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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

It feels like a simple thing but I also suspect it is effective from my personal experience.

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.

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We have it our 2016 Forester and I won't buy a new car without it. I'm a pretty careful driver most of the time but I had one incident where I went into a road trance right as the car in front of me braked very abruptly to make a turn and I didn't register it in time. Was going about 35mph and there were a few car lengths in front of me. Automatic braking kicked in along with a loud chime and I slammed on the brake and stopped within inches.

Amazing technology that saved my ass and my car.

My car (not a toyota) does it too and I've never had it actually brake but the very audible + visual warning signs definitely makes you act tiny fraction sooner (at least that is how it feels). I'm pretty sure it would have stopped otherwise on its own but a bit less pleasant.

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).

>it also triggers when you go down a steep parking lot onto a flat surface a bit too fast

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)

> You shouldn't need it if everything else goes perfectly, but it doesn't hurt to have it.

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.

There is very little reason to be in a state where the advantage is the difference between a collision and not, is I think what they were referring to.

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.

Hope it doesn't break automatically since dealers are expensive.

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