Studies find automatic braking can cut crashes over 40%
apnews.com
apnews.com
False positives usually happen when there are cars parked along a turn, but I ignore this completely.
Over the course of the five years I had this car it prevented a collision twice this way.
This way takes away the biggest advantage of this systems - that they can react before you do.
Always false alarms, never in time that I could brake at a time that I wouldn't otherwise, and distracting enough to be a real worry. The only situation I can conceive of it being useful is if the driver is falling asleep on the highway.
What were the situations where yours triggered and actually helped?
Second was the car in front of me hitting the brakes when I was looking in the rearview mirror because both of us wanted to overtake the truck in front of us - that other person in the last moment decided not to do it.
Or perhaps they weren't planning on that and just didn't see the truck - I didn't see them indicate.
They both mis-trigger fairly reliably if I'm in a bend in the road and there is a car or object on the outside of the bend, so it seems that they don't take into consideration that I've turned the wheel, or the steering angle. I've also had total mystery alerts, seemingly from spots or a shovelfull of dirt on the road surface.
OTOH, the distance-keeping cruise control on the Mazda is very good, and I've used it for dozens of miles at a time on country roads, with and without traffic.
These emergency auto-braking systems are clearly not ready for prime-time, except maybe for highway use, which is where they can do the most good anyway. I sure as heck don't want my car to auto-brake in any of the situations I've seen the "Collision alert" triggered. Some would have definitely caused accidents.
Still looking forward to it when I’m older and a bad driver anyway. Can’t wait to have a personal vehicle that takes me everywhere.
When backing up near a wall/obstacle, the auto-brake seems to kick in when anything is closer than three or four feet away from the bumper. I use my mirrors and have an accurate impression of where the four corners of the vehicle are - I don't need the computer slamming on the brakes when I am reversing in a tight spot. It feels _more_ dangerous and I fear that one day, my knee-jerk reaction will be to fight the machine (press the gas harder, or get distracted looking at the console which emits lights and sounds every single time auto-brake kicks in) and wind up wrecking with even more force than I might have otherwise.
Also, in traffic, I'll often take my foot off the gas and coast/idle, letting the vehicle slow down naturally. I try to do this instead of braking sometimes as I believe it assists with keeping the flow of traffic predictable for others. Usually this is no problem because I follow the next person at a safe distance.
Sometimes, while decelerating as described above, I will allow the distance between myself and the next car to close, for example, if they're turning and will be gone in a second anyway. The Subaru then ruins my slowdown maneuver by slamming on the brakes because it thinks I'm approaching the vehicle ahead of me too quickly. Well, yes, maybe, but they're also halfway out of the lane already so it's not terribly significant that I'm closing the distance. Another half-second and they'll be gone, restoring my follow distance. (This has only happened once or twice but I imagine it gives the person behind me quite the unnecessary shock.)
I wish there was a way to fine-tune the sensitivity, or at least an option to say "I am an attentive driver, please switch auto-brake to a lower sensitivity level." Currently the only option is to disable it each time the engine starts, which feels wrong to do...
> Sometimes, though, I will allow the distance between myself and the next car to close, for example, if they're turning and will be gone in a second anyway. The Subaru then ruins my well-calculated slowdown maneuver by slamming on the brakes because it thinks I'm approaching the vehicle ahead of me too quickly. Well, yes, maybe, but they're also halfway out of the lane already so it's not terribly significant that I'm only one car-length away and still going 40 MPH. Another half-second and they'll be gone, restoring my follow distance.
You really shouldn't be driving like that. You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly, like because, I dunno, they suddenly see a pedestrian crossing on the side street.
Personally, I'm a more reserved (I guess safer?) driver, and I always leave good following distance and brake predictably in order to do so, and I can't say I've had problems with these systems. And I'm 100% in favor of systems that force other drivers on the road to drive more safely as well. Now if only they could prevent tailgating entirely ...
My driving experience: very rarely have a PCS audible warning when conditions change unexpectedly on the 10 (SoCal). Braking activated once or maybe twice in three years.
His experience: constant “false” alarms from the system, several instances of pedestrians and vehicles “coming out of nowhere” that passenger saw 10+ seconds away, several instances of slamming on the brakes, both machine and human-activated.
Some people just don’t treat driving as the life safety critical activity that it is. Most people.
I’m willing to ignore the false positives when moving very slowly in tight parking spaces. That’s startling and annoying, but doesn’t really bug me too much. I believe you can also turn that off independently of the forward-facing road-speed emergency braking feature (and you need to if you have a trailer or bike rack).
