The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But to be fair, drunk drivers kill 28 people a day in this country, or about 10k people per year. 3k people die at signalled intersections every year, or around 8ish per day.
While Tesla shouldn't be beta testing their self driving cars on public roads, it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse.
Here's one of many: use sensors and AI in the car to detect a drunk person behind the wheel. This is HN so I'm sure readers could spend 10 seconds and think of numerous ways this could be accomplished and many otherideas about what could be done when a drunk driver is detected.
I also think the NHTSA should have prevented companies like Tesla from behind allowed to put every single control behind a touchscreen. It's extremely dangerous to have to look away for 2 seconds when you're driving. Imagine if (when?) every car in the world adopted this and all drivers are having to look at a screen to turn on windshield wipers.
Personally I'm more in favor of smart road like technologies where a highway has a mechanical or physical properties to assist self-driving vehicles stay in line with the road. Mostly because a 100% software solution will likely not work, particularly in the midwest and great lakes states during the wintertime.
It need not be expensive either. Magnetic nails embedded in the road would maybe be the cheapest way, and would be easy for both city and rural populations to add, and be detectable with icy and snowy conditions.
But yes, I bet even better standardized road markings would be a huge help for self driving cars. I wonder if there's something stupid simple like a paint additive that would make it easy for machines to track. Magnetic beads?
Probably no more than someone painting their own road lines or putting up fake signage does now [1], but if you want something that's better than what we currently have it would need to not only be both machine and human readable, but also authenticated.
I always thought it would be quite neat to have those portable roadside displays you see for roadworks and so on also communicate map and driving data (cryptographically signed by your local council or dept of transport). So you might get a sign that says "roadworks ahead, please slow down" for human drivers, and the radio beacon would communicate a change of speed limits inside a certain geo-bounded area that would cause self-driving vehicles to slow down. Or similar stuff for "bridge out ahead, turn around now" causing navigation to reroute.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-dri...
It's a lot easier and more future proof to side-channel map updates to cars through a cell network, and allows for some curation. Also, improved cell network coverage seems like a more worthwhile capital expenditure for a local government than a bunch of smart signs that only help 0.001% of drivers. Cynically, I'm sure some politician's spouse's cousin would be happy to win the contract to slap a BLE beacon into a box and bolt it onto a sign for $150k a unit, though...
There is an ongoing effort to introduce infrastructure free direct communication for vehicles, using 5.9ghz spectrum. The spectrum was previously allocated to DSRC radio technology the automotive industry pushed for, but it's been 15 years and it hasn't gone anywhere. The FCC is now letting the cell network folk take a crack at solving the problem instead.
This is already the case in Europe.
Cheaper and easier would be surveying and improving road markings. As for snow, well, my Tesla maintains lane position in snow fairly well, and gets better all the time. No magic nails required.
I am all up for people willingly do beta testing for Tesla they even have to pay for, but it should be clearly marked and explained as so in contracts. The thing is, most folks are not aware of this at all. As things are now, Tesla's and Musk's lies (this and auto drive) cast a pretty bad picture on morals of that company.
Bdamm counters that magnetic nails would help with lane keeping, but that is clearly not the part self driving cars have the most trouble with.
As you astutely observe “ hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't” is the problem. Which magnetic nails in the road would not help even a bit.
> 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives
Yes! And again. Maintaining position is the only thing magnetic nails in the road would help with. Bdamm was not arguing that the car keep lane position therefore it is good. Bdamm was arguing that magnetic nails would not help with the real problems.
> What a surreal read
That is exactly my opinion about your comment. Can you follow two sentences stringed together?
Real sane drivers hit stuff all the time. Miscalculated takeovers ending up in frontal collisions (these can be really REALLY fucking nasty, two 3-ton SUVs @ 100km/h have a lot of potential energy), trucks crashing into traffic jam rear ends and squashing together a dozen cars in front of them, people mistaking stairs to a train station as a car parking ramp (this is a common occurrence here in Munich [1])... the simple thing is, as long as an instance of an object is on a road, one of the instances will eventually get hit by a stupid mistake of someone.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-marienhof-u-ba...
Yeah, another idiocy. They aren't reliable and need constant calibration, good luck driving a car full of drunks as designated driver...
Such infrastructure might help make cheaper lane-keep assist as standard options I guess, but at the speeds where it matters for safety, you need significant look-ahead on the trajectory rather than just lateral position error.
