I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.
"Please click all the images of bicycles to access volume controls".
The adaptive cruise is pretty good, it's been fooled once by two cars moving in front of me at the same time and it appears to have no understanding of cars with huge speed differences. (Bozos that enter the road at half the speed limit.) It also refuses to operate below 28 mph which I dislike because cruise control is good for using the engine to hold your speed down on hills--and there's a certain 25 mph mountain road I sometimes drive. Yeah, maybe the adaptive stuff can't work but at least give me basic control so I don't need to use my brakes!
In Germany it is only legal to operate a touch screen while driving for essential functions with only a brief glance. For example, a judgement was handed down against a Tesla driver who tried to switch up the interval of the windscreen wiper via touchscreen and ran off the road in the process.
Source: https://www.burhoff.de/asp_weitere_beschluesse/inhalte/5723.... (in German)
We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items.
Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not
setting it to a high speed will fuck up the wipers when there is little rain, a /low/ speed will be useless when there is appreciable rain, and when driving you often move from one to another.
Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc.
Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.
This is completely untrue by third party metrics (both governmental and not).
Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into more dangerous operators.
You know, like on my appallingly primitive 1998 Range Rover, or pretty much anything from the same era?
Besides, what if you are on the road with no shoulders.
You've never driven in rain, have you?
My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.
Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.
She has never commented on Seattle "rain" since.
REAL rain.
We get that rain too periodically.
Sesttelites complain about rain because we regularly experience 100+ days of rain.
Seattle rain is not not a storm, it's a marathon.
There's a map here that shows that most of the eastern US gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle is very high on the number of days of measurable precipitation.
Many years ago we had a guy working for us who was sent over from our company's parent company in Southern Cali. He was not keen on going out in the rain at all, and was absolutely terrified that we still drove at 60mph when it was raining. "But what if you skid? It's raining!" he'd wail.
He'd never driven in rain. He just did not take well to a Scottish January, especially the bit where you get 140mph winds for a couple of weeks.
I guess we also have laws about keeping cars in good condition with decent tyres and stuff.
But also, you can now adjust wiper speed / interval on the steering wheel in a Tesla without using the touchscreen.
Feature was actually added a just a few weeks ago in a software update.
Yes, in theory it would be best to have the perfect speed without intervention but there isn't one perfect speed for the conditions.
The speed the driver wants changes from driver to driver and might depend not just on how much rain is coming down but on the amount of traffic on the road, proximity to pedestrians, eye sight and time of day and any number of other factors.
It's always going to be better to have an automatic system that can be tweaked by the driver because everyone is different. The more easily the driver can do that without thinking the better.
There is a specific ban on using phones while driving.
There is an obligation to drive with "due care and attention" so taking your eyes and attention off the road to spend time fiddling with a computer screen can be an offence as well.
I parked (where I could not be seen by the van) to warn oncoming drivers of mobile speed van 50 metres ahead over brow of hill.
While nearly all made eye contact with me and speeders instantly slammed the brakes, two drivers on phones (both women with kids), despite me flashing my headlamps AND putting my hand out of my car and waving at them, they still did not look at me or put down the phone.
This was after the penalty was doubled to 6 points.
(And yes I know its not legal for me to warn drivers of speed traps like this)
Insurance companies should have this data already. They should start setting rates based on it.
What’s explicitly prohibited is texting/writing and driving.
I did laugh when of course sometimes they would pickup someone holding a chocolate bar while driving. While not necessarily the best thing to do with the one hand, not illegal all the same.
The way that the separations of powers work in the US, basically all driving laws are set by the states. The rules for driving can and do change when you cross state lines in the US, sometimes significantly. It really doesn't make any sense to talk about specific driving laws in the US as a monolith.
https://www.themanual.com/auto/touchscreen-in-car-less-safe-...
https://actslaw.com/dashboard-touch-screens-safety-hazard/
https://www.ala.co.uk/connect/in-car-touchscreens-more-dange...
It is only one data point but my insurance went down when I got the Tesla.
Also, claim rates have all kind of confounding factors. Maybe a car is safer but more prone to theft, or more dangerous but easier to repair, or has better controls but is driven by inexperienced drivers etc.
They need to make a profit over their whole insured client population, not necessarily over any given segment or car model, so I wouldn't use insurance rates as data points in determining car safety without a lot of caveats.