I have a Ford Escape with cross-traffic warning, front and rear proximity sensors, lane change warning, ABS, stability control, rear view camera, etc. Top of the line Titanium edition.
Stability control and ABS are great. The backup camera is handy in tight spaces, since the vehicle has crap rearward visibility. The rest… its primary function seems to be to annoy the living shit out of me. The sensors go off driving in and out of my garage, or when someone pulls up too close behind me, or in a drive-through… The cross-traffic warning triggers after a car I had already seen is already past me and no longer a threat. And every time one of those things goes off, it mutes my audio for about 5 seconds. Since I listen to podcasts, that invariably means missing stuff I wanted to hear and having to rewind.
But what is worse is that I don’t just get lots of false positives, but also the occasional false negative. The first time the lane change warning light stays off when there is a car right in your blind spot is the last time you should rely on that system. All of these sensors have failed to detect threats at one time or another.
It’s a good thing I had a lifetime of shoulder-checking habits or my ‘safety’ features woild have caused an accident. To the extent that these features cause drivers to become lazy and inattentive, I wonder if some of them don’t do more harm than good.
In aviation you learn that if an instrument is not 100% reliable you should ignore it, and preferably cover it up so you aren’t even tempted to use it. So the first thing I do when I get into my car is hit the switch that turns the stuff I paid big bucks for OFF.
What years (if ever) did these new technologies become standard in the lower price range cars? Or are these something you just find in the more expensive cars?
Some forms of Driver Assist Technologies (or however each maker brands it) are by now in almost all mid-tier new vehicles and available at some trim level even for most economy models. Not necessarily all of them nor the fanciest version of each system, but some. I drove today a 2018 car that was bought with negotiated price under $20K pretax that includes a form of the autobrake (with a recall notice to tweak it), rear cross-traffic detection and blind spot minders. It seems to have had the option also to add lane minders and the supplemental extra-braking. And of course for a few years now the model has had the rearview camera.
My current car is the only one I’ve ever owned with any advanced safety features and I’ve had it less than a year. The automatic emergency braking alert pipes up every once in a while in traffic but almost always after I’ve already started moving to the brakes and steering to respond. No accidents saved.
The lane keeping assist in my car helped improve my driving in a small way. I have it set to warning only and it vibrates the steering wheel if you change lanes without signaling. At least twice, It’s started buzzing when I thought I signaled before changing lanes but clearly had not. It’s made me pay a little more attention to signaling first and then waiting a half second before changing lanes.
Apparently, one of the biggest modern safety improvements has been electronic stability control. The funny thing is, it works so seamlessly, people probably don’t even recognize the number of times is has saved them from a wreck, particularly SUV drivers.
This is not a safety feature but it seems to work well enough in my car. I can’t say how much gas it saves though.
You can get pretty much all the modern safety features on a new car for less than $20,000 today. All new cars have electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, and rear-view cameras. Under a voluntary agreement with automakers, all new cars in the U.S. will get automatic emergency braking by 2022 but most new cars have it standard now, even pretty cheap ones like the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, and Ford Fusion.
I didn’t realize that when answering and would change from from ‘probably yes’ to ‘definitely no’ for our 2015 car which has none of those features and ‘probably no’ for our 2018 car which has some. The red warning light for auto-braking system going on has helped me I guess in some cases drive safer, outright ‘prevented a wreck’ probably not. It doesn’t have blind spot detection, and the lane keeping system generates too many false alarms on certain kinds of road so I keep it switched off.
Answering the question as asked, I think the agility of the older car (BMW 328i) avoided at least one serious accident, though not a scientific result. It might have been avoided in a mass market brand car also, I can’t prove otherwise. Although I took a course at the BMW driving school and this was steering as hard as we had to in some of the collision avoidance exercises we did there.
The big honking (not only ABS) brakes of the newer car (BMW M2) I think prevented an accident where I was trying to pass on a two lane road and guy I was trying to pass then braked suddenly and turned left into a non road, no signal and no time for me to even register the autobraking warning. I (manual not automatic) stood on the brakes, car barely stopped in time. Even the other BMW wouldn’t have been able to…though then again a less powerful car wouldn’t have been accelerated as much as I did before braking, and I might not have even have attempted the pass in the first place.
Anyway steering/handling and brakes are still the two key safety features to avoid wrecks (seatbelts, airbags etc don’t avoid them) IMO and the capabilities of those systems differ significantly among cars.
I drive a Miata. If you’ve ever driven one, you probably know that with the top down visibility is of course excellent, but with the top up visibility out the back sucks*. Especially when I try to shoulder check before changing lanes. The blind spot monitoring is definitely useful in that situation. Likewise, the back up camera helps to make up for the tiny rear window. I can’t think of a specific situation where it has definitely prevented a wreck, but I think it has probably helped. Since Mazda was trying to keep the Miata affordable those are the only two modern safety features they included.
*But I live in California, so weather usually permits driving with the top down and I do so at every opportunity.
In a grocery store parking lot once, the back-up cam in my CRV showed me a little boy. Maybe I would have seen him in time, but I will never be without one again.
Several times during Winter the ABS has responded to ice before I knew it was there.
Very true. When I was shopping for used cars almost all the CRVs I looked at had rear quarter panel damage. After driving mine a day or two it became obvious that it was because the back-up cam only shows directly behind the vehicle. You still have to turn your head and look to the sides.
And that is the downfall of all these safety features: people are not properly trained in on how they work and when to rely on them.
Lane departure prevention is for emergencies when you pass out - not so you can dig in your wallet for the phone number you want to dial.
AWD and ABS will help you drive safely on mostly-cleared Winter roads, they will not get you to a booty call in an ice storm.
Blind spot monitoring and a myriad of other technologies are there to help cover areas you can’t see, not a substitute for turning your head and looking where you are going.