I suppose you could go crazy and embed some sort of NFC into the road, so that it can communicate the lane geometry. It could probably even be done cleverly, perhaps by embedding multiple nails and encoding curvature in their spacing, or maybe in the orientation of the magnetic flux itself. All that to avoid some front facing cameras and image processing, though, that can also be used to detect other cars and pedestrians.
On the other hand if you start talking per trio then we aren’t even close to that.
Reliability with 1 accident per 2k hours would be 99.95%.
Reliability for 1 accident per 20k hours is 99.995%.
An hour on the other hand is completely arbitrary, why not a day or a minute?
For a system that isn't "mission" oriented, you would probably think more in terms of mean time between failure.
It's like the difference between talking about all-causes mortality versus the reliability of a bullet proof vest. Some don't buy that the vest is more reliable when we are not being shot.
Failure intervals generally use multiple different metrics depending on context. You see statistics for fatalities per year or per passenger mile as both being relevant depending on the context. A life insurance company and a car insurance company would focus on different statistics.
The natural comparison for AI seems to be each individual situation. With City and Highway driving being different enough to be considered separately. In that context ~5 second intervals seem fairly natural because the car who accurately identified everything 0.001 seconds ago is probably going to avoid maying a major mistake for a few seconds. In much the same way a human driver can blink or look at a reed view mirror without significant risk.
Like your self driving car shouldn't be meaningfully more reliable if it slows down by 5 mph (because if it is the operating parameters are poorly chosen!).
However, safety isn’t the only thing people care about or it would be illegal to sell cars with the downright ludicrous top speeds currently available.
- All FSD miles put together are still only 1/3 of the average miles needed to generate a fatal crash using a human driver.
- The vast majority of those miles are in ideal conditions.
- A cursory glance indicates there have been 15 FSD-induced fatalities.
- Tesla's FSD in particular (being an entirely vision-based system) likely operates in less-than-ideal conditions much more often than competitors.
- Where are you finding the "15 FSD-induced fatalities" stat?
- Tesla's FSD might operate in less-than-ideal conditions more often than competitors, but I'd posit that the typical human driver operates in much less ideal conditions than FSD. Humans are explicitly instructed to not enable it in sketchy scenarios and to be fully attentive when it's in control, and performance in that environment is at best an upper bound on what you might expect if deployed more widely.
- I skimmed the stats from https://www.tesladeaths.com and was hoping Cunningham's law would kick in if that was too far off base.
Volvo wanted to do that, in Sweden. They pointed out that it would also be useful for snowplow guidance. That's often done by putting up poles at the side of the road.
I live in Norway, the poles at the side of the road are not just for the snowploughs, they are very helpful for human beings too. Magnetic nails embedded in the road are not at all useful to humans and are just more stuff to maintain, especially in an environment where simply maintaining centre and edge markings is a difficult and time consuming job.
Just build a train.
What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
Taxis already exist, just like trains they work fine.
Personal cars will likely always exist, but only a small minority absolutely needs one. The bulk of human transportation doesn’t need cars.
My comment was emphasizing that smart road technologies would be useful to many people also. There are many places where it’s not possible or desirable to build train infrastructure—these are areas that can be served by autonomous vehicles.
The important thing is to build a system that works for wide masses - even replacing half of individual car transit by rail and bus works wonders for space consumption [1]. The more complex cases - rural people, mostly - can be dealt with later on, e.g. by providing something like a "phone bus" service. Here in Germany, we're experimenting with on-demand buses [3]: they serve the existing station network, but unlike the usual village buses that run every two hours or worse, you can order them like a taxi and use your existing public transport ticket.
Saying "no" by default because a system is not entirely perfect at the beginning is a destructive discussion tactic that only serves those in power.
> Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
Someone in an emergency situation should just be able to call an ambulance. That's what they exist for. Ideally, someone in an emergency situation should also not have to fear going bankrupt (to the tune that this scenario has become a meme in itself [2]).
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-efficiency-o...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/utbn5z/a_man_k...
[3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/landkreismuenchen/landk...
Who are these people in power, and what are their goals? I don’t see what this has to do with my comment—I’m not arguing against trains, merely in support of autonomous vehicles, in areas where they might be useful, like far away from cities.
https://investinganswers.com/articles/10-most-popular-stocks...
Then there's good old fashioned malice. Look at who used to live or run businesses where highways are now.
