These ads tout “life-saving” features, wherein the car warns you that you’ve fucked up or makes a correction for you.
Is this a good thing? In the ads, the drivers make claims like “I had no idea the car in front of me stopped” and “Gee, I must have fallen asleep and drifted into oncoming traffic.” WTF? This doesn’t seem like progress, on the contrary it seems to excuse really bad driving. On the one hand, we all make mistakes and maybe overall this will be beneficial when it’s a standard feature on all cars. On the other, I can’t help feeling this will encourage bad driving habits.
Didn’t seat belts and anti-lock brakes have the same arguments against them when they first came out?
Bad driving is going to happen anyway, whether we have the extra safety features or not. Given that it’s going to happen, is there a good reason why we shouldn’t take extra precautions against it?
As tempting as it is to think bad drivers “get what they deserve”, they’re not the only ones affected by their actions. What about the pedestrian that the bad driver ran over and killed? Did the pedestrian deserve that, did their family and friends?
I don’t care if the extra safety features “encourage” bad driving habits as long as they mitigate the results of actual bad driving.
I don’t think it will encourage bad driving as much as help reduce the negative risks of bad driving that will happen anyway. I’ve never considered my air bag or seat belt as reasons to drive poorly. I don’t think braking override or lane departure systems will either.
Seat belts and airbags and anti-lock brakes have nothing to with being an alert and cautious driver, they are intended to mitigate the negative effects of bad situations.
I wish I could find these ads on youtube. Basically the car is correcting for things a good driver wouldn’t let happen. If you’re drifting out of your lane, why? Should you be driving in the first place? If you don’t know the car in front of you is braking, why? What the hell are you doing that you don’t see that?
It doesn’t matter why. Once you’re in the situation of drifting out of your lane, or about to rear end a truck, or about to slam into a pedestrian, it doesn’t matter why you got into that situation. It doesn’t matter that you shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.
What matters is that an accident is about to happen, and it can potentially kill somebody. You can’t go back in time and keep the person from driving, you can’t handwave the situation away by saying “oh they should never have been driving”. An accident is about to happen, right now. What can be done to avoid it?
We could rely on the driver. The driver who is poorly-skilled or incapacitated and shouldn’t have gotten into the situation in the first place. If they didn’t have the ability to prevent the bad situation in the first place, what makes you think they have the ability to avoid the imminent danger?
Or we can help the bad driver out with some technology.
Who among us drivers has never made a bone headed mistake? Generally speaking I think I’m a safe driver but in my eighteen years of driving there have been a few occasions when I made a bad error that nearly got me into an accident.
#1. While attempting to change the radio station I screeched to a halt because traffic on the highway had come to a standstill.
#2. Many years ago I almost wrecked while dialing a cell phone.
#3. Once I didn’t realize how tired I was and I came to a stop at a red light. I mean directly under the red light instead of farther back where most normal people stop.
#4. I’ve attempted to change lanes without making sure my blind spot was empty and almost hit someone.
I suppose someone might chime in and say I’m a horrible driver. In my defense I have also helped to prevent accidents because I was alert while someone else made a bone headed mistake. I don’t have a problem with extra safety devices designed to prevent me from making a stupid mistake.
Listen, if my car can sense that I’ve fallen asleep and bring itself to a stop, great. If my can can warn me that the car in front of me has stopped, or some obstacle has suddenly appeared, even better.
What I don’t want is a car that argues with me about what to do do when I am alert and in control. I do not want my car to override my input. When I bought a car, I had to go to another dealer to get a car without anti-lock brakes, because IMO they cross over that line.
I do agree with this. If there’s a conflict between what the driver wants and what the computer wants, the driver should always win. There are always going to be weird corner cases that the computer can’t handle. Most of the plane crashes you hear about come from the automated systems misinterpreting or mishandling some strange input. Some kind of manual override is imperative.
Cite? I’m a bit of a plane crash buff, so I’ve spent hours reading NTSB reports and other literature about plane crashes, and I’d say this is about the opposite of what I’ve seen. The vast majority of crashes I’ve read about were caused by human error (sometimes pilot error, sometimes maintenance error), and often were a combination of factors. In one prominent case – Colgan 3407 – a major factor in the crash is that the pilots incorrectly overrode the automated system that was trying to save them (the stick pusher).
I’m not saying that such technology has no benefits. We all make mistakes. What worries me is relying on this technology to overcome potential situations a driver shouldn’t be facing in the first place. If the computer in the car saves your ass, then why does the car need your complete attention? That scares me.
There may be some people who would think that they don’t need to pay full attention because the car will save their ass. I can believe that. I have no data, but my strong suspicion is that it would be an extremely small percentage of drivers. I’d further guess that those drivers are likely to already be very bad drivers, and this kind of technology probably won’t make them significantly worse. Any relatively intelligent, rational and safety-conscious driver will realize that it’s stupid to think that way.
At the same time, the technology can help save good drivers who have a momentary lapse of judgement, are temporarily impaired or otherwise find themselves in a situation they should’t be in (and know quite well they shouldn’t be in). Additionally, the technology can save innocent bystanders from the aforementioned horrible drivers in some cases.
With those things in mind, I’d suspect that the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
It won’t bring you to a stop if you fall asleep, but there is a system available on some Volvos that will notice you are driving somewhat erratically and tell you it is time to stop. IIRC the icon is a cup of coffee and the words, time for a break.
As far as arguing with you, the auto brake and pedestrian detection and braking system on the Volvo will not react if it senses you are an active driver. It is only when the car thinks you are not paying attention, that it will step in. In my fairly limited exposure to the system, it seems to work excellently.
I’m not a plane crash buff and was just going off of what I remember from the news. After doing some research I’m going to have to retract my statement. The crashes I was thinking of (Air France 447 last year in particular) weren’t due to the computer incorrectly handling corner cases. Instead the input into the computer was faulty, due to malfunctioning air speed sensors. Other crashes have been caused by similar faults.
I’m very much pro-computer when it comes to things like this. A computer is going to react faster than a human, and never be tired, distracted, drunk, or stressed out. But any system can fail, and should be able to be overridden in the case of a failure.
Fair enough. I looked through the history of the Airbus 320 which is completely fly-by-wire and maybe two out of eleven accidents were attributable to the computer systems, and even then not faults in the software (which is amazing) but sensor problems. One crash where the software may have contributed was mainly caused by the pilot being a twat (doing a low altitude stunt with a lot of people on board). Look up Air France flight 296.
For the Airbus 320 I make it nine out of eleven crashes to pilot error (often with contributing factors like bad maintenance, unfamiliarity, stupid operating policies or asshattery), one to bad weather and one to bird strike (the one that ditched in the Hudson).
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The Air France crash is quite a good example for the OP. The pilot was relying on the safety automation to keep the plane flying at the edge of its envelope, and pushed his luck.
Just the other day, some doofus drove out from a driveway without looking, and hence didn’t see me in my big truck in the right lane, only 50 feet away. I was able to dodge around him, missing him by inches (I’m still not sure how I did it - I swore he was going to hit my side). If I had a fancy Mercedes “collision avoidance” system that applied the brakes automatically, he would have hit me for sure.
I’m not sure that’s a typical scenario, but it makes me wonder…
My guess is that it has logic to determine whether the lane change is on purpose or accidental. It can look at speed, inputs to the steering wheel, driver position, etc and make an educated guess.
Just curious, but how do you feel that anti-locks endanger you? They’ve saved my ass a couple of times (hearing them engage and then remembering that I should have started pumping already)