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Comment by Ninn | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but i do not see how the warning is useful, as it first of all distract your attention from driving, and secondly happens too short a time before the would be accident for you to react in my experience. So as a stand alone warning feature without automated breaking, i dont see the use case that you're praising?

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A lot of accidents happen because people don't see the car ahead of them.

This could be either because they are distracted (eg. fidgeting with the radio or their mobile phone), or because vision is poor (dense fog).

A system that warns you in those cases that there's a vehicle in front of you sounds useful to me.

Also a thick A-pillar will block vision for a few degrees slightly to the sides. Enough to give me a couple of "crap, did not see that (car/pedestrian)" close calls in full daylight.

I feel you there. My partner (who doesn't drive) just bought a second hand Corolla. She'd had it just a few days when I nearly t-boned a flatbed Toyota Hilux because it was hidden completely behind the pillar and just happened to have the correct speed relative to me to allow it to match my turn and remain completely hidden. Luckily, I'm quite cautious at intersections.

I've since learned to move around whenever I'm looking for other vehicles.

Yep, that's a classic case of an engineering trade-off. The thick A-pillars in modern cars are a real detriment to visibility in a place where we need it most, and can not only cause more crashes due to low visibility, but also more impacts with pedestrians since they're frequently hidden in that spot. However, they're also a real boon for crashworthiness: thicker pillars are structurally essential for surviving a rollover accident, and they're also good for holding airbags which can prevent deaths or maimings that the front airbags are insufficient for.

This is all too easy. On Friday, I was taking the off-ramp to join a different highway, on cruise control (because I knew the road layout ahead), at the speed limit (70MPH). I glanced down to adjust the heater and when I looked up, a BMW had been sitting on the ghost islands separating the highway and the off-ramp (apparently missed the turn), and the driver had just decided to join the lane I was currently steaming down. Fortunately, the excellent brakes (as well as the loud horn...) in my Supra made up for my lapse in concentration.

I'm in two minds about vehicle automation. Most of it is to compensate for human idiocy (such as the above example). The same gains could be made by humans not doing illegal maneuverers like that. Yes, there are occasions where the electronics can react appropriately to a rapidly developing situation much faster than a human could (e.g. child/animal running into the road), but I agree with the article's caution on complacency. All it needs is for a driver used to auto-braking to get into a car without it and cause an accident, and the technology will suddenly become mandatory.

At the other end of the spectrum, as I've often said, it's technology developed by humans, based on our own understandings, so there will be flaws. Having experienced poor ABS systems that would activate at low speed to the point that I feared the car would not stop at the junction I was approaching, I am not confident auto-brakes will react appropriately in every situation they're called upon.

A lot of vehicular automation is compared to aircraft systems (especially fully autonomous technology) but there is a critical distinction - you never get tailgaters in the air (or if you do, something has gone terribly wrong). Aircraft can rely on huge amounts of automation because in normal use, there are huge amounts of open air in every direction to allow the pilot time to take back control should the systems fail, and still have space and time to correct the immediate problem. Vehicles on the ground are tightly grouped together. Not only does this leave precious little time for humans to react to a bad situation, it also means that any automation systems are similarly constrained. They have to work correctly in a span of seconds or milliseconds. There is no time to 'nope' out and pass control back to the human when they exceed their programming, as is frequently the case with Tesla. Failure is thus very difficult to analyse and account for.

Automation is generally a good thing, but I can't help thinking we might end up automating ourselves into a hole on this one.

Yikes, early ABS brakes were terrifying, especially on snowy or icy roads. I had a couple vehicles that you'd have to start braking a hundred yards earlier than if you were using normal brakes, or else you'd go sailing past where you planned on stopping. Fucking dangerous, if you weren't expecting that behavior.

Another problem with early ABS is that it was widely misunderstood. Many drivers thought it would allow them to stop in a shorter distance under very slippery conditions, when in fact the opposite was often true (but you could steer more effectively). Thus they didn't slow down as much as they should for the conditions and didn't have enough time left to stop.

It's a pretty common mistake to rear-end the person in front of you if they stop unexpectedly while you're shoulder-checking for a merge. A warning would probably prevent some of those collisions.

You mean like the mandatory lane change warning light which you should engage much in advance of the manoeuvre already?

Why not do so before the merge check?

I was always taught (in the UK) to check your mirror before signaling, and then make a final check before the maneuver.

I think you're misunderstanding. Consider a merge like the one below. Each line is a lane, and the direction of travel is upwards. This is sometimes how an on-ramp ends, for instance.

     ||
     ||
     ||\A
    C|| \B
     ||  \

Cars A and B are in the \ lane, and Car C is in the leftmost | lane. The \ lane has a yield sign.

The driver in Car A is a new driver, and is uncomfortable merging. The lane they would be entering is clear, but they're spooked by the car in the far lane and stop unnecessarily at the merge point.

The driver in Car B behind them is following closely and is preparing to merge by doing a shoulder check. They are not looking forward when the car in front of them stops. If the way had been blocked they would have been expecting the car ahead to stop, but they had seen it was clear.

The driver of Car B is at-fault in that collision. They were depending on the driver ahead of them to behave predictably, and they were not driving defensively enough. A warning noise would probably have triggered them to slam on the breaks and might have prevented the collision. Automatic emergency breaking would do the same, perhaps more reliably.

(This was a real accident. I was a passenger in the lead car.)

Absolutely disagreed, the car starts beeping if you're approaching a slower car in front of you but don't start slowing down - it has captured my attention more than once on long motorway drives - it does it long enough in advance that you can go "shit I didn't realise we were slowing down".

> as it first of all distract your attention from driving,

They didn't do tests with drivers inexperienced with the system?

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