As for false positives while at road speed, I think the actual brakes have only kicked in once or twice, and only very briefly (certainly not enough to slow me down so much that it could cause an accident). It’s a bit more common to get a false positive on the first stage of alert, which in my car is an audible alert and some red LEDs on the primitive heads up display.
The only object warnings I’ve triggered are completely understandable and never had auto braking
A sharp turnning off-ramp to a rest stop on i5 with a sign in the middle that one drives directly at before turning has reliable triggered the object warning but never breaking. I suspect that if I went dangerously/stupidly fast in the turn it would brake.
The other other time I could reliably trigger it was pulling in faster than usual to park head on 1 ft in front of a fence, and that only ever did the warning not braking.
So far, and it’s anecdotal yes, I’ve never had it happen when actually on the road.
What I do find annoying is the cruise control starts to floor it when changing lanes if it sees the clear path down the lane line during the change.
I also agree with the cruise control issue. The adaptive cruise control is very nice for highway traffic that's changing speeds a lot, except that I'll forget that it's set at 65-70 after cruising around 50 for a while, and then when it finds a clear lane it will try to accelerate very quickly. That's ultimately just a limitation in how far ahead the system looks to find cars.
All of this is infinitely nuanced anyway. There might not be a side street. It can happen on the highway too when cars switch lanes to exit. And it's not like it happens every day, it's fairly rare, I just have yet to actually _need_ the car to do it, by a fairly wide margin.
1-2 car lengths (not in literal units of 15-feet each, I mean one or two _seconds_ of follow distance minimum after accounting for speed/traffic/weather) going the speed limit with my foot off the gas and over the brake, paying attention ready to slow down fast in case of a contingency feels very safe to me. Again, pretty nuanced, this only lasts for a handful of seconds while the lead car completes their maneuver.
The salient point is that I already do what the machine tries to replicate, I don't need my maneuver clobbered by another system.
https://www.automotive-fleet.com/driver-care/239402/driver-c...
I don’t know how accurate the above is, but it suggest that the stopping distance at 40mph is 5-9 car lengths, so I have to agree with the above poster that if you are routinely leaving one car length and your car system is freaking out, you are probably driving unsafely.
Keep in my that statistically this could work out for you fine for 20+ years before one day you get into accident, and presumably blaming the driver who suddenly stopped mid turn.
Check out watchpeopledie or idiotsincars for plenty of videos of what could go wrong. I recall one video of exactly this issue — an idiot SUV stopped mid turn in the middle of a lane, clearly a bad driver. And then another driver t-boned her because he didn’t have enough distance to stop, also cleary partially at fault IMO.
I know people with lifelong pain from minor auto accidents. Don’t have that be you, or cause that for someone else. What do you lose by keeping some more space between you and the next car?
Not partially at fault; completely and totally at fault (except if we're talking about someone deliberately trying to cause a crash in which case I'll settle for partially). The reality is there could be a hundred reasons the car stopped, the driver being an idiot is only one of them. Mechanical failure, something unseen from the following car, a door flying open, someone stepping out in front of them, a queue in front of them which is not obvious from behind etc.
If you are not leaving enough room to come to a stop when the car in front does then you are riding your luck, there are no two ways about it.
We also need to understand that being at fault isn't 1-to-1 with who was being safe. Typically, if you pull out and get t-boned by someone who has the right of way and is generally following the law, the person being t-boned is at fault for failing to yield. Where a vehicle is impacted plays a huge role in investigators determining who is at fault. Now if you run into the back of the person in front of you, it's almost always your fault, unless the person in front was driving carelessly or recklessly (brake check, for example) but would still involve partial fault in many cases.
So really, we can't say either way without knowing a lot more.
Not just 15 feet, that'd be insane!
Given this confusion, it does seem like it explains the root of the disagreement here, but that said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people reading your comment to assume that when you said “car length” you meant the length of a car.
A car length is, literally, the length of a car. It does not vary with speed.
Exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction (coming soon in a software update to a Tesla near you)
To me, a car length should simply mean the minimum safe _length_ at which to follow the car in front of you.
I get it. You'd prefer to use the phrase "car length" to not literally mean "length of a car" in this context. Apologies if I seemed pedantic but, as evidenced by this thread, your use of car length is going against the grain.
Safe following distance is often expressed in multiples of car length. What car? Sure, good point. Pick one; it's close enough! (If you're actually thinking about following distance in any terms at all, even roughly estimated, you're ahead of the safety curve and you clearly are!)
