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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

I can't read the linked pilot study, but I'm not sure why the author thinks it provides significant evidence with regard to people in general. It is based on a test of 10 adolescent drivers with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

I suppose the author also thinks we should sell automobiles without traction control. After all, a person that can't mentally delegate the maintanence of traction will have to manually monitor for traction by feel. Maybe we should also eliminate automatic windscreen wipers, so that people can't mentally delegate that task and will have to manually actuate them like on an old Land Rover.

I'm of the mindset that it's a good thing when people can spend more mental energy on their surroundings, and less on operating the mechanical systems of their vehicle. The fact that people like the author don't pay attention to their surroundings because they think a modern car can somehow drive itself is a separate issue.

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Yet in a motoring context, risk compensation has been shown to have a significant effect, and the more safety features your vehicle has the more unsafely you will tend to drive.

It's been studied and shown in the context of shared streets, switching the side of the road your country drives on (Sweden - the accident rate went down markedly), seat belts, ABS, crash helmets for motorcyclists, and in a non motoring context in sky diving and ski helmets.

Those features are a good thing when people do spend more mental energy on their surroundings - yet it's been shown time and time again that they don't. They have extra bandwidth to chat, listen to music, eat a burger and yell at the kids in the back, or send a text message. In other words to increasingly be a passive passenger. That they shouldn't and a few good and diligent drivers don't is irrelevant.

Cars should be built for the majority of their users, not the presumption that everyone acts like a tiny minority.

Driving has gotten much safer (measured in injuries/fatalities per million miles) over the past century. Obviously the safety features help much more than they hurt.

Sure. Crumple zones and seat belts have both made a huge difference, particularly in the last 20 years or so since much more stringent crash testing. Having picked off low hanging fruit, it's naive to assume every feature comes without negative consequence. Some of these have demonstrably moved the fatalities elsewhere, so whilst fatalities for occupants have been reduced, pedestrian fatalities are rising - as a direct consequence of increasing car safety.

Some, like lane assist, may eventually turn out to even be counter productive to overall figures. I'm not sure if there's been much research on the real world consequence of many of the newer ideas yet.

>It's been studied and shown in the context of shared streets, switching the side of the road your country drives on (Sweden - the accident rate went down markedly)

This famous example seems to be the opposite of the others you highlight. Reversing lane directions forced people to concentrate more on their surroundings, and be more cautious, not less, unlike seat belts, ABS, helmets, lane assist, and other safety features. Perhaps that is the solution: make the surroundings less safe, so people are forced to pay attention, as many safe streets advocates have been pushing for decades.

Quite - the expectation and predictions were that accident rates would, understandably surge and there might, potentially be chaos. That the reverse turned out to be true seems to show, that everyone was being hyper-aware of their surroundings.

Shared streets seem to work on similar lines - removing right of way for traffic, and the assistance of lights, signs, markings puts drivers in a higher state of vigilance almost by default. Personally I'd like to see them far more widely adopted.

Things like lane assist, ABS etc seem to come with a cost. Increasingly for the vulnerable outside the ever more reinforced and protected vehicle.

The problem is that many modern driver assist technologies end up causing and encouraging drivers to spend less mental energy on their surroundings.

Friends and family members of mine with adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot detection, etc seem to trust those things completely. I hopefully don't need to explain why this is an issue.

Yes, people like the author, who admits to regularly reversing without looking, only listening for beeps. Do you think such a person should be allowed to drive ANY car? I don't think a manual transmission will turn a careless moron into a good driver.

Maybe part of the driving test should be conducted in a car or sim with no assistive technology, or with some of it randomly turned off. Also maybe test for accident avoidance situations. But then here the modus operandi seems to be to get the most drivers on the road as a means of access.

No, I don't. Unfortunately I have no way to force the US to increase the standards people must meet to be licensed, however, so the next best thing would be to stop giving the already terrible drivers on the road even more reasons to be unaware of their surroundings.

> we should sell automobiles without traction control

That is not a good example. Perfect traction control is beyond human limit even if the person in the driver's seat is maximally attentive.

Agreed, cruise control would fit parent's argument better, although it isn't strictly a safety feature.

s/traction control/shifting/ and your statement still applies

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