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Comment by techdmn | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read statute, but my understanding has always been that if you run into the car in front of you, it is your fault, period. If you didn't have time to stop, you are "Following too close for conditions", regardless of what those conditions are. I agree that culturally a lot of people in such situations say "It's not my fault, they stopped right in front of me!", but as you correctly point out, there are legitimate reasons for someone to come to a sudden stop, and as a driver it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you are ready for that possibility.

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There’s no way that can be true if a car changes lanes or pulls out of an intersection in front of you.

This is fair, I should have been more specific. "Following too close" implies "following", doesn't include people unexpectedly pulling into a stream of traffic. In this instance the Tesla changing lanes would mitigate "Following too close" and it would likely be "Unsafe lane change". That's only true for the first vehicle though, not the rest of the pile up.

>"Unsafe lane change"

Well "unsafe lane change" can be totally legit as well. I for once had to do no think abrupt lane change when I saw some largish object appear seemingly out of nowhere and it was flying towards my front window. Still do not know what it was. Abrupt lane change did not cause any problem in this case but in theory it could have.

While you may have had a legit reason, there's no way you can expect a driver in the lane you abruptly changed into to anticipate this behavior. If you hit another car in your abrupt change, you are still at fault even if you have a legit reason.

Of no fault of their own, the car you hit trying to avoid something means you didn't avoid them. The car you hit did nothing wrong, but you did. Insurance will place you at fault at a minimum of partial fault. You will not be blameless in your example if you do hit someone/something

>"there's no way you can expect a driver in the lane you abruptly changed into to anticipate this behavior"

I am not expecting anything. Just trying to save my life.

by potentially wrecking someone else's is the point

Yup. Except that I did not have fucking time to analyze situation in all fine details.

Yeah, I know where you're coming from, but...when you've taken as many defensive driving classes I have from my younger days (we all know why), then some of the things they teach definitely start to stick with you. If you are forced to drive in rush hour traffic every day, there's definitely not much you can do. So, stop driving in rush hour traffic!! After that, you stop driving next to cars. You place yourself in the gaps even if that means slowing down. And that was my biggest Doh! moment was learning to accept that slowing down has so many benefits. One of the take aways form defensive driving was always leaving yourself an out. Being cognizant of not having an out for unexpected need for avoidance maneuvering will go a long way of avoiding the situations you experienced.

>"So, stop driving in rush hour traffic!!"

I have better solution. Why don't we stop manufacturing cars. No more car crash victims.

FWIW the defensive driving guidance in that scenario is to stay in your lane and brake -- this is most commonly encountered when you see a deer in the roadway, you will almost always do more damage to your passengers, other motorists, and your own car by swerving (and potentially risking a rollover or running off the road) than by maintaining your course and hitting the object at a lower speed

> maintaining your course and hitting the object at a lower speed

Growing up in the Midwest, I remember being taught (not sure if this was official or something I got from my father, older brother, or maybe an uncle) to quickly assess if I believed that I would hit the deer or not.

If I was going to hit the deer, regardless of my actions, I was to accelerate into it.

If I could brake and avoid it, I was to brake.

I've been in that situation a few times. In the case of a collision with a deer, I accelerated into it and only took damage to the front passenger side panel. I do believe that it helped prevent a bad situation from becoming worse.

In the other cases, I was able to avoid a collision by braking.

Later in life, I did swerve once to avoid a large animal that I mistook for a person walking on a very dark, very rural road. My car flipped and slid on it's top ~100 ft. before coming to a stop. Myself and all 3 passengers walked away without incident but I still feel fortunate that we all did these many years later. Swerving is almost always the wrong answer.

I always wondered about that recommendation to accelerate into it. It seems to me it would only end up making things worse by adding more energy into the collision than less.

I was told the same thing, accelerate if you have to.

Reason given was that braking causes the front end to drop causing the deer to be “pushed” up onto the hood and into your windshield.

No sure if this is true or not.

Sadly it does happen. There are horror stories of live deer going through the windshield, doing a number on the occupants both with their arrival and their attempts to escape.

Animals do not fly towards you. Tires do and they kill people who brake and wait toll it hits you. Becaus all happened very fast I can not bet what the flying object was but it was most likely a tire.

The object flying towards my window was most likely a tire. Sorry but I am not suicidal. Brake and wait till it hits you is worthy of Darwin award. There are countless examples of flying tires killing people on the road.

> That's only true for the first vehicle though, not the rest of the pile up.

I don't think that's right. Because safe following distance can only prevent you from slamming into the car in front of you if it breaks hard. If it hits something and stops way before the breaking distance, there's little you can do.

If the car in front of you hits something and comes to an extremely abrupt stop and you don't have the stopping distance to stop, you're too close.

There was something you could have done: leave more space.

The stopping distance at 60mph/96kmh (~28m/s) for a typical car seems to be 133ft/40m. So you are right, it is actually significantly smaller than the recommended 3-4 seconds rule with a relatively good margin. It also amounts to ~5 car lengths at that speed, which I rarely see in practice on active highways.

> If the car in front of you hits something and comes to an extremely abrupt stop and you don't have the stopping distance to stop, you're too close.

That is your opinion, and my local DMV does not specify a distance that long.

I don't know what area you're from but I cannot imagine the DMV advocates for a following distance where you know you wouldn't be able to stop in time. I'd love a citation for that.

