What happens when you trigger a car's automated emergency stopping? | Hacker News Reader

What happens when you trigger a car's automated emergency stopping?

arstechnica.com

52 pointsrntn59 comments

Interestingly, based on the title of this article, I thought this would be discussing automated emergency braking systems that are standard on most cars, not the “what happens when you stop paying attention with adaptive cruise control, and ignore all the warnings”. Mercedes calling their call center seems a bit aggressive… since it doesn’t sound like the journalist was actually in a collision.

consider that:

> Mercedes calling their call center seems a bit aggressive

through necessary: I mean, let's be honest under which "normal" conditions do you ignore the warning system _and continue to do so even after the car stopped_?

Whatever it is if you are not a journalist testing something out there is a pretty high chance you need help one way or another.

So they call you to then figure out if they need to call you an ambulance (e.g. imagine you had a heart attack, or passed out due to some circulatory mall function) or a technician (the warning system malfunctioned) or well if they can safely ignore it (you are a journalist trying things out).

It's in a certain way just a natural extension of the existing emergency call system (common (required?) in the EU) where on detection a collisions/the airbag going off an emergency call is made. It just now detect a user seemingly becoming unable to interact with the system.

It might feel aggressive but it shouldn't trigger under in any normal usage situation and even if there might be some harmless situations it likely will save lives.

A lot of things can happen when you are out there on your own rolling coffin, a Heart attack, hypoglycaemia (from Greek “hypo-“, meaning ‘low’; “glyc-“, ‘sugar’; and “aemia”, ‘blood’