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No thanks. I drive an aged car and drove a friends recent Mercedes long distance. The thing has a feature where it breaks where it thinks it’s good to break, o

No thanks. I drive an aged car and drove a friends recent Mercedes long distance. The thing has a feature where it breaks where it thinks it’s good to break, often just when I need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot. I need the vehicle to respond to my inputs directly, not mix my inputs with what it thinks must be done. It’s extremely unpredictable and it feels like I’m not in control of the car.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
If studies show that automatic emergency braking cuts down on deaths overall, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff -- I'd even be happy to have it be mandatory/non-disableable. It sounds like the car you were driving had some kind of defective implementation of automatic emergency braking. That doesn't invalidate the good that these types of systems do when implemented properly. Also I'm wondering what kind of situations there are where you "need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot?" I'm a pretty experienced driver and I think the number of "must accelerate" situations I've ever encountered could be counted on a hand. Almost universally, you can solve whatever problem you're in by being more patient and decelerating instead. For example, if you're trying to make an aggressive merge into the passing lane because someone is coming up quickly behind, you could just wait until that person passes. If you're trying to get up to highway speed as you merge, but someone is slow in front of you, it might be best to leave that person more of a gap and wait until they go. Even in the case of passing on a two lane road (a situation where I doubt emergency braking would trigger erroneously), you've already made a mistake if a rapid acceleration is needed to avoid a dangerous scenario. Etc.
- nsomaru 6y ago
  I’m getting downvoted for voicing my opinion on a darling HN technology, is that it? Next time I’ll just keep my mouth shut (as I usually do because of the downvote brigade). This time, I’ll bite. I guess you guys have never driven in Africa. Or Asia. Braking is not always the best course of action is actually dangerous in some situations. Like if I can see someone screaming up behind me in the fast lane, there’s a car next to me that means I can’t move out of the way, so I need to accelerate to get past that car and move out of the way. If I don’t get out of the way I’m now in a stressful situation with an unpredictable and often reckless driver behind me, often right up against my tail. Maybe it’s better on average but personally I prefer to have full control of my vehicle.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I think it will be a long time before AEB is mandatory in Africa or Asia, so you should be good in that case. Personally I think this is a sort of moral hazard scenario, where exactly the people who most need AEB would be the ones who would turn it off. So even if it makes a few people unhappy, I'd probably support not allowing the user to have control over this safety feature. Of course we'd need to study the issue to establish whether this is the case.
  - praxulus 6y ago
    >Like if I can see someone screaming up behind me in the fast lane, there’s a car next to me that means I can’t move out of the way, so I need to accelerate to get past that car and move out of the way. Sounds like that guy's car should have automatic braking.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Even if the car isn't "screaming up behind you" if someone is closing at a decent rate of speed your two non-jerk options are move faster and then move over or move slower then move over. Depending on what's beside you faster might be the obviously better option.
  - jeffreygoesto 6y ago
    In near-critical situations there tend to be disjoint optima in how the group of participants need to behave in order to avoid an incident. If the automated system is programmed to prefer the more - hm how would you call it - calm, civilized, obedient "minimum", but the participants the more agressive one, I can feel your problem. Sometimes just squeezing through resolves a situation more directly and quickly. The designers of those systems are usually not allowed to prefer that. Even if the system would recognize it properly (which needs much more processing power, because the search space is much bigger and, as mentioned, non-convex. I don't think you should be downvoted, because that is one of the core ethical aspects we need to discuss about those systems. And how they interact with humans. SV dystopia "soon there won't be humans in the loop" doesn't help here.
  - deleted 6y ago
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Also someone barreling toward you from the side when you're in an intersection. I'm not sure how far down perpendicular roads Waymo cars can see, but I'd like to see them solve this weak spot to eliminate the rear-enders.
  - nsomaru 6y ago
    This is a good example. In this situation you’d actually prefer to lightly rear end the car in front of you and deal with those consequences than possibly lose your life because someone asleep at the wheel hit you from the side.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  > Even in the case of passing on a two lane road (a situation where I doubt emergency braking would trigger erroneously), you've already made a mistake if a rapid acceleration is needed to avoid a dangerous scenario. Are you talking about a road with each lane in one direction? Outside US that is the most common way to travel between cities. It is easy to say that acceleration shouldn't be needed, but that's life right now. When somebody starts overtaking, the better acceleration he has, the safer he can do the maneuver. At that point the car behind the car that takes over may have closen the gap to go back, and emergency braking can be fatal.