Ideally, following distance could be accurately estimated in metres and adjusted continuously by velocity and driving conditions. AI can do that. People just kind of eye it and say, "it was raining and I followed about four car lengths behind him" or "we were inching along and I was half a car length behind him". Good enough for meat brains!
Safe driving!
I don’t know you, but I believe a majority of people underestimate safe stopping distance. That’s why the webpage I posted, which is one of many similar ones, exist. That’s also in part why there are so many accidents.
People are also bad at estimating feet, so telling someone keep 80 feet is also not helpful.
But people are pretty good at estimating how many cars can fit between them and the next car.
So telling someone, hey, you are tailgating that guy and only one car could fit in front of you, but you need 10 car lengths to be safe, has a lot more communicative power.
Not if taught correctly, which I think it's important to note that we can't really do via textual communication.
In the driver's seat, during a driver's education course, you might learn that a car length is the length of an average car, but you also learn how to count the seconds of stopping distance you have in front of you. In addition, you learn that weather, traffic, and other factors can affect stopping power/distance, the point being that the whole system is incredibly dynamic and variable.
One can't reduce a dynamic traffic situation down to "X car lengths = safe." Similarly, saying "1 car length = a safe distance" doesn't really help either.
The idea is to teach people what "safety" actually looks like. How it's referred to is secondary. The proof is in how badly I was misunderstood when I said 1-2 car lengths. I _know_ I'm keeping enough distance, because I know how to judge a safe traffic situation.
I don't really care what a car length is or isn't, it's fairly irrelevant because safety is a much bigger picture than units of measurement.
The Subaru's adaptive cruise control system treats car lengths as variable units based on speed. It's much more liberal than I made it sound in the original comment. It sounded reasonable when I wrote it, but infinite nuance strikes again I suppose.
Personally, I find it somewhat confusing, but people should probably be more aware that it's a thing and not necessarily someone mixing up terminology.
Cars in your area are on average 40 feet long?
A car length is about the length of an average car.
Either way, with a 40 foot "car length", 1-2 car lengths is then ~80 feet. The above stopping distance chart puts a 40mph stopping distance with reaction time at almost 140 feet. <80 feet away is driving way too close at 40mph! Especially for a car you know is doing a maneuver which could result in them braking suddenly such as turning into another field of traffic.
I just used the term "car length" with entirely too much room for interpretation and am now getting torn apart for it, my mistake. I swear I'm not tailgating people LOL
If you're going 40mph and approaching nearly stopped cars at <80 feet, you're absolutely tailgating people and creating extremely risky situations.
Don't get me wrong, I've had my emergency braking trigger for similar circumstances of someone turning into a parking lot off a feeder of a highway. But I don't blame my equipment, I acknowledge I'm not a perfect driver. The car knew it could have been quite a challenge to stop in time and so it took action. The better action would have been for me to be going slower and approach that situation with less speed, not to just blame the car for being cautious and forcing realistic safety margins.
Yes they are, further up this comment chain is:
> for example, if they're turning and will be gone in a second anyway
That car turning is a nearly stopped car, doing a maneuver which could result in them stopping suddenly and unexpectedly. Going 40mph less than 80 feet away from that car turning is absolutely an extremely risky manuver. You don't know they're going to be gone in a second, you're assuming it, and if your assumption is wrong its a collision because you cannot possibly stop in time. Emergency braking triggering in this scenario is 100% justified.
Either way, if you are rapidly closing the distance to a car which is changing lanes, you don't know for certain they won't cancel the maneuver and go back to being in the lane. You're still assuming that, and assuming you'll be able to slow or stop fast enough to handle it.
If your AEB is constantly getting "false" alarms, maybe it is not the AEB that needs adjustment. Maybe driving in a fashion where the car's AEB doesn't constantly give "false" alarms would be a lot safer.
Changing lanes is a type of turn because you _turn_ the wheel to change lanes. You also might turn 45 degrees in a roundabout, or 90 degrees at a stoplight. They are all turns.
I'd agree that it's an assumption. Though your assumption that the distance is closed _rapidly_ is also just that - an assumption, and one made in bad faith despite my efforts to correct it.
The mere act of being in a car on the road involves dozens of assumptions made every single minute about the traffic conditions. Very little is known for certain, ALL maneuvers are to some extent based on assumptions.
This conversation is no longer productive, thanks for your participation anyway though.
