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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

It's not even remotely economical to eliminate bad drivers, not to mention good drivers who driver badly at times. My sense is that during any test, people will appear much better drivers than they are on average, since they won't be drunk or shooting off an SMS message or whatever else.

It is economical to save a lot of lives with technology. This is a good tech. I don't know if I'd go with most important since seat belts, but it could save lives.

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Agreed. Even assuming people do the right thing all the time and never get behind the wheel after drinking, when emotionally heated, without enough sleep, or while distracted by phones, etc., anyone can be distracted for a split-second and cause a major accident.

That kind of "Superman" thinking that things would be great if only you tried harder is BS in a lot of cases. Most people do not want to get into road accidents, deliver code late, or build a shoddy product. Fixing the incentives or process works better.

It's an incentive for people to pay less attention when driving. It's a bad incentive IMHO.

You could make the exact same silly argument about seat belts, crumple zones, and air bags, but the fact is all 3 save many lives.

Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags don't claim to prevent accidents. People aren't likely to say "Ah well, it doesn't matter I don't need to pay attention, since I have an air bag".

Radar etc though does claim to prevent accidents. Which will likely mean people pay less attention.

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