  - maccard 6y ago
    > When somebody starts overtaking, the better acceleration he has, the safer he can do the maneuver. If you overtake someone while driving in an oncoming lane, and cut it close enough that the emergency braking of a modern car cuts in, you didn't have enough room to perform the maneouver in the first place. Even safer than performing the dangerous maneouver is not performing it in the first place. This is coming from someone who regularly drives a stretch 150 mile long road with many parts of the road where dangerous overtaking maneouvers are the only way to overtake, and you're sharing the road with articulated vehicles speed limited to 10mph lower than you on steep hills. The choic is always to _not_ make the maneouver.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      I think he's talking about AEB engaging on the car you're trying to pass. If you are overtaking on a 2-lane you want to back up, wait for your opportunity and close on the vehicle to be overtaken at a decent rate of speed before pulling into the other lane in order to minimize time in the wrong lane. Also if the other person decides to be a dick and try and prevent you from passing this gives them less of an opportunity to do that. If AEB forced me to get in the other lane before stepping on it because it thought I was gonna rear end the car about to be passed I would be very annoyed.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  It's not a worthwhile tradeoff because erroneously functioning humans are still there, and this tech enables them! Today it's crashing a car, tomorrow it's forgetting to walk your dog or pick up your kids. Mindless humans are the problem and auto braking is just a band aid. By all means, if auto braking (and in the future - auto driving) is enabled, there must be an option in the OBDII interface to disable it.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    You're surely one of them though, no? There's not a single person who can claim they've never been distracted while driving. People hear "distracted" and their minds go to texting and their virtue signaling goes to 11... case in point Realistically humans are easily distracted. Distracted can be an errant thought, a random sight, a bad mood, literally limitless possibilities for why our brains would wander from the task at hand. I don't have a problem with saying automatic breaking should be controllable, but the diatribe about mindless humans... we're all mindless humans.
    - Bancakes 6y ago
      Interesting you should ask that, I had a lot of problems in college with distraction so it's something of a goal to be concentrated outside my house. Call it a coping mechanism.
- intended 6y ago
  If you look at driving patterns in developing nations it’s not the same as in America. Driving data is cultural data, not some inviolable aspect of the physical world. There is nothing that stops the behaviors in, say India, from happening in America. Which means everything from stray cows on the road (farm escapee) or people driving in the wrong lane. This is also before we get to things like thieves who work in gangs during heavy traffic. Non standard human behavior will become more needed if you start reducing the more common cases where humans screw up. Side note - I don’t look forward to the moment in this conversation where government decides what patch firms must put out, or begins asking for access to control car behavior during emergencies - the last of which is a fair ask.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Also I'm wondering what kind of situations there are where you "need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot?" I'm a pretty experienced driver and I think the number of "must accelerate" situations I've ever encountered could be counted on a hand. Almost universally, you can solve whatever problem you're in by being more patient and decelerating instead. There are a myriad of situations, often involving merges of some sort, where the moves of various traffic participants have resulted in a situation where an aggressive acceleration up to speed and into traffic or up to the traffic speed of another lane so you can get into it, closer to the car in front of you to make space behind you for someone else, or something else like that results in a better overall situation and a net fewer number of people needing to react to the situation and therefore less opportunities for someone to do it wrong causing a near miss or accident. Yes, you could likely solve these situations by braking but in doing so you are roping more traffic participants into the situation and making it more dangerous making accelerating and merging the more courteous approach. Braking for everything is definitely more stupid proof heuristic and if followed blindly will yield infinity better results than accelerating for everything but it leaves a heck of a lot of efficiency on the table.
jeffbee 6y ago
People who believe they should accelerate out of dangerous situations, and who later comment upon such beliefs, should have their licenses automatically revoked by autonomous natural-language-processing robots that crawl around on the web for that specific purpose.
sandos 6y ago
I have got auto-braking on my car and it has never once activated during the 5 years Ive owned it. It has warned with a beep signal I think 2 times when it deemed the car too close to other traffic.
bluntfang 6y ago
Have you considered reflecting on your driving behavior? I'm personally rarely (i honestly don't remember when I've had to do this, but let's say less than once a year) had to accelerate quickly to get out of a tight spot.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

