# Car on all night **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [October 23, 2024, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/car-on-all-night/1009107 "2024-10-23T16:47:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 90
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2024, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/car-on-all-night/1009107/90 "2024-10-24T16:02:24Z")
> [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > Taken as a group, people are lazy, are known to be terrible drivers and awful at risk assessment. > > Car companies have responded to this problem by creating lots of “features” to save us from ourselves. Agreed, and safety regulators have likewise made a lot of safety features mandatory to compensate for the ineptitude of the average American driver. This is what we get for having a car-addicted culture. If you take away an American’s ability to drive (because they aren’t as good as the typical German driver), it becomes very difficult to get through life unless they live in a city with decent public transit. And so as much as we would like to require US drivers to be excellent, we can’t do that. So instead, we get extra safety features baked into the car itself to try to lower our fatality rate. > [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > For years in my job, I drove a lot of rental cars. So I was exposed to many, many designs and it was frustrating how little standardization exists in cars. More importantly, I fail to see how those differences contributed to functionality or safety. It’s different when you own one car and get used to whatever ergonomics are installed. But I don’t want substantially different controls. > > So we move the gear shifter, or change it to a new kind of control entirely. Why not swap the accelerator and brake pedal positions? That would be ruinous, of course, and is a slippery slope argument. But I just don’t see the necessity of changing the basic controls, even if it saves a little space. There has to be a better reason for such changes, IMHO. For safety-related controls, I agree that there should be some mandatory standardization. I made that same point in the recent thread on a runaway Honda Pilot: > [@Why this runaway Honda?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-this-runaway-honda/1008369/38): > > It’s good that it has this feature, but a driver will have to have studied the manual in advance to know that: they’re supposed to put the car in P (not N) if it’s running away with itself, and to get it into P while rolling, they need to hold to button for a few seconds. The average driver will not have reviewed the owner manual for how to disable a runaway car, so they won’t know that you have to hold the button for a few seconds - besides which, their first impulse when hauling ass down t… For things that aren’t safety-related, I’m fine with letting the marketplace drive the design decisions. > [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > My questions (which I’m not saying I can answer) would be: > > How much are these innovations really worth? Should we allow them to proportionally drive up car prices more? > > Seat belts, air bags and anti-lock brakes have obviously greatly increased safety. Have things like lane assist? What about all the other features? I’m guessing we could do without some of them. I don’t know whether there’s enough data (yet) to say whether cars with things like lane-assist reduce accident rates. But if they are shown to be beneficial, they might become mandatory. Electronic stability control provides an instructive example: it was available on more and more cars sold in the US for a couple of decades before the NHTSA made it mandatory for 2012 model year. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/car-on-all-night/1009107)._