Will smarter cars lead to worse drivers?

[Sam_Lowry]

@mmmiiikkkeee

Yes there will always be a small number of people that get more complacent when they realize an advance in technology will help them… one of my school teachers years ago said she was happy when air bags came out because she felt more comfortable speeding because the airbag would help protect her if she did have an accident. But such people are a vanishingly small minority; most will choose not to get lazy and go out and have an accident, got to court, get their insurance premiums jacked up, and possibly have a traumatic experience.

I don’t think it’s a conscious decision for most people, but I do think that lots of people will behave less carefully when they can because of whatever safety equipment, I think it’s just human nature.

But I would think that most engineers and designers take that into account. That whatever safety device X will affect drivers behavior, so that you can’t just take into account how people drive before X is installed, but also how people will drive after X is installed, and make sure that the overall effect is still positive.

@scr4

In the past few decades, cars became much safer - seat belts, crumple zones, rollover protection, airbags, ABS, etc. Did these features make us worse, more complacent drivers? Probably. Did that lead to even more deaths from car crashes? Evidently not, because the car fatality rate is lower than ever.

Right, it’s very possible that if you compared the average driver from 1950 and the average driver from today and compared them on driving ability, the driver from 1950 would win. But considering how much safer cars are today, I’d much rather be around cars now than in 1950.

@Senegoid

I suppose that might only work for some kinds of safety features. Some other kinds, a driver probably couldn’t help but notice, sooner or later. Like automatically staying in a lane, or correcting when the driver starts to drift. I’m sure a driver would notice that happening.

And I could imagine that backfiring if there are safety features that the driver doesn’t know about, like if someone was trying to switch lanes but having trouble because of the automatically staying in the lane feature, so the driver ends up having to jerk really hard over into the next lane.

@Der_Trihs

Smarter cars probably will lead to worse drivers since they won’t need to be as good. On the other hand, drivers make “human errors” all the time already. So, the question is does removing the latter more than make up for the former? I think it probably will.

It’ll be a while before an automatic system is better than an alert, skilled driver; the problem is, there’s a lot of people on the road who are lacking one or both of those qualities.

I agree. There might be some danger in combining an automatic system and a driver who’s not properly trained or aware of what’s going on; I could imagine a car behaving as it should and the driver panicking and something going wrong. Or the driver thinking that the automatic system is better than it is and relying on it in a situation it can’t handle and things going wrong. But overall, considering how many errors human drivers make on their own, I’d say that more automation on cars is a good thing.

[Boyo_Jim]

@mmmiiikkkeee

… Yes there will always be a small number of people that get more complacent when they realize an advance in technology will help them… one of my school teachers years ago said she was happy when air bags came out because she felt more comfortable speeding because the airbag would help protect her if she did have an accident. But such people are a vanishingly small minority; most will choose not to get lazy and go out and have an accident, got to court, get their insurance premiums jacked up, and possibly have a traumatic experience. …

I have personal experience with this, and I think you are completely wrong. I think a very LARGE number of people will get more complacent with safety technology.

My new car has blind spot monitoring, the first time I’ve ever had it. And because of the way it works, it actually it actually preempts my own safety check before changing lanes.

My habit was, if I wanted to change lanes, was to put on my signal, take a look, and then change. Now, the moment I turn on my signal, if there’s a car in the blind spot, the alarm beeps before I even have time to look. So I don’t look – I turn off my signal, and do whatever I need to do without changing lanes. Maybe I’ll try again a little while later.

There’s some odd things about how it works that I didn’t expect, though. Since the alarm is directly tied to my turn signal (there are little indicators on my side mirrors, though, that operate independently of the alarm), if I suddenly wrench my wheel to change lanes without signaling the alarm won’t sound at all and I might crash into a car in the blind spot. And If I’m in a situation where there are 2 or more turning lanes, the alarm will sound because it doesn’t realize the car next to me will also be turning along with me.

The other piece of new (to me) safety gear is a “rear cross traffic alert”, which is great in parking lots with head in parking. As I back out of the space slowly, and with so many big SUVs and minivans around, completely blindly, I will get an alarm sounding if traffic is coming at the back my car from either side, from maybe a hundred or so feet away.

FYI, both these alarms a sensitive enough to warn me not only about car sized objects, but also people on foot or on bicycles.

I am quite sure that the blind spot alarms are making me look to my rear/side checking less diligently, because they warn me before I would look if I didn’t have the technology. I’m not sure whether this might eventually cause me to have an accident if and when it fails, just as I’m equally not sure whether it has indisputably prevented an accident already.

I just know that I feel safer with both.

[mmmiiikkkeee]

@Boyo_Jim

I have personal experience with this, and I think you are completely wrong. I think a very LARGE number of people will get more complacent with safety technology.