I don't think it's reasonable to prepare for the car in front of you to stop in place as though it had hit a brick wall. Instead, the safe follow distance is derived from the current speed and breaking power of the vehicle I'm operating and the vehichle that's behind me, and the distance to the vehichle behind me.
I personally always try to maintain a safe-ish stopping distance, but I'll also ensure that I'm never in a position where I'm missing a swerve ready escape route.
And I’m a young guy that is working on being a more conservative driver myself - so I’m chuckling to myself just at the idea of me taking this side of the discussion.
But in general, very good commentary on systems that provide useful feedback for the human operator versus ones that don't. ACC makes it clear what a car length should be, and if you're paying attention you can gauge how much more space it leaves when you're moving fast. So that's what I go by.
Ug. I'd rather have testing be changed so that safety is increased in all situations by having a competent driver. Most of the situations being described here are simply poor choices on the part of one or more drivers.
For real, who the hell is cutting through lanes of traffic and slamming on brakes because they will miss a turn? Best to remove these people than have them rely on a price of tech to save them in 1 situation but let them continue to be dangerous in another 9 areas.
This follows to taking driving license from them.
You'd have to change USA more than Lincoln and Roosevelt together to remove critical dependency on cars there.
More drivers need to be aware of this one. There's an intersection near me where drivers always tailgate and rush others through the (slightly greater than 90-degree) turn onto a side street, no matter how well the turn has been signaled already. There have been multiple minor accidents, but fortunately no pedestrians have been hit that I know of. When someone's turning, drivers behind need to give them more space not less.
What I can say is what bothers me about it. Can I turn it off? Can toggle on/off switch be disabled by an update? Can I trust that it the off button will do what it is supposed to do? If I can do those things, can I trust this feature to work as advertised? I used to not ask questions like that with cars as there was certain level of.. expectation that this machine has to work in sometimes drastically radical conditions ( especially in some parts of US ).
Cars are software now. But that is not my main beef with it. My beef is that it is built to the detriment of the end user and to strip the user of all control.
I think that's the problem with that attitude and why I don't like my car doing excessive braking. Unlike the distance lidar, I can actually see there's nothing obstructing the turning driver, and I can see their speed of leaving the lane is simply too high for them to stop before leaving the lane even if they slam the brakes. And even if they did somehow manage to break where they are already I'd only need a little swerve to the left to drive around with no traffic there etc
Auto brake isn't just for "inattentive" drivers. It's also for self proclaimed "attentive" drivers that can still lose focus at a bad instant.
A turning car can still slam in their brakes when they're not completely out of your lane. Its rare, so your maneuver will be fine most of the time. But sometimes other drivers do unexpected things.
I don't think anyone would complain about these systems if they had all of the context and made good decisions. But it is a problem when either humans or automated systems stand on the brakes based solely on what is in front, without regard for sides or rear.
I do believe these systems are a net win. But they have rough edges that at least cause a lot of near-accidents because they don't behave the way drivers expect each other to.
I've also had it activate in normal driving due to someone else doing something dangerous. I'm pretty sure I was on top of those situations but I'm happy the system had my back even if I didn't need it.
My car auto-brakes at 5mph for parked cars that are backed into spaces, which I am sure reflects poorly on my driving in some way, if we're adopting the "bad things only happen to bad people" model.
My sister got annoyed with the auto-braking on her new Subaru and turned it off. Three days later she rear ended someone, smashing up the whole front of her car. This was the third time she had rear ended someone.
She keeps it on now.
Pretty wild. Seems like license suspension or retraining should be required.
The lane departure can be slightly more aggressive. It generally works very well, but I have had a few cases where old road lines (think construction zone) caused it to veer into oncoming traffic. It has happened twice. Luckily I keep my hands on the steering wheel and it feels the resistance and submits to my judgement. But for all those people that drive with their knees or text while driving, it could be problematic.
I'm comparing this to a 2020 F-150 Platinum that I had previously. It's automatic braking was awful. It had false alarms constantly. The lane departure was equally horrible. I find it interesting that the article pointed out how specifically terrible pickup trucks are with automatic braking technology and I thought back to my F-150. Since the F150 is the most common truck on the road (actually the most common vehicle in America period), I wonder how much of that statistic is being dragged down by Ford's terrible technology alone. Everyone I know with that on an F150 has turned it off because its so bad.
I think the brand and implementation of this technology is very brand-specific. I have driven my parent's 2021 VW Atlas quite a bit which is equipped with both technologies and it is "fine". Not great and not bad. I've seen a few false alarms already in the shorter amount of time I have been in it. They were constant in the Ford and I have yet to experience one after 12 months of daily driving in the BMW.
