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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I confess that I find a dark humor in how many self professed "great drivers" find these features a nuisance. All the while so many people are completely unaware that they have these, as they have never activated. Hard for me to square those pegs in a favorable way.

Which, yes, being a great driver means you may be pushing close to limits while still be completely under control a lot. I just don't have a strong prior for that view.

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I am reminded of the quote, often attributed to astronaut Frank Borman:

“Superior pilots use their superior judgement to avoid situations that require use of their superior skills”

There's a similar one among sailors: "The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling."

Anyone operating a machine in a way that doesn't leave much margin is, in fact, not skilled at operating that machine.

It's really interesting watching videos of emergency responders in my country (the UK) either showing how their advanced driving looks in practice, or in later stages of training when they're explaining their thoughts to an instructor as they work.

Their progress through traffic is markedly faster without greatly compromising safety. They aren't making violent manoeuvres, they accelerate pretty aggressively but other than speed limits they aren't breaking many rules that apply to everybody else. They are paying a lot more attention to the environment and applying excellent judgement from what they learned. For example rather than weaving through traffic like a Hollywood movie, they take clear bold lines and hold them, which gives them better vision of what's ahead and more options when things go wrong. It's doesn't look as flashy, but it's very effective.

Would love to know more

So for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmGDpUnlMas is people learning to drive an ambulance in an urban environment, so, they're under blue lights with a siren, they're authorised (while learning and after completing training) to exceed speed limits, and break various other rules, but they're being trained to do this safely (or at least, more safely than most people probably drive normally)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkBchxT5kw is a solo, commentating live on his driving in a response car rather than an ambulance, again he's be authorised to break the rules.

I like the second one better. It's priceless to hear how slightly he accents unFORtunately he hasn't seen me after some driver blocks him for about 28 seconds despite blaring sirens.

Nuisance or not is a false dichotomy. Mandating it rather than simply offering it makes cars even more expensive, by making cheap cars even more unprofitable to sell. Imagine if car ownership becomes increasingly unaffordable, like what homeownership has become.

What is the raw cost of AEB to the manufacturer? You need some sensors, a computer, and a way to actuate the brakes. Doesn’t seem like it would represent a significant fraction of the cost of even a cheap car.

They also already have that computer and most of them have the sensors too. The reason so many cars come with lots of these features is that the base electronic package that the maker uses just comes with it, so the R&D is already paid for and removing it would be more labor than the components cost. After all, it’s a $5 radar, a $3 chip, a $1 camera, and $0.02 of wiring.

I can't count the number of flowers AEB has prevented me from murdering. But at least in my equiped vehicle, the nuisance activations haven't been dangerous, and most of the events in traffic have been reasonable, if overly conservative. During parking, less so, but at least predictable.

Having AEB without being aware of it is probably not ideal. If it activates improperly and you didn't know it was there, that's twice the disorientation. It was really jarring the first couple times, and if it was on a wet bridge while turning in a narrow lane, that wouldn't be pretty as others have discussed.

Sadly, most anything is disorienting in crash situations. I recall how disoriented my mother was when a car came from the side and almost hit us. She tried braking and swerving, but that just caused a hydroplane and when the wheels got traction again, jerked us to the side. She was convinced the other car hit us. I was, too, all told. Until I saw that there was no impact on the side of our car.

Which is to say, you aren't wrong. I prefer folks knowing what their stuff can and will do. I am not clear on what that really says about deploying AEB. How many folks have no idea why their seatbelts lock up if you pull them all the way out, until you let them retract all the way? Very useful feature that they should not wait for everyone to know about before sending it out.

Well, if it's mandatory on new cars, then kind of everybody knows its there, and then there's the fun of not realizing it's not there on older cars. While it's optional, it might be nice if they had a notice on the dash that it's enabled.

On the seatbelt locking, I learned the why when installing car seats, which seems reasonable, because that's what it's for.

They do have a dash notice on the brake engaging. And cars come with a giant book that almost certainly covers it.

And these same concerns apply to antilock brakes, no? Getting used to the way those feel took time for folks that were there before.

With all due respect, it sounds like your mother oversteered more than anything. AEB has little to do with that.

I didn't mean to implicate anything other than oversteer there. My point was that being in an accident is disorienting already, with no extra tech needed. Such that needing full teaching on it is an overly large burden.

Yeah, I have to agree. Maybe I just got lucky with very capable AEB, but I've had it activate on me two or three times - and every one of those it happened basically at the same time as I smashed the brake pedal myself.

i intentionally purchased a car without any of these hanfisted “safety” features that take control of the car away from me. NEVER had an issue. sit close enough so that you can properly slam breaks to engage ABS as hard as automatic braking systems do, and don’t take your eyes off the fucking road. it’s not that complicated, and i’ll be damned if i let a car make that decision for me.

A driver that drives unreasonably more slowly than the traffic that surrounds them is a bad driver. They cause traffic and create more chances for crashes -- after all, crash severity is directly proportional to relative speed between moving bodies.

The propaganda that hyperfocuses on speed (ignoring all other factors in the system) has been very effective.

People seem oblivious to the reality that vain platitudes will never convince aggressive drivers to drive more safely in traffic.

Police are guaranteed to obsess over speed. It's just like the war on drugs: officers can measure and record criminal behavior! Easy money. Not once in my life have I even heard of the other law that is posted on signs - slower traffic keep right - being enforced.

Traffic flow is as important as any other variable in this system. Crash intensity is zero when there is no collision.

But odds of rollover and braking distance are proportional to your absolute speed. So is crash severity when you're impacting a tree, animal or pedestrian.

The problem is that there are more than two drivers involved:

There is you, and the slow driver blocking traffic in the passing lane next to you.

Then there are the 8 cars behind you, and at least one of those drivers is making everyone unsafe out of frustration.

You can't do anything to change that driver's behavior. The situation persists until the system is altered.

Unfortunately, unless the frustrated driver is allowed to drive unimpeded at 100mph+, they will continue to be unsafe and make others unsafe. If there is enough traffic for you to be the slow car on the road, then that unsafe driver will be causing safety problems for all of you. Bottling them up in a line of cars going the same speed may be the safest course of action you can take for everyone.

That's very often not the case. Usually they just want to go 80 or 90, but are stuck going 63 because 2 drivers are aggressively passive.

Bottling up traffic is not safer! Every driver in a line who has to slam on their brakes, for whatever reason, subtracts the amount of available reaction time left to the driver behind them.

Traffic engineers the world over would disagree that decreasing space between cars makes anyone safer.

What makes more sense is leaning on the raison d'etre of multi-lane highways: slower traffic keep right. Designed systems work best when used as designed.

Typically you're not at high speeds when those risks are there. And when those risks are there on high-speed highways, they're typically due to poor road design (sightlines, etc.) and not the instincts of otherwise good drivers.

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