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Comment by fdr | Hacker News Reader

It seems like these accidents could have been prevented by humans driving cars with collision avoidance. I'm a big fan of this feature on my relatively late-model Subaru, which tends to come part-and-parcel with adaptive cruise control, which is also quite a positive change in experience driving.

I recently rented an even later-model Malibu that only had collision warning auditory alert. Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.

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> Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.

In the EU, at least, since May 2022, all new cars do have automatic emergency braking, along with intelligent speed assistance; alcohol interlock installation facilitation; driver drowsiness and attention warning; advanced driver distraction warning; emergency stop signal; reversing detection; and event data recorder (“black box”).

Other features like eCall – a built-in automated emergency call for assistance in a road accident – have been mandatory since March 2018.

Sigh, EU cares about your privacy until it doesn't. These are data collection and monitoring nightmares. Big brother here we come.

While I broadly agree with you, at least eCall contacts (via voice and data) the local State 112 emergency services and only self-activates in the case of a collision.

That's far better than the situation in the US, where private services like Tesla, GM with OnStar, or Ford with "Sync with Emergency Assistance", which have no limits on data collection.

> along with intelligent speed assistance

Shame. I've never had it work really reliably in any car, it's a feel good but mostly shit. Even more so when it's not even hooked into cruise (many cars will provide a shortcut to copy the sign's speed into the cruise or speed limiter, but far from all of them).

Yeah, the systems I've used are dire.

The auto-braking collision avoidance system on my 2023 Mazda CX-5 actually is exactly what caused my first collision in 20 years. I was slowing down to avoid a car that was turning off, the auto-braking decided I wasn't slowing enough (or, I might have just let go of the brake) and it proceeded to slam on the brakes bringing me to a full stop on a busy road, leading to me being rear-ended. At no time was any of that necessary. I've also had the auto-braking engage (on multiple cars) because of random debris in the road, or seemingly no reason at all.

Granted, I'm sure this will improve over time. But for the past 5ish years, all my experiences with auto-braking have been dangerously negative.

The classical caveat of any fully automated system - it works well when everyone has it.

I've never driven a car with auto braking. I've been yapped at many a time for lane "departures" that were not lanes (concrete grooves on the highway being the primary culprit) and sometimes not even real (that "lane" is the shadow of a nearby power wire.) I've also seen the adaptive cruise control appear to fail once when two cars simultaneously changed into my lane, one from each side. It still had a moment it could have acted so I can't conclusively say it failed. It also fails to recognize cars with too great a speed difference.

The most likely explanation is that you were tailgating.

So what if they were?

A system that takes driving too close and turns it into something more dangerous is not a good thing.

There is no actually no indication that Waymo cars are making tailgating even more dangerous

Huh? Aren't we talking about the anecdote above, where they were following a turning car, then automatic emergency braking kicked in and they got rear-ended? No waymo involved.

I was thinking about the waymo incidents.

Or just human drivers leaving enough room to brake in.

Human drivers being poor at driving is why self-driving cars exist. See: driving under the influence, distracted driving, aggressive drivers.

This tech is wonderful! Fun fact about the inclusion of this technology in automobiles sold in the US:

The Obama administration (2015) was able to successfully negotiate with and convince most major car manufacturers to voluntarily agree to start making new cars with automatic emergency braking. Their agreement stipulated that all new cars must have it by 2022 [1]. But this negotiated agreement is why we started to see some new car models include it post 2015.

The tl;dr is the Obama administration basically said "look, if y'all don't agree to these proposed minimal standards, we'll get congress to pass a law that is more strict. So the companies decided to take the agreement now to de-risk themselves from having to comply with potentially more stringent requirements in the future).

[1]. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-and-iihs-announc...

AEB and friends also demonstrably reduced costs to insurance companies, who pushed some savings onto consumers to shape demand. My $28k brand new car has better insurance rates than my 2004 car because of all the additional safety and automation prevents enough incidents that would otherwise total the car.

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