The turning example you give, in my opinion, is a prime example of something really quite risky all drivers do, but it's quite simple for that person to tap the brakes and then you'll cause an accident.
Otherwise, with the wall, maybe your system is misconfigured; I've tested mine pretty well and at low speeds like when parking or reversing it has never triggered until I'm within 1ft of walls or bushes
The worst example was when a bird flew in front of me and the car decided that was an imminent accident, but otherwise I think if you loosened the tuning it would be unlikely to be so effective.
BTW: 0 accident driver before and after this vehicle
Past that, ACC is a godsend, should be standard everywhere. Lane keep assist also works impressively well (the proactive one that steers for you, there's another "emergency" lane keep system that will haul you back onto the road if you start to veer off, which I've never had the pleasure of using)
Emergency auto-brake is _scary_ though. When it kicks in, the brakes make this horrible grinding sound, and you can tell the vehicle is stopping with all its might. You feel like you've done something wrong even if it's clear that the maneuver was safe.
The autobraking isn't getting in your way and you don't need it, it's exactly for you lmao.
Ideally I'd like to have it disabled only when reversing. Between the backup camera, mirrors, and the rear window, the safety systems are already present. The rear bumper really does not need to be triggering emergency brakes imo.
The front bumper though - yeah that one should probably stay on, even if it annoys me sometimes.
When your driving safety system gives you feedback while driving, you have two choices:
- Learn from the system and modify your driving to be safer for yourself and those around you, or
- Ignore the system, describe it as "too sensitive," and disable it.
Before the driving safety system feedback, you might have been an unsafe driver out of ignorance. After the driving safety system feedback, you're choosing to be an unsafe driver willfully.
Sometimes I still trigger it when reversing towards obstacles though. It still prompts an eyeroll and a muttered curse. Not sure if that will ever go away, somebody else mentioned that it tends to treat bushes as solid objects. Not that I'm reversing over top of the bushes, but reversing _towards_ them should not be as big of a problem as the auto-brake would have the driver believe.
Also the same issue coming up on turning cars that will be gone momentarily. I'm ready to brake if they suddenly stop, but the system freaks the hell out and tries to get me rear-ended.
I am willing to believe that there is a net reduction in crash likelihood because it may save me one time that I would have crashed. But the cost is a constant low-level fear of surprise and terror from normal driving.
At least it's better than the 2014 Audi I had that would slam on the brakes on the freeway if there was a semi trailer going slow one lane to my right. I learned to keep one foot on the gas and ready to floor it when that happened (maybe 5-10 times a year).
1. Forward collision alarm goes off falsely sometimes, but never the actual braking
2. Rear collision braking is usually fine as well, but since it doesn't realize grass/bushes aren't solid it feels a little more intense in those situations.
It really feels like you're just driving recklessly.
These numbers must be wrong, and are terribly unsafe.
Just off the top of my head, that's like travelling 60fps for .5 seconds is 30 feet, which exceeds 1 car length, even for my truck.
Your reactions don't correlate in distance (car-lengths), they're measured in time response (seconds).
Always measure your safety buffer in the appropriate metric: time.
Distance is the appropriate metric when you want to keep two objects a minimum distance apart.
Your response is only half the equation, then stopping performance comes into play. So while reactions are measured in seconds, you're converting those into distance traveled.
Measuring in following time is just a convenience for eliminating distance estimation biases. That time will also fluctuate based on the road conditions and vehicle performance.
As far as definitions for "car length" go, I feel that "average length of an actual car" is just as open to interpretation as "minimum safe length at which to follow a car" - really, these are both non-definitions.
Today I've learned NEVER to reference "car length" online because it's a shitty and imprecise unit of measurement. In the future I will simply say "appropriate follow distance" even though that's highly variable too.
Then again, I've known two people who both proudly proclaimed that they'd never even gotten a ticket before whose driving was so terrifyingly unsafe I wouldn't get into a car with them a second time, so maybe that's my bias.
Most DOTs claim around 1.5s for reaction time, and then up to another 1.5s for braking at typical highway cruising speeds. So, 2-3s follow distance in total. Adjust down for low velocity and up for poor driving conditions.
Car length may be variable, but is colloquially understood to be 15' give or take, but not more than 20'.
I often wonder what advantage in life people think they are gaining by this behaviour. Care to share?