I was talking about people getting complacent to a degree where they start making foolish choices which place them at significantly higher risk, not causing minor changes in their behaviour or attention. If you’ve seen the Simpson’s episode think about when Homer visited Canada, said to the family something like “Hey, they got free health care here”, and intentionally walked out into traffic to get run over by a passing car. The real-life equivalent being that teacher I mentioned who stopped using caution with speed and just drove as fast as she could get away with confident that a collision wouldn’t be a big deal now that she had an airbag. Most people won’t make dumb decisions like that.

But yes, many people will make small changes in behavior or attitude when they are exposed to more (or less) safety features. The thing is we are already exposed to this phenomenon and have been all along… I don’t believe it’s a new impending problem caused by technology. It’s both fairly mild and reversible… not a one-way street of degrading skills or habits. All a person needs to do to experience this is to switch vehicles they normally drive. You’ll notice yourself feeling a little more anxious and attentive driving an unfamiliar vehicle; you give yourself extra space and use the brakes lighter until you get the feel of how the vehicle responds, you double check when changing lanes and do so more cautiously since you’re not familiar with the visibility of that car, etc. That kind of experience will show you the things you’ve become complacent with in your normal day-to-day vehicle.

So, are you more or less likely to have an accident when you’re extra cautious but in an unfamiliar vehicle, or more complacent but have a very good feel for the vehicle? I’d say there probably wouldn’t be much difference, nor would there be much difference in how safe you drive when you become used to not checking your blind spot because you’ve got an alarm or back-up camera installed. My point was all the other things that cause us to use caution and be attentive (laws, fines, crashes, insurance premiums, risk of injury and traumatic experiences) still exist and influence us and that a particular feature (or lack there of) on a vehicle plays a very small part overall.

It’s kind of like living in a dangerous crime-ridden neighborhood vs a gated low-crime safe community. In the safer neighborhood you’re not going to use the same caution walking down the street, not gonna eye up everyone else, carry multiple weapons, plan safe routes, etc. But the need for less caution doesn’t mean you turn into an idiot and leave your wallet on the sidewalk, walk blindly across the street, or march straight through barricades around a construction site. You retain most of your normal sense and just lose a slight edge (which you can easily regain)… I think it’s the same with driving and new advances in technology.

[spamforbrains]

I was talking about people getting complacent to a degree where they start making foolish choices which place them at significantly higher risk,

You see this happen every year with the first big snow storm. The people with big SUVs (all white, for some bizarre reason) assume their 4wd cars can drive like normal in it and then they go out and try to drive like normal and end up in ditches and crashing into trees.

[romansperson]

@Boyo_Jim

The other piece of new (to me) safety gear is a “rear cross traffic alert”, which is great in parking lots with head in parking. As I back out of the space slowly, and with so many big SUVs and minivans around, completely blindly, I will get an alarm sounding if traffic is coming at the back my car from either side, from maybe a hundred or so feet away.

FYI, both these alarms a sensitive enough to warn me not only about car sized objects, but also people on foot or on bicycles.

I love this feature on my car - it’s really helpful. It hasn’t changed the fact that when I end up parked between two much larger vehicles, I still back out really slowly, but it will warn me of things I cannot yet see, which allows me to stop and wait to see what’s back there - things I would not have seen before until I was much farther out of my spot. I’ve had my car for 2 years and it has not failed once.

I also love the rear view camera - besides the simple advantage of seeing what’s behind you when backing up, it’s useful when parallel parking.

I think when we get to the point of self-driving cars, we will be better off, even during the period where there’s a mix of old and new technology. Will the new tech fail? Inevitably. But humans already fail an awful lot, and the tech will not get tired, bored, angry, scared, distracted, or drive while under the influence, which is a huge advantage all by itself.

[usedtobe]

My grandparents slaughtered and dressed pigs, sheep, cows, and (sadly) squirrels when money was scarce.

My parents were raised on farms but (like the majority of Americans) moved to the city during the Depression.
I wouldn’t have eaten any meat they had slaughtered - they were way out of practice by the time I was born.

“Use it or Lose it” applies to skill sets of all kinds
“Yeah, I could park it, but it does a good job, and I’m tired” will become "Park it myself?!, are you nuts!.

I’m really torn about self-driving and how it is introduced. Do we do it drip-by-drip (as is now), or wait for all of the ducks to line up and do it en masses?

Maybe we could do driving as we do flying - to keep your license, you have to fly a tester (FAA) every year. The tester will throw monkey wrenches - you just lost your engine (yes, they will shut down the engine).

You want to be the guy at the controls? Prove you can still handle a car in adverse conditions every year or so.