Times are a changing a bit these days. Weirdly a bunch of companies on that list are the ones that would love having a 24/7 video and lidar feed of everyone anywhere near a public space.
If we want to lower drunk driving incidence rates we need people walking to the bar or taking public transit. It requires us to fix our outdated and asinine transit culture.
All of the technical solutions in the world can’t solve this problem because they’re solving for the wrong thing (safer cars) when we should be solving for reduction in driving.
List of choices:
1. Not drink alcohol
2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving.
3. Pay for a driver
4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol
5. Rent a hotel room nearby
And so on and so forth. Drunk driving is certainly a choice, one made because the perceived or true cost of drunk driving is less than the cost of not driving drunk.
I think it's important to add this one because it's free and doesn't even require previous planning, so it's very hard to argue that you couldn't do it instead of driving drunk.
(Although keeping a blanket in your trunk makes it a much better experience.)
Some states like California you can only get a DUI if there’s evidence you moved your car, but in other states it’s a lot less clear - and you can be charged with any appearance of intent to drive, like sleeping in the driver’s seat.
Not to mention the possibility of getting a trespassing charge in a private lot overnight.
Plus, I don't know how American cops work, but hopefully they're less likely to stop and breathalyze a dude sleeping in a parking lot than a guy on the road at 4 AM.
Also, now that I think about it, American cars are huge, if you put the seat all the way back is your body you going to be even visible from the road?
No but your car will be, which will probably be investigated. If you are on the side of the road you'll definitely be investigated and for sure get a DUI because they'll say you drove there and parked. (Also definitely a no-go on highways/freeways).
If you are in a parking lot cops will usually scope out a car, especially if you are parked away from other cars and then they'll wake up and tell you to move. Then you'll say "I'm drunk I can't drive" and then that's where all of the problems start. If you park near other cars (perhaps late night workers) they'll probably call the cops or call a towing company because you aren't allowed to park there and sleep overnight (another reason all these gigantic stupid surface parking lots are so useless).
There's just way too many problems with this strategy.
I've slept in my car in night clubs' parking lots several times and have never been bothered, either by the owners or by the police. I've also had friends follow my recommendation (well, more like pleading/pushing, since they were insisting 'noo I'm fine to drive') without trouble. Likely a difference between laws/customs in different countries.
There are better alternatives than drunk driving, but sleeping in your car isnt one of them.
1. Don't drink alcohol
2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving.
3./5. Pay for a driver/hotel
4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol
Related to #6 from the poster below - you can get a DUI for sleeping in your car while intoxicated, you can get woken up because you aren't allowed to sleep where you are parked, you can get towed, etc.
If the drunk driver ends up in a collision with a motorist, then the damage to the other party would be minimal. The drunk person also still has personal transportation as well.
If you were riding a bike drunk and drove into or were hit by a car you would probably be hurt pretty badly. If you ran into something else, or another person, same deal.
Based on the remark about individuals making a choice to operate a vehicle while under the influence, having them use a bicycle instead of a vehicle that's significantly heavier, the choice changes from do they drive under the influence and take the chance on injuring or killing people to do they drive under the influence and take a chance on injuring or killing themselves. Whether that change influences their choice remains to be seen.
But the point of the bike comment largely doesn’t matter since people have to drive to the bar or wherever and there wouldn’t be a bike to get a DUI on.
I’m actually not even sure that if given equal consideration a bike causes more drunken damage (although probably less lethal) but we won’t know because so few people ride bikes since they have to drive a car so they just get DUIs and kill people and themselves that way since we force that on people.
They always could choose not to drink if they have no choice but to drive. How is that not a choice?
If you're saying that "drive or not" is the choice, then sure we agree. But that's not really a choice because every incentive would be to drive and that's the structure we've built with car-only culture.
Even leaving aside all the gravel and dirt roads, and the many places where, at any given time, there's construction moving a lane 5 to 15 feet to one side temporarily, do you know how many miles of road there are in the US alone? I sure don't, but I know it's a staggering amount, a hell of a lot of it is rural (and some seasonal), and getting all of it retrofitted with even the most simple and low-tech self-driving guidance assist tech like your magnetic nails would cost vast amounts of money and either take a decade or three or cost about ten times as much.
This was a partnership between caltrans, the college of engineering at uc berkeley amongst others.
Unfortunately I can find any readily available links, but all of the data should be public. I'm only aware of this because I worked w/ some of the technical groups on the project (very tangentially involved).
