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A lot of comments are focusing on safety via driving better. But with self-driving vehicles, can't we make the layout of the car safer, and thus accidents cause
by gamerDude 6y ago
A lot of comments are focusing on safety via driving better. But with self-driving vehicles, can't we make the layout of the car safer, and thus accidents cause less harm to the people inside?
For example, right now because we need to see the road, I assume there is significantly more danger from the windshield vs. a padded back on both sides of the car with passengers facing each other like in a train car.
It seems likely that we can make self-driving vehicles much safer, even with the same number of collisions, by just changing the layout.
- vernie 6y agoMaybe Tesla can revive Elon's "mini-sub" idea.
- wlesieutre 6y agoFor handling rapid deceleration, I think you’d be best off with seats facing the rear. A cushioned seat can distribute force much more evenly than a seatbelt when the car stops suddenly and your inertia wants to keep you going, and the backs could be reinforced to block anything coming into the passenger compartment from the collision. Hard to do that with a windshield.
- e9 6y agoOn top of facing the rear they can attach industrial spring to absorb the shock of the fast deceleration/collision
- cogman10 6y agoAfter the crash is where I'd be concerned. While the windshield has a lot of negatives, one positive is that it's relatively easy to break and pull someone out of the car in a crash. IDK, probably still safer, but it's something that'd deserve some aggressive crash tests to make sure we aren't making a pinto mistake.
- newacct583 6y agoAre a significant number of traffic fatalities currently avoided by pulling people out of vehicles through broken windshields? That seems a little overspecific to me. In fact, rear-facing seats are absolutely known to be safer (c.f. infant car seats), given that in all collisions one vehicle is almost by definition decelerating along its forward axis.
- philwelch 6y agoThe ole sitting in the bed of a pickup truck technique, in other words.
- hypertele-Xii 6y agoI would be unable to sit in such a vehicle at all, then. I must face forward and clearly see the horizon or I throw up in a matter of minutes in any moving vehicle.
- dheera 6y agoOn a related note, before we get to self-driving cars I really wish we had un-crashable cars. They have systems like active lane keep which are supposed to increase safety but do the exact opposite of what's safe. For example suppose a driver falls asleep or gets a heart attack. The lane keep will beep a few times quietly and disable itself when the car reduces speed to under 40mph, causing the car to then go straight and crash, instead of aggressively lane keeping until the car comes to a complete stop while increasing the beep volume the whole way, and then putting on emergency flashers, which would be the safe thing to do.
- spullara 6y agoUltimately all the even lower level self driving cars will just pull over and stop.
- nxc18 6y agoLane keep gets it wrong often enough that this doesn’t really work. Probably ~80 of activations are false alarms in the two vehicles I’ve driven that had it. Assists are nice, but I don’t want the car to be aggressively wrong.
- bsder 6y agoJust getting rid of the steering column would make cars significantly safer. This doesn't even require an autonomous car--just "drive by wire" electric vehicles.