like they are trying to flush out inventory for a minor refresh
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This is exactly what is happening.
Average new car price in the US is over $48,000.
https://jalopnik.com/new-cars-... [jalopnik.com]
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Always ask "is this a big number or a small number?"
The inflation-adjusted average new car price has been declining since around 1998. The big increase was from 1980-1987. The CPI for new cars has bee relatively flat since 1996.
At the moment we are still seeing the effects of a one-off supply shock. When you are supply constrained, the obvious manufacturing and sales responds is to concentrate on higher margin models.
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> Always ask "is this a big number or a small number?"
In that case the only acceptable number is percentage of income. And somehow add ownership costs to that number (which the autobrake system will increase).
I'd even argue for percentage of disposable income, but that's because I'm from Europe.
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Backup cameras have been mandated for years now. There are like 9 air bags.
I get where you are coming fr
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At the rate all these new addons are going, the cheapest autos will cost $200,000 brand new in today's dollars. Already new cars are too expensive and seems we are heading to be like Cuba in the 80s, everyone driving 30 year old cars.
Maybe with that, America will finally have enough sense to build public transports that actually works.
Given how spread out everything is and will be for the foreseeable future, something like mini autonomous busses dynamically routed to optimize user destinations with minimal transfers would likely be more optimal than other infrastructure even if it requires a dedicated lane because full self driving still won’t be solved. You need to hit a critical density before something like a light rail system is better in terms of function/cost. So given the track record we all will be riding around in 30 year
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Nobody here WANTs it.
We kind of enjoy the full freedom of door-to-door travel on our own schedule and not having to depend on someone else to kinda get us near where we need to go.
It's the way we've lived for decades, we got a taste of it and WE LIKE IT.
If you like taking longer to get where you want and riding with smelly bums, then by all means...take the bus, you are free to do so.
This has been not just expected but planned (Score:5, Informative)
Most automakers have already promised to make AEB standard [iihs.org] across 95% of their product line. They made the pledge back in 2016 [iihs.org]. It's pretty hard to make a good argument against it other than cost, but doing it across whole product lines does mean making it cheaper. It might even be a good idea to mandate it even (or especially?) on vehicles with self-driving features, as a separate backup that can override the main computer.
Re: This has been not just expected but planned (Score:2)
And it is already mandatory in the EU.
But what about icy roads? (Score:5, Interesting)
So instead of just steering around a pedestrian, my car applies the brakes without my knowledge, putting the car into an uncontrolled skid?! Has anyone thought this through?
When I was younger, I learned to drive safely on ice and snow. However, I also learned that applying the brakes while steering would cause a front wheel drive car to spin out of control. The problem was that I had enough traction to steer, or to brake, but not both.
This was fairly easy to learn. Instead of trying to stop on icy pavement, I'd just steer around it. But if the car itself applies the brakes without my consent or knowledge, simply steering around an obstacle (like a pedestrian) may actually cause a preventable collision. Instead of going around the pedestrian, the car would instead skid sideways and hit them broadside.
We've already seen how airbags increased the cost of vehicles without actually improving safety. Yes, airbags reduce the injury to idiots who can't be bothered to wear a seatbelt, but they do little to nothing for a properly belted driver. It is one thing for a soccer mom to buy a car with automatic braking because she knows she'll be driving and texting, but quite another to force everyone else to buy a car with automatic braking because the government knows soccer moms will be texting and driving.
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instead of just steering around a pedestrian, my car applies the brakes without my knowledge, putting the car into an uncontrolled skid?! Has anyone thought this through?
If the car has ABS, that doesn't happen. It doesn't stop either, though, unless it's very good ABS.
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Yeah ABS has the opposite problem. It will refuse to break on loose snow or gravel, even when it is completely safe and possible to do so, because it is afraid of losing grip on the surface it thinks is solid ice.
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even when it is completely safe and possible to do so, because it is afraid of losing grip on the surface it thinks is solid ice.
Jesus this reminds me of the "I'm better than my car" disinformation from the 90s. No ABS is not unable to stop in situations where it is safe to do so. The system objectively kicks in to recover a situation where traction is already lost which is why on a high speed camera you can see the wheels lock and unlock repeatedly when ABS kicks in.
No, the situation wasn't safe.
No, you can't stop the car better than ABS can.
No, actual professional drivers have tried and couldn't either.
personal anecdote is trolling? (Score:2)
What is this, Wikipedia?
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So you're saying that a good driver is at a disadvantage trying to avoid a low-speed collision, but the average idiots who vastly outnumber them suddenly improve drastically. Statistically, if you're a legislator trying for a net reduction in medical expenses and public complaints... the auto-braking wins.