I know the magnets were always considered a problem (cost/effort), but there weren't other options at the time, as computer vision was too computationally expensive at the time.
That said, touchscreen controls (with tiny targets) instead of dedicated controls and the new square steering wheel with touch controls instead of stalks... gah!
Similar to how drunken walking has a higher fatality raid than drunken driving/biking.
Scooters have regulated speed, zones that are banned from use, reaction tests, sidewalk restrictions and on and on. You would think there were thousands of e scooter deaths per year.
Operators didn't want the hassle of the paperwork involved with drunk drivers, crashes and followup costs, so they agreed with the city on implementing a "latency test" or other scare-offs [2]. Some of the operators already had that voluntarily activated during night time in other cities, some had to implement it from scratch, but I think they will more-or-less keep it in place.
Additionally, the potential for severe injury is way higher with a scooter than it is with a bike. Scooters run faster and are way more sensitive to steering input.
[1] https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article201502060/Nach-Oktobe...
[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/oktoberfest-sperrzone-f...
With a deer your best course of action is to try and stop but mow it over if necessary.
With a person swerving on a bike or moped, you may not be able to stop in time and most likely swerve.
the National Transportation Safety Board conducted
an investigation finding that the government should
not be actively restricting headlamp systems that
have been shown to have a safety benefit.
Personally, although tesla does "market" their technology, I think it is good technology that has probably not only saved a fair number of lives, but also bumpers and fenders.
Looking at the storied history of the airbag, I think telsa did a good job assisting the driver (and customer) when the status quo for other car manufacturers was to innovate at a snail's pace and implement safety features mostly when required.
If the US really cared, drunk and distracted driving would have appropriate sentencing. For god knows what reason, we're still not there yet.
As a general example, how many nightlife areas have decent public transportation at bar closing to avoid committing a DUI?
You either have to take an uber both ways, or get an uber home, then back to your car in the morning.
I used to just Uber if I thought I'd be drinking at -all-, but hell that costed me about 60 to 70 bucks which definitely isn't realistic for most young people looking to just have a few beers out.
The fix is not arbitrary alcohol blood levels, or extending the "War on Drugs", but with standardized, enforced, in-vehicle continuous testing that ensures that the driver is awake, responsive, and in control of the vehicle.
That is something where R&D in AI/ML/software to analyze and detect incapacity could/should be directed.
It can be entirely on/in-vehicle, with access to the data only available to law enforcement (and, perhaps, insurance companies), if and when it is needed to determine liability (not as a general "carte blanche" for the data), in the same way that aircraft black boxes are only analyzed for investigation after an incident.
I'd like to see research into ways to identify those drivers and encourage them to improve their driving skill.
For example, one way might be to make a register of driving skill public information, and then insurance companies can jack their prices up for those people unless they go on and pass (government funded) extra training courses.
Such a register could simply be an open database of insurance claims, or police crash records showing the names of people involved.
> At-fault crash-prone drivers are usually considered as the high risk group for possible future incidents or crashes. In Louisiana, 34% of crashes are repeatedly committed by the at-fault crash-prone drivers who represent only 5% of the total licensed drivers in the state. ... From the findings, it is recommended that crash-prone drivers should be targeted for special safety programs regularly through education and regulations.
In the US, these are CLUE and A-PLUS
https://risk.lexisnexis.com/products/clue-auto
https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/a-plus-commercial/
Car dependency is just as bad a disease as any.
Cars give you the freedom to go anywhere, but take away the freedom to do anything without them.
Uber decimated the taxi industry, the pandemic finished them off, and now taxis need to be sent from one town over, and those drivers don't accept my government subsidy card.
At my fittest, I could push my chair about 10km per day.
I need a car.
None of these things prevent you from having a car, and driving in areas that prioritise them is safer, faster, and more pleasant for the people that need cars.
Car dependency does eliminate transport for all of the people with disabities that prevent them from driving though.
And this should make you angry. No one should be reliant on a car. Everyone should have access to a robust public transportation system. Even if that means you personally get a subsidized van to take you where you need to go. Subsidized so it costs the same as a bus ride.
However, there is an exception for anyone with a "blue badge" holder (for those with disabilities which prevent easy mobility - wheelchair users and others). These people not only get free car access to the city centre (which now has a lot less traffic because nobody else is driving there), but also get to park in places that most people are not allowed to, etc.
