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Forward emergency braking systems don't detect such situations. You'd be hit regardless. They only have a 170 degree field of view at the best of times in their
by Tanoc 3y ago
Forward emergency braking systems don't detect such situations. You'd be hit regardless. They only have a 170 degree field of view at the best of times in their current implementations. Somebody two hundred feet away closing at sixty miles an hour will hit you in the side regardless of forward emergency braking simply because it's not designed to look for something moving that quickly that far away at that extreme of an angle.
That said there's also a balance in safety systems between personal responsibility and systems responsibility. Relying too much on systems responsibility actually causes more harm because the person becomes more careless or is entirely at the whim of the system responsible for their safety. We put railings on stairs in public places but don't require everyone to put on a safety harness and latch it onto the guide to climb stairs for example. There's an expectation that system safety has hit a reasonable limit and the safety harness is too costly in time, money, and attention to implement.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThe car doing the T-boning can see forward, and even slowing down by 10 mph can halve the lethality of the resulting crash. Full success isn’t necessary for benefits. Or sub in a high speed rear-ending scenario.
- janalsncm 3y agoThis reminds me of the fact that many foreign subway systems have outer doors (so you can’t just walk onto the tracks) and inner doors. Most people won’t just walk onto the tracks in America but the outer doors address inattentive people, tired people, and people who want to do the wrong thing. In a lot of places the outer gate is only chest high which isn’t insurmountable but is enough of a barrier to avert 99% of the bad cases. I think the analogy to automatic braking holds.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI’ve never had a bad accident in a car, but the closest I have ever come was in my friends new VW with lane assist on a dark country rode on a bend when the lane markers vanished due to wear. I started to get lazy and distracted as the car was mostly driving, my friend was talking at me and the assist disengaged, next minute we were going pretty fast towards a barrier. We recovered but it was close. I’d just prefer to drive honestly.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThe article cites a 38% reduction in crashes. Random anecdotes to debunk that are not super compelling. Some habitual drunk drivers never have an accident and may even claim it makes them a better driver, but that doesn’t make it the right choice on a population level.
- ChatGTP 3y agoLittle hard to respond to the snark but I’m just glad I was paying attention and not on the phone or else I might be dead. Cheers.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNo snark, and every avoided accident is a good thing. Policy makers at the national level just have to weigh all the cases over individual anecdotal ones. This often means one person’s risk goes up while thousands of others’ goes down. Sometimes that’s hard to balance, but if the 38% reduction in crashes cited in the article is true, this particular decision seems fairly simple.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI suspect the real issue is people using phones while driving, I know of at least one person who is dead from this. I rear ended a car when I was in my early 20s while on the phone, I se people driving trucks in narrow streets while on the phone in my area. I don't like enforcing things like this as a band aid, it's fine to try improve a situation, but let's be honest, many people who are involved in these accidents are doing something with their phone.
- ceejayoz 3y agoSure. What we know, though, is "stop doing that" doesn't work. That's why aviation, highway safety, healthcare, tech postmortems, etc. have discovered that "please ask the human to stop doing human things" isn't the approach to take. Instead, we try to engineer away the opportunities for human error to kill people. (Quite successfully, in a lot of cases; as an example, aviation safety in the developed world is overall an incredible success story for regulators.) People will continue to use their phones in their cars. That's a fact we have to accept.