If studies show that automatic emergency braking cuts down on deaths overall, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff -- I'd even be happy to have it be mandatory/non-disableable. It sounds like the car you were driving had some kind of defective implementation of automatic emergency braking. That doesn't invalidate the good that these types of systems do when implemented properly. Also I'm wondering what kind of situations there are where you "need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot?" I'm a pretty experienced driver and I think the number of "must accelerate" situations I've ever encountered could be counted on a hand. Almost universally, you can solve whatever problem you're in by being more patient and decelerating instead. For example, if you're trying to make an aggressive merge into the passing lane because someone is coming up quickly behind, you could just wait until that person passes. If you're trying to get up to highway speed as you merge, but someone is slow in front of you, it might be best to leave that person more of a gap and wait until they go. Even in the case of passing on a two lane road (a situation where I doubt emergency braking would trigger erroneously), you've already made a mistake if a rapid acceleration is needed to avoid a dangerous scenario. Etc.

nsomaru 6y ago
I’m getting downvoted for voicing my opinion on a darling HN technology, is that it? Next time I’ll just keep my mouth shut (as I usually do because of the downvote brigade). This time, I’ll bite. I guess you guys have never driven in Africa. Or Asia. Braking is not always the best course of action is actually dangerous in some situations. Like if I can see someone screaming up behind me in the fast lane, there’s a car next to me that means I can’t move out of the way, so I need to accelerate to get past that car and move out of the way. If I don’t get out of the way I’m now in a stressful situation with an unpredictable and often reckless driver behind me, often right up against my tail. Maybe it’s better on average but personally I prefer to have full control of my vehicle.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I think it will be a long time before AEB is mandatory in Africa or Asia, so you should be good in that case. Personally I think this is a sort of moral hazard scenario, where exactly the people who most need AEB would be the ones who would turn it off. So even if it makes a few people unhappy, I'd probably support not allowing the user to have control over this safety feature. Of course we'd need to study the issue to establish whether this is the case.
- praxulus 6y ago
  >Like if I can see someone screaming up behind me in the fast lane, there’s a car next to me that means I can’t move out of the way, so I need to accelerate to get past that car and move out of the way. Sounds like that guy's car should have automatic braking.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Even if the car isn't "screaming up behind you" if someone is closing at a decent rate of speed your two non-jerk options are move faster and then move over or move slower then move over. Depending on what's beside you faster might be the obviously better option.
- jeffreygoesto 6y ago
  In near-critical situations there tend to be disjoint optima in how the group of participants need to behave in order to avoid an incident. If the automated system is programmed to prefer the more - hm how would you call it - calm, civilized, obedient "minimum", but the participants the more agressive one, I can feel your problem. Sometimes just squeezing through resolves a situation more directly and quickly. The designers of those systems are usually not allowed to prefer that. Even if the system would recognize it properly (which needs much more processing power, because the search space is much bigger and, as mentioned, non-convex. I don't think you should be downvoted, because that is one of the core ethical aspects we need to discuss about those systems. And how they interact with humans. SV dystopia "soon there won't be humans in the loop" doesn't help here.
- deleted 6y ago
rkagerer 6y ago
Also someone barreling toward you from the side when you're in an intersection. I'm not sure how far down perpendicular roads Waymo cars can see, but I'd like to see them solve this weak spot to eliminate the rear-enders.
- nsomaru 6y ago
  This is a good example. In this situation you’d actually prefer to lightly rear end the car in front of you and deal with those consequences than possibly lose your life because someone asleep at the wheel hit you from the side.
xiphias2 6y ago
> Even in the case of passing on a two lane road (a situation where I doubt emergency braking would trigger erroneously), you've already made a mistake if a rapid acceleration is needed to avoid a dangerous scenario. Are you talking about a road with each lane in one direction? Outside US that is the most common way to travel between cities. It is easy to say that acceleration shouldn't be needed, but that's life right now. When somebody starts overtaking, the better acceleration he has, the safer he can do the maneuver. At that point the car behind the car that takes over may have closen the gap to go back, and emergency braking can be fatal.
- maccard 6y ago