But please consider that not everything is evidence that everyone else is reckless driver. One day your system will fail in a surprising/dangerous way, and you'll tell someone "wow, it mistook a reflection for tail lights", and they'll say "well I am a perfectly safe driver so that could never happen with my careful driving, you must have been really reckless", and you'll have an epiphany.
Never said or implied that. I said that one specific behavior is dangerous. Maybe you're right that "my system" will fail some day, but in the meantime I'll continue doing my best to improve the odds instead of using "well, stuff happens anyway, can't do anything about it" as an excuse. After driving for ~40 years, having been in a few accidents (only one in the last ~30 and never even remotely considered to be at fault) and seen more, I don't think I'm the one who needs that epiphany here.
BTW, let me go into a bit more detail about that one accident, since it's kind of relevant. I was turning, had signaled, person behind me saw and had tapped the brakes, person behind them was on their phone and plowed right into them, pushing them into me. No injuries, amazingly. Key point: there was nothing the woman in the middle could have done. She would have been struck regardless. If she had "absorbed the slack" as you suggest, her car would have just been slammed into mine even harder - quite likely with more dire consequences. Other times, as I already mentioned in another comment, drivers "absorbing the slack" actually caused accidents themselves at an intersection near me. More than once.
You're relying on your reactions being better than those of the person behind you (if not better than humanly possible), with no justification whatsoever. "Absorbing the slack" is a stupid and dangerous habit that most people who have driven for a while learn to avoid. I'm trying to tell you here so you don't have that epiphany about defensive driving and margins of error too late.
https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/topics-and-issues...
Just that bit from my original comment. The other child comment worded it better than I did though.
I've had a Crosstrek since 2018, and it has prevented accidents for me at least 4 times. It can be annoying when someone edges into your lane, or is edging out of your lane (and usually braking), but for every time it autobrakes for that, there's probably a situation where I'm glad it did. I'm sure the tech will just get better over time.
We have automatic braking (fixed: breaking) on my Toyota Rav4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbnoFbb8G8Q
It is a simple thing but the PCS has been triggered 4 times in the last 5 years and never incorrectly. I think I would have stopped soon enough without it (as I've never hit anything in my 20+ years of driving), but it was always in those unexpected situations like a car rapidly slowing down in the middle of the highway for something I can not even see.
It feels like initializing values to 0 automatically. You shouldn't need it if everything else goes perfectly, but it doesn't hurt to have it.
Amazing technology that saved my ass and my car.
edit: it also triggers when you go down a steep parking lot onto a flat surface a bit too fast which is interesting but at least valid (with respect to suspension compression and hitting the ground).
that's a great feature, I always have to remind friends and relatives to slow down when going down an incline onto the road (they invariably scrape the underside of the car)
That's not how I see it. Computers react faster than humans even setting aside the mechanical delay of lifting your foot, moving it, and pressing it down again.
It's more like running a linter on your code. 99.99% of the time it isn't necessary and you already knew what it was going to say, but the one time it does catch something important it's a life saver.
Adequate following distance, conservative driving, etc.
Not like that happens on freeways in any city, of course, but the point is - it shouldn’t matter, but should be nice to have.
Unfortunately, I’ve had numerous false triggers (highway construction barriers coming in rapidly from the side, while other traffic merged in), which made me disable mine. It’s almost caused several accidents in the last few years.
Apparently most drivers don't actually apply the brakes fully when emergency braking, so this helps with that.
This desire to be in control of a car, or the belief one should be in control of a car, is a true curse on the public realm. People who actively think of themselves of good drivers, are invariable the ones who drive aggressively. It's never the ones that drive slow, boring, and predictable that reject safety measures.
For example; seatbelts were fought, the fetishization of things like acceleration or top speed capabilities of a car, traffic calming measures that reduce top speeds are always fought, speed limiters are way out of the overton window, just mentioning automated speed cameras cause aneurysms, ...
People have unhealthy attachment to the brand of driving, the dumb shit that they see on car advertisements.
It's primarily a male ego thing, and it's pathetic and needs to go.
Safety measures that prevent so-called spirited driving should be mandatory on cars: speed limiters, auto-braking, and lane keeping are a good start.
I also drive pretty carefully and provide a ton of space, but others don’t.
Also see Tesla phantom braking.
It isn’t just diesel bros.
On the other hand a lot of "aggressive" drivers slip up earlier or later. The risk is too high.
Also, looking at a phone is entirely your choice, not a boredom/distraction moment. Listen to audiobooks if your mind needs to do something while driving.