Pales in comparison to the cost of parking. An afternoon in the Q-Park at Westminster is £45, 3 times the price of the congestion charge.
That you need a car is not a given but as you say a result from stupid decisions you can't control.
AI/ML/software is know for its high false positive rates, so if it was enforced it would lead to many drivers unable to use the car because of a false positive hit. If it was enforced, then the high risk reduction wouldn't occur before the crash and society in general will want to impose laws to fix that. Car crashes effects more than just the driver, and it not reasonable that so many people die from car crashes each year.
Is that true? Those human statistics take every human car and driver into account, not just Teslas. I have never seen data that shows self-driving cars anywhere close to human driving capability. If we replaced every car on the road with "self-driving" Teslas, it would be mayhem.
1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example.
2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything.
If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists"
...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.
I still cannot grasp what people are trying to do with this, really. Why are they trying to do public transports... With cars? You guys do realize most of accidents come from urban/chaotic areas, right? You don't have to use a car to solve this.
But America isn't too concerned with road deaths (equivelant of one 9/11 per month, or 240 9/11s in the period of time the US occupied Afghanistan in response.
Financially the response to 9/11 cost about $950b - $300m per death. By that reckoning the US government should be spending about $12.8 Trillion dollars a year on reducing road deaths, about half of the US GDP.
We don't have to be pioneers at the bleeding edge of testing, but 15+ years? Come on.
No, I have never asked for painkillers myself, so it isn't personal! However, if God–forbid I came down with pain issues that were treatable by painkillers, you better believe I would be on the dark markets PDQ.
(My RSI is no fun, but I deal, and it isn't amenable to painkillers except in mind-numbing doses.)
In addition, any GP that might normally have a chance of breaking people out of the disease-food feedback loop is bought out by the healthcare cartels (maybe getting a part of the symptomatic treatment profits).
Here is a link of videos made by a non-profit, with a plethora of references for each video.
Just a warning - trying to ignore the pain (by bearing it or hiding it with painkillers) is what is likely making your RSI worse. Please try and address the actual cause of the pain, than just taking pain killers.
I would only add that this isn't an accident - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
For a large company, draconian regulations can be to their distinct advantage, as them very size allows them to handle the cost and complexity, while smaller companies cannot - or they can simply cheat, and if caught, swallow penalties that would destroy a small company.
The manufacturers tried to get the standard updated, but the US auto industry blocked it, which resulted in car companies having to make US-specific, shittier, headlights - at significant expense - because GM and Ford didn't wanted more competitive advantage.
I was picturing something like what we've seen with marijuana, where laws change at the state level while DC looks the other way.
The Democratic Party has advanced actual legislative agendas, tried to govern, and supports democracy.
The Republican Party has openly stated their goal to "make Obama a one-term president", frustrate Democratic legislation simply because it is Democratic legislation, and is actively working to subvert democracy and both prevent and overthrow the results of free and fair elections.
If you genuinely can't tell the difference between these things in 2022, either you have been living under a rock, or you are refusing to see what's objectively clear because it upsets your worldview.
That’s a very trashy hot take. Doing everything possible to demonize and replace a POTUS is American tradition dating to the Peggy Eaton affair and has contributed to a United States civil war. In recent times, Democrats objected to the Trump presidency, elected though he was, and sought to block his every move. In fact, when Trump announced the COVID vaccine initiative, the Democratic Party held congressional hearings decrying it as a dangerous waste.
There's a big difference between "we need to be able to defeat the other side in order to enact our goals, which are X, Y, and Z" and "our only stated goals are to defeat the other side and hold power". Also see 2020, when the Republican Party released no official platform aside from, effectively "we support Trump, whatever he says goes".
There's a big difference between every (modern*) Democratic president and Trump, who has, since even before he was elected, derided and eroded our democracy, actively promoted racism and white supremacy, and relied upon Big Lies[0] as fundamental parts of his campaign and governance strategy.
* To differentiate from the era prior to the Dixiecrats flipping to the Republican Party, in response to the Democratic Party officially supporting civil rights.
The fact is, the vast majority of lives are jeopardized by reckless, unaware, distracted, or impaired... Things which don't apply to FSD.
Like in california, nobody is ever, ever ticketed or pulled over for not using turn signals.
Not that you're not right!
Another problem is aftermarket HID and LED lights which might not have any sort of legal pattern at all.