And airbags? They absolutely do NOT save people who don't wear seat belts. Failure to wear a seat belt can mean you're dangerously close to the airbag when it goes off... to the point you can be more se
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He's probably remembering the generation 1 air bags, that were forced to be made with the premise that they needed to protect an unbelted driver/passenger under the premise that there were a lot of them. To be fair, there probably were at that point.
These days, education and more annoying warnings* means more people are buckled up, and they switched to 2 stage airbags.
For others reading this: Airbags ABSOLUTELY DO IMPROVE SAFETY. That's why people can walk out of 60 mph accidents with minor injuries thes
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We've already seen how airbags increased the cost of vehicles without actually improving safety.
No we haven't. Except maybe in a few flawed implementations, airbags improve safety.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipmen... [nhtsa.gov]
https://carbuzz.com/car-advice... [carbuzz.com]
etc...
but quite another to force everyone else to buy a car with automatic braking because the government knows soccer moms will be texting and driving.
The problem is that everybody is convinced they're a good driver, ergo the texting bad driver soccer mom is convinced she's a good driver so she'd buy a big SUV without automatic braking, because who wants that? She's a safe driver... She just wants the massive SUV to make her safer from all the other idiots driving massive SUVs on the road(to be safe
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No we haven't. Except maybe in a few flawed implementations, airbags improve safety.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipmen [nhtsa.gov]...
https://carbuzz.com/car-advice [carbuzz.com]...
etc...
I wouldn't take safety benefit claims from bodies that push regulations as an honest unbiased assessment of reality. It's not to say the conclusions are necessarily wrong.
NHTSA never actually measured the effectiveness of airbags. They used a biased dataset that only capture fatal events with obvious confounders such as crumple zones and belt tensioners being introduced or improved in parallel with newer air bag equipped vehicles. They also violated their own inclusion criteria for example failing to exc
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my car applies the brakes without my knowledge, putting the car into an uncontrolled skid?
The car is not a stupid human. Only stupid humans drive cars. Why would car the car skid? Between traction control and ABS the only way you can get your car to skid is do something stupid, such as attempt to swerve so severely that you probably should hand your drivers license in right now.
Anyway your whataboutism is stupid. AEB objectively saves far more lives than it causes in the hands of jittery drivers. It sounds like that pedestrian was going to die one way or another.
Blind spot monitoring first (Score:2)
Blind spot monitoring is the least troublesome and most helpful in my experience. AEB features still aren't smart enough.
The proposal should have this (Score:2)
Median Income: $34,000 (Score:2)
No. The mandates need to stop and be rolled back until the median income earner can afford a new car.
Or stop funneling all their wealth to DC and Wall Street.
How well do these systems really work? (Score:2)
There was a commercial which ran during the Superbowl about Tesla cars. Do these systems really work as advertised? We have a car with some advanced safety features (lane departure, etc.), and they seem to be mostly an annoyance, and I usually end of turning them off when I drive. Will these really save lives for all of the costs? I'm just curious about the cost-benefit.
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Didn't we already have an article about (Score:2)
Why don't we wait until the tech proves itself because I don't think it's there yet.
Designed for Carjackers? (Score:3)
If people stand in front and behind a car will it stop the vehicle from escaping?
Golf cart option (Score:2)
Its great cars are getting safer and safer, but many of those features are not necessary for a majority of many people's driving. Many people have short commutes to work/shopping/school and don't need a car that can withstand a 50mph crash. Some places allow people to drive golf carts which are slower and safer. Its not a solution for everyone, but it would be great if more cities allowed them on city streets. They cost less, are easier to maintain, use less fuel, are cheaper to fix (don't cost $1000+ to fi
Numerous... (Score:2)
...are the ways one could come up with hypotheticals where the unexpected braking causes unintended consequences. I drove some mountain roads with no center lines or guard rails a couple years ago on vacation, and I can imagine encountering a slow vehicle around a blind curve and going flying. Like the ABS of old, that didn't stop for squat on gravel or snow, this will almost certainly be bad news for some driving situations that a human could handle just fine. All it really needs is a switch to turn
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I'm pretty sure these are all optimized to never trigger outside of compliance testing.
Moving cars in the same lane is easy, everything else is a phantom breaking bonanza.
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The first time the warning triggered was a WTF moment. But it is never wrong in my experience, you are anticipating a car clearing the lane in time and the computer is telling you back off - and it has been right each time
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Nobody ever caused a pileup by braking for something that was there. People following too close have done, though.
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"onboard computer or control system that is capable of overriding you, "
Yeah, that always works so well, like the Airbus crash at the Paris Air Show where the computer insisted the plane was landing, when the pilot was actually trying to do a touch and go, and the computers wouldn't allow him to throttle up enough power to clear the trees. Oooops. Expect essentially the same thing out of automotive computers that think they know best too.