>It wouldn't surprise me if these safety features end up increasing collisions because people start feeling safe that the blockchain ai machine learning sensors of the future will do all the work for them.
I'm all for them but properly tested and validated, not the tesla cowboy approach that musk espouses. I fear that he will discredit the idea before we have serious autonomous driving products.
The person hitting you from behind would be at fault anyway, at least where I live you are required to keep enough distance to stop even for no apparent reason, if driving in a lane and not moving to another.
If you do it whilst moving in front of another car as it could be on you as you are required to yield and leave enough space to not hinder or endanger the driving of the other vehicle. This also includes brake-checks as your obligation to yield does not stop after you have merged into another highway lane and continues for an unspecified amount of time.
So there should not be an issue there, only problem is people can and will not understand the stopping distance of a car driving 100+kph and do not leave enough space. YMMV with respect to the laws involved as it's entirely possible you could be at fault at the place you are living.
Where is this place where drivers just magically pay for damages? Where I live in the US, the person who hits you from behind is probably going to back up and just drive away.
The rear ender having to pay is just the base case that is used in the absence of other facts.
If you drive "in an asinine manner" (the definition of asinine is subject to discretion and negotiation between the relevant insurance companies) and manage to make the front of someone else's care meet the rear of yours in the process AND there are witnesses, dashcam footage or other evidince you will almost certainly wind up having to pay up.
Everybody knows that traffic doesn't follow the rules. Pretending like it does is a convenient legal fiction we use in order to make rule making easier.
There is intentionally tons of redundancy baked into the rules to cover for all the edge cases where people routinely don't follow the rules. Hence why other people's obligation to not crash into stuff isn't a blank check to do whatever. In cases where two people are breaking the rules usually whoever's breaking them in the more typical and predicable manner is the one given a pass (e.g. someone speeding "a normal amount" will likely not be found at fault if you roll a stop and get t-boned).
So sure - the guy in front of you may have been extremely reckless, but no one involved is even going to want to hear that narrative.
Nobody cares about talk. Everybody lies when they have financial motive to do so and everyone who deals with accidents professionally knows this. That said, insurance companies care deeply about hard to falsify (i.e. anything better than heresay) evidince that show that their customer was not the cause of the loss (dashcam video, surveillance footage, 3rd party witness statements, etc) because the profitability of their business depends in large part on claims payouts.
For other accidents, yes - I've found they want to listen. Rear ending: Not really: They just want to know who was driving the car that rear ended the other car.
I got rear ended once. I spoke to the other party's insurance. Trust me - they didn't want to know why I had gotten hit. It's to their benefit to know, but for them it was an open and shut case. All they wanted to confirm was that it was their insured who had rear ended me.
I have a dashcam, if someone cuts me off and slams on their brakes I may not have time to react. The party in front could be responsible if you can prove it with a video. The insurance company WILL CARE if you have footage.
However, if someone seems to brake no reason, it is on the driver behind to stop.
Maybe it's different in the states, I'm not up to date with all traffic rules everywhere.
Also people commenting here are likely from widely disparate parts of the world with different driving laws. Those differences are more than enough to preclude useful discussion here at the extremes.
So if autonomous systems hit the brakes much more severely than conditions warrant, it’s not obvious that the drivers behind you are going to have time to react.
https://electrek.co/2022/08/30/tesla-faces-class-action-laws...
https://jalopnik.com/the-honda-cr-v-and-honda-accord-are-bei...
Most other brands seem pretty good. My 2019 Subaru has zero phantom braking events so far. (Although the adaptive cruise control does get confused when driving in the slow lane on freeways and slows down when the car ahead turns onto an offramp.)
Automatic emergency braking changes nothing from a crash liability standpoint. Generally the leading vehicle has the right of way, and the following driver must leave enough space to avoid a crash even if the leading vehicle brakes inappropriately.
The features most related to this article are: FCW, AEB, CAEB, HAEB, and PD. Note that some manufacturers have much better implementations than others, so after you settle on a few models, investigate how good their implementations actually are.
My Tesla, on the other hand, get's it right about 10% of the time. I wanted to type a higher percentage, but phantom breaking happens so often. The number of times I've seen the red X on the atlas in the entire time owning it is about the number of times the M3 loses its mind on a monthly basis.
The other interesting thing: I could probably write the algorithm for the adaptive cruise control on the Atlas. It's so predictable that I know exactly what it's going to do in reaction to traffic around me. If a car ahead of me slows down, I slow down at a constant rate. If the car speeds up, I know exactly how much it's going to speed up. Same with people changing lanes ahead of me, etc.
