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Comment by kuya11 | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone who rear ended the car in front of them was an idiot.

I find this comment baseless and insensitive to those that were killed. The Texas accident was attributed to a failure of road ice management. Bystander video clearly shows vehicles attempting to stop sliding for hundreds of yards on ice.

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Those videos also show people successfully stopping without smashing into the car in front of them, and then getting rear ended by the driver behind them.

There's your baseline.

One could make the argument that the drivers were not aware of the dangers of driving on ice, but then it's a fault of the regulatory body that issues licenses to these people. However, I do think it's the drivers responsibility to assess the road conditions and pick an appropriate speed. Whilst it is a failure of government authorities to not de-ice the roads and spread salt, any driver can at any point in time be caught off guard by terrible weather, and they should be ready to deal with those situations.

Agreed, I don't think OP ever tried to figure out what happened in that scenario, just waved it off as dumb drivers, "I would have had different results", rather than the sudden undetectable absolute loss of traction event, which probably wouldn't even have a high chance of being detectable by any fancy Vision/Lidar self-driving algorithms (black ice, no change in contrast).

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