> If the car in front of you hits something and comes to an extremely abrupt stop and you don't have the stopping distance to stop, you're too close.

It is physically impossible for a car to come to an instantaneous stop for no reason. It would have to e.g. drive into a concrete wall, but if there's a wall across the freeway you should've seen that from afar.

You only really need to have enough distance to be able to notice the car ahead braking and start braking yourself.

In Australia it's true. It doesn't matter the circumstance, if you hit a vehicle from behind, you are at fault. A friend hit a car with no brake lights and no turn signal that stopped in the driving lane. Doesn't matter.

Kind of fascinating about the Australian rule.

Personally speaking, in this scenario, with an enormous stream of one way traffic on one of the few roads leading from San Francisco, I hope circumstances are taken into account.

All Teslas could do this at any moment, is my takeaway.

It’s the same in Europe. The car hitting the suddenly stopped car is at fault, every car after that is at fault as well.

You’re to maintain distance and speed that would allow you to stop in time without an accident at all times.

Same goes for potholes, if you hit a pothole and bend a rim or something, you can get a fine for driving without maintaining proper speed. Then you can use that fine to sue your local government for having a pothole there.

In my part of Europe, the lane changing car is in fault, and the cars behind (expect the first of them).

I don't know where it would be allowed to stop in the middle of a highway lane for no apparent reason, especially after a lane change that did not result in a proper distance to the car behind.

Australian here. I was in a multi car pileup years ago. The car in front of me stopped unexpectedly on a freeway's onramp. Everyone was accelerating at the time. I slammed on the brakes. I decided I would stop in time looked in the rear view mirror to see if the guy behind me would ram me. I still remember it vividly - it was a white Commodore. Its brakes were on hard, nose almost grazing the road but it looked like it would be OK so I turned by attention forward again.

The next thing I remember is hearing an almighty crash, followed by the Commodore crashing into us, followed by another crash as we were pushed into the car in front. A moment later a motor cycle flew by the left hand side. It has evidently been unable to stop and and swerved right to a full frontal but was then off balance. The handle bars then creased the left hand panel of every car. The bike was only slightly damaged, and he drove off.

The police arrived. After a few questions, they determined it was the last car in the chain that wasn't paying enough attention and had pushed everyone else the car in front. They were taken to the station. The rest of us heard nothing more of it. The insurance companies paid out without much of a fight after getting the police report.

But that's about the limit of it as far as I can tell. In Australia, if you going though a intersection with a green light and hit someone who has run the red, your up for dangerous driving. It's not "one person made a mistake". As far as the law is concerned you both weren't paying attention.

Only for the first car, though. A lot of the impact of this story isn't the initial fender-bender-scale collision for which the Tesla driver[1] is clearly at fault, it's the horrifying stuff that happened in the resulting "8 car pile up" that surely was due to someone else going way too fast.

If the first crash were the only one, this would never have reached the level of media attention. If the same pileup was caused by a garden variety grandparent, no one would care.

[1] I'd suggest caution in attribution here. The only evidence that FSD was involved is the at-fault driver's statement to the police. I'm not going to say it wasn't operating, but I will say that I've never seen behavior like this from FSD. It's extremely cautious at lane changes, often annoyingly so. And while I've seen the same "phantom braking" everyone has, it's a pulse, not this kind of "bring the vehicle to a stop" behavior. Given the assertiveness of the controls, I'd say it's just as likely that the driver decided to swing into the left lane on their own and then hit the brakes instead of the accelerator by accident (which happens, again, all the time!).

Exactly. If a driver pulls into your lane right in front of you and then slams on their brakes then that driver is at fault. You may need eyewitnesses or dashcam evidence to prove that is what happened, though.

Of course there is a way - you are driving too fast, which seems to be case here, albeit not insanely fast.

You get situations of people backing into you which looks like you ran into them. I think it's on the absence of other evidence the car with front damage is presumed guilty but if you have additional evidence like a dashcam you can challenge that presumption.

In that situation, the person did not get hit from the rear. They hit someone with their rear.

Good luck proving that without evidence. You can see a number of youtube videos of people trying to perpetuate break checks as an insurance scam. Sometimes break checking alone doesn't work so they reverse into you. Relying too hard on simple heuristics creates these problems and additional evidence such as dash cams can help.

It's one of the reasons we have dashcams in both our cars.

Added bonus is that if you witness an incident, the police is very happy when you can send them the video file to prove how it all happened.

You can easily tell this situation from the tire marks.

I had a driver brake randomly and I rear ended them. They ended up admitting it and my insurance went from being mad at me to covering everything. Granted I barely tapped them but still, I think the law is a bit fuzzier than that.

Same exact thing happened to me. But my car is over 20 years old so the handshake on the side of the road was the end of it.

In some states (perhaps even most or all) this is true. It is your legal responsibility to drive a safe enough distance to the car in front so you can avoid collision always if they stop short for any reason.

That is exactly how it is handled in Germany. Actually not keeping enough distance on the Autobahn is one of things with serious fines overhere. I know both, the "your fault to hit car in front of you" and the "please pay 200 bucls and hand over your liscense for month as you were to close and we have video" aspects of it.

Insurance scams attempts to exploit this interpretation of the statues.

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