I liked reading (for years) this site regarding automotive headlamps, and there are problems:
https://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/bulbs/Hid/conversio...
this site has been around for a while, see what they said about the NHTSA and glare in 2000:
It has disappeared a long time ago.
edit: https://valdeuropeinfos.fr/faites-verifier-vos-phares-gratui... actually it still exists, and it's the police (a technical department dedicated to road safety)
I am the source. Anyone that gets blinded at night by oncoming traffic is the source, because this should not happen with properly aligned headlights. Regardless of ground clearance, low beam headlights should angle down towards the road to focus on the road approximately 125ft from the front tires. The higher the ground clearance, the steeper the angle.
> Are you claiming that the manufacturers are making trucks with illegal headlights? Because that seems pretty far fetched. Or that drivers are modifying them? Because that is very rare.
It's either the dealers or the owners, or both.
Anyone can. Headlights are collimated by reflectors. If the lights of oncoming traffic are in your eyes at a distance of half a mile or more, then it is obvious they are misaligned, as proper alignment necessarily requires they be at an angle pointed at the road no more than 150' in front of the front tires.
> I don't believe that dealers or or drivers are modifying them in illegal configurations at more than a minimal rate. This would be quite the conspiracy.
Conspiracy is not required. All that is required here is ignorance and/or entitlement.
Never had a problem with pickups but I've had several dozen experiences where the headlights behind me were "blinding" and in most cases the vehicle in question ended up being an Audi, Mercedes or BMW. In later years, this "headlight disease" spread to other mainstream brands - can't say I've ever been blinding by "big pickup guy".
Edit: I just googled it. That’s exactly what’s happening - EU side mirrors are curved to prevent blind spots.
People forget the Edsel and "unsafe at any speed" from the 1950s/60s.
Here is an example how: https://www.defensivedriving.com/safe-driver-resources/how-t...
I'm not sure I understand you correctly though. I'm aware of "parking cameras" for driving in reverse. Are you saying American cars typically have cameras covering their blind spots that are meant to be used when switching lanes or turning? Because those are the situations for which you're supposed to do a quick blind spot check by looking over your shoulder and I can't imagine Americans who don't look over their shoulders checking cameras for those.
I can't find anything authoritative on this so it could be I was mistaken but it was my understanding modern cars have more blind spots in order to increase crash safety performance and the backup camera is supposed to compensate.
Here's a reddit post by someone saying they are a former automotive engineer who discusses this but obviously using a reddit post as a source is not ideal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/q1jart/c...
> I imagine it's all about liability.
'Just ignore warnings in the manual' doesn't seem like smart strategy. Dust and snow disable those sensors frequently. Those warning are not just there for some legal reasons.
So many people set them so that they can see the side of their own car - that's incorrect! They need to angle it out to the point where they cannot see the side of their car, that way traffic should seemlessly be visible from the rearview mirror to the sideview mirror to the driver or passenger window.
People similarly freak out when you back up too quickly into them, because you have a reversing camera on.
Much worse, your car freaks out nowadays. Twice I've had my car apply ABS while I was backing up, while I was fully aware of a car behind me but not in my planned path.
yes, I almost had a crash in a rental because it freaked out.
Car in front of me is stopped at a light. I'm rolling towards it, well aware of the situation and ready to break in plenty of time.
suddenly a big red light is flashing on my dashboard (like as big as the spedo) and a loud alarm goes off.
Huge distraction.
My car does a pretty decent job and turning off the brights when it detects oncoming traffic, is this February Ars article saying that is illegal? If so, why is it implemented in my Hyundai?
EDIT: Based on other replies it appears that the difference is beam forming, exactly. My headlights simply go from high to low. It is pretty odd that would be banned, but okay.
And maybe they should be conservative, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it should take a decade to get something like this approved (or formally rejected).
Instead of we adopted a position of everything being illegal until it is blessed by a regulator, it is in effect guilty until proven innocent.
Until we put government back into the proper context innovation will continue to be inhibited
Uh, no. There should be a well defined standard of what light need (light area of this and that size or at least this or that brightness) and can't (low beams blinding oncoming traffic etc.) do, then let market work within those limits. The regulation should have actual research behind it. Pretty sure that's how it works in EU.