The M3 OTOH feels like a buggy machine learning model. I have no idea why it's at the current speed it's at. If I set it to 120KM/H and there's no car in front of me the chances of it being 120KM/H is about 30%. If a car pulls away from and my car should speed up there is no rhyme or reason to when and how quickly it speeds up.
All that being said, I'd still take the Tesla automated braking over nothing at this point. Reading the other posts, it sounds like VW is doing something right.
That incident gave pause. If the brakes had engaged, might that have caused a crash?
They actually recommend to disable the "pre-collision braking" feature before driving through an automated carwash. Apart from that situation, I also disable it when I'm facing highly congested traffic for the reasons indicated in the other comments. It's very easy to do. I don't understand why this is a big deal.
I think the system works very well and has saved me several times over the years while approaching intersections and on the highway.
(and yes the AEB did save me from backing into things at least twice in these years, so I know it works)
Super satisfied with the system otherwise though. Lane keeping and adaptive cruise control are good enough to ease the burden on longer trips but just bad enough that I never "fully" trust them and completely divert my attention.
It's not always safe to keep the huge distances apart at the speeds the system wants (other drivers will cut in). The system can also have a difficult time with motorcycles lane-splitting.
Anyway the way I see this is the switches are there for the driver to use at their discretion. I would hate for the industry to move towards full automation. I love the system as it works right now. Just my two cents.
I wonder about front-to-rear crashes when the struck vehicle has automatic braking when the rear one doesn't.
I worry about people with automatic braking not paying attention and being on their phone and letting the automatic braking keep them from hitting people in front of them, while coming to abrupt stops and getting hit more from behind.
Side note, that car has astoundingly good brakes.
Facepalm slap. Seems so obvious once said out loud.
That'd be like a Rodney Brooks inspired actionist strategy, right? Our vehicles as boids, with implicit coordinated action, like flocking, herding, pacing, station keeping, etc.
Maybe a bottom-up emergent behavior strategy has potential. Or a hybrid strategy.
When it comes to AI, FDS, etc. I obviously know nothing about nothing, so please chime in.
It would have, as a separate system, probably saved several of the Tesla drivers who drove directly into obstacles at highway speeds, which for whatever reason a purely optical system will screw up. Similar to how it saves human drivers that rely on sight.
Automatic braking has demonstrated the ability to:
- reduce rear-end automobile crashes "in half" (technically 49%)
- reduce Rear-end crashes with injuries by 53%
- vehicles without automatic braking, but with collision warnings only cut accidents by 16% (compared to 49% with automatic braking)
- pickup trucks are less effective at preventing crashes, only preventing 43% of accidents and reducing injuries by 42% (compared to above numbers for other vehicles)
- lane departure systems reduce crashes by 8% and reduce injuries by 7%
- A consortium of 20 auto manufactures have voluntarily committed to offering automatic braking technology to 95% of their light-duty models during the 2023 model year
Imagine auto braking on black ice or because of a faulty sensor. We're giving immature technology too much control of the vehicle.
I remember back in the day when seatbelts were controversial because someone was thrown free from a car.
We really should work on software reliability.
As for humans, 35,000 Americans die every year on the roads and 6 million accidents occur.
I think we should be able to get software reliable enough to reduce that by 10x
There are almost 2 million rear end collisions in the US every year. Humans just don't have the reaction times to handle many situations. That is also best case. Many people are distracted while driving.
Wrt. black ice, if there's a stopped car in front of you, black ice or no you want to try to stop.
I can only imagine what driving would be like if the car did indeed autonomously brake in those situations.
Or in situation when I am already breaking ie to full stop hard with enough breaking room and it still pops up the warnings. Sometimes just warnings out of blue, in the middle of an empty road. Me and my family are very happy no automated breaking is integrated into that car, its current state would kill us sooner or later.
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/do-you-know-what-torque-vectori...
ESC is good at preventing people who don't know how hard their vehicle can actually turn from going "all in" with the brakes and winding up off the road because they robbed the car of all the tractive force it was using to turn. For example, if you whip around a turn at a high rate of speed and there's a deer there ESC will keep you on the road, you're still gonna hit the deer though.
I think all these technologies are beneficial because they bridge the gap between the hapless dolt and the driver who can get the most out of their vehicle but no amount of breathless hand wringing and low effort internet comments will ever change the rules of physics.