  > When somebody starts overtaking, the better acceleration he has, the safer he can do the maneuver. If you overtake someone while driving in an oncoming lane, and cut it close enough that the emergency braking of a modern car cuts in, you didn't have enough room to perform the maneouver in the first place. Even safer than performing the dangerous maneouver is not performing it in the first place. This is coming from someone who regularly drives a stretch 150 mile long road with many parts of the road where dangerous overtaking maneouvers are the only way to overtake, and you're sharing the road with articulated vehicles speed limited to 10mph lower than you on steep hills. The choic is always to _not_ make the maneouver.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I think he's talking about AEB engaging on the car you're trying to pass. If you are overtaking on a 2-lane you want to back up, wait for your opportunity and close on the vehicle to be overtaken at a decent rate of speed before pulling into the other lane in order to minimize time in the wrong lane. Also if the other person decides to be a dick and try and prevent you from passing this gives them less of an opportunity to do that. If AEB forced me to get in the other lane before stepping on it because it thought I was gonna rear end the car about to be passed I would be very annoyed.
Bancakes 6y ago
It's not a worthwhile tradeoff because erroneously functioning humans are still there, and this tech enables them! Today it's crashing a car, tomorrow it's forgetting to walk your dog or pick up your kids. Mindless humans are the problem and auto braking is just a band aid. By all means, if auto braking (and in the future - auto driving) is enabled, there must be an option in the OBDII interface to disable it.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  You're surely one of them though, no? There's not a single person who can claim they've never been distracted while driving. People hear "distracted" and their minds go to texting and their virtue signaling goes to 11... case in point Realistically humans are easily distracted. Distracted can be an errant thought, a random sight, a bad mood, literally limitless possibilities for why our brains would wander from the task at hand. I don't have a problem with saying automatic breaking should be controllable, but the diatribe about mindless humans... we're all mindless humans.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    Interesting you should ask that, I had a lot of problems in college with distraction so it's something of a goal to be concentrated outside my house. Call it a coping mechanism.
intended 6y ago
If you look at driving patterns in developing nations it’s not the same as in America. Driving data is cultural data, not some inviolable aspect of the physical world. There is nothing that stops the behaviors in, say India, from happening in America. Which means everything from stray cows on the road (farm escapee) or people driving in the wrong lane. This is also before we get to things like thieves who work in gangs during heavy traffic. Non standard human behavior will become more needed if you start reducing the more common cases where humans screw up. Side note - I don’t look forward to the moment in this conversation where government decides what patch firms must put out, or begins asking for access to control car behavior during emergencies - the last of which is a fair ask.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Also I'm wondering what kind of situations there are where you "need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot?" I'm a pretty experienced driver and I think the number of "must accelerate" situations I've ever encountered could be counted on a hand. Almost universally, you can solve whatever problem you're in by being more patient and decelerating instead. There are a myriad of situations, often involving merges of some sort, where the moves of various traffic participants have resulted in a situation where an aggressive acceleration up to speed and into traffic or up to the traffic speed of another lane so you can get into it, closer to the car in front of you to make space behind you for someone else, or something else like that results in a better overall situation and a net fewer number of people needing to react to the situation and therefore less opportunities for someone to do it wrong causing a near miss or accident. Yes, you could likely solve these situations by braking but in doing so you are roping more traffic participants into the situation and making it more dangerous making accelerating and merging the more courteous approach. Braking for everything is definitely more stupid proof heuristic and if followed blindly will yield infinity better results than accelerating for everything but it leaves a heck of a lot of efficiency on the table.

jeffbee 6y ago

People who believe they should accelerate out of dangerous situations, and who later comment upon such beliefs, should have their licenses automatically revoked by autonomous natural-language-processing robots that crawl around on the web for that specific purpose.

sandos 6y ago

I have got auto-braking on my car and it has never once activated during the 5 years Ive owned it. It has warned with a beep signal I think 2 times when it deemed the car too close to other traffic.

bluntfang 6y ago

Have you considered reflecting on your driving behavior? I'm personally rarely (i honestly don't remember when I've had to do this, but let's say less than once a year) had to accelerate quickly to get out of a tight spot.