Then if for some reason behavior of lights on the market causes problem, the standard should be revised, not ban random products for breaking rules that haven't existed when they were created (aside from extreme cases I guess)
It was another 5 years before you could use a shape other than rectangular or round, even for composite lights. I believe the Dodge Viper was the first US car to get them.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Mercedes...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/1988_560...
Unless it involves red turning signals.
Same as side mirrors, apparently the technology of using curved mirrors to reduce blind spot has yet to make it across the pond.
I suspect its rather a typical lazy government bureaucratic hell case.
Hopefully very few because standards keep ineffective or dangerous designs off the road.
As for testing, they have that very well covered.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/laboratory-test-procedure-fmv...
They could regulate cars to make sure they're incapable of going faster than a certain speed, but people seem to want faster and faster cars for some reason and I'm guessing most accidents aren't happening at > 100mph speeds
It probably wasn't invented in America, and therefore the US government refuses to believe that it exists.
This is why the US is happy to allow half-baked self-driving tech from Tesla, but won't allow automakers to adopt anything that became standard overseas first.
and they started issuing patents for dumb shit regardless of that
Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/audi-digital-matrix-led-headlights..."
Can't wait for this one to start displaying ads when the driver's premium subscription runs out and when it's parked outside my bedroom (personalised by the cameras sending a live feed to audi).
My wife suggested a fun tech solution: night vision and making all lights less bright. Kind of a fun idea: a slight glow or dim lights so you can still see vehicles unaided, but a full night vision windshield or glasses and no more too-bright-to-see lights.
I once drove on a stretch of highway that used reflective paint for the lane markers. My feeble beam could light them up better than any HID could. It was very relaxing to drive in the dark and never once did you have to strain to make sure you can see the road. I think this is really the future of night driving.
Some automakers took this to heart and have since eliminated the glare that was then-rampant.
(I would personally award bonus points if this is implemented with some kind of inverse adaptive "matrix" mirror mechanism whereby reflective-ness is automatically concentrated at light sources that are directing light at you. This is again a win for good light citizens as it would make the car not overly bright during the day while managing to boost its visibility specifically to people who themselves have lights looking for obstacles, with the only side effect of blinding people with dangerous lightings setups who are blinding others already.)
That's how reflective signs, vests, and auto reflectors work.[1]
How about other approach - trying to foster a culture amongst people of not being an a-hole to others, especially on the roads? Rather than playing whack-a-mole with all possible variants how assholism can be manifested. It generally works quite well in western Europe, I can't remember the last time somebody blinded me (if I don't count split-second situations of popping up suddenly from behind some tight curve).
The main disadvantage is that the road by contrast may become harder to see. But I'd argue that the road also needs to become way more reflective, on the painted lines. The paint itself has some amount of retroreflective material, but it rapidly gets dirty. Cats-eyes are fabulous, but they also need to be regularly maintained and replaced, and that has definitely been slipping in many places.
Seems like the answer is here. Tesla evidently needs unquestioned access to your high beams for their research program in which you are voluntarily participating. You can regain control of your high beams by leaving the program.
That sounds a bit too long - in 2002 LEDs were just starting to be used in brake lights etc., but not in headlights. Of course, it depends what they mean by "nearly two decades" (I imagine it has to be at least 15 years?) and by "has been around" (in the lab? in prototypes? or in actual cars that you could buy?).
Well, since they explicitly mention regions, in that context they rather mean the cars one can buy.
That's on top of being 24/7 surveillance of every public space that will be used to try and hawk garbage to me.
Do the adaptive lights let you see off the edges of the road for animals?
Kangaroos can be damn near suicidal...
- Night vision camera. Not sure if it will actually help - you don't watch your screen when driving.
- BEEP, BEEP when approaching an invisible human/animal that is too close to car on a lane.
Some cars can actually use the headlights to highlight a detected person, so you can see it out of your window. Not sure if it works for animals though.
Basically, they split the beam into multiple sections and if it detects an oncoming car, it turns off the section that would shine towards the oncoming car, but keeps on the section that shines towards the side of the road.
Another thing - if you are driving behind another car, then the headlights don't shine into the rear-view mirror of the car in front, but rather around it.
The last time I encountered a vehicle without orange turn signals was on the autobahn, at night. It was an american military vehicle, and the blinking was so dim, that it looked like a malfunction tail light. I was furious at yet an other idiot who didn't look in his mirrors and just went left without using his indicators, until I realized that he was, in fact, using them. But they were simply of a piss-poor design, unexpected in Europe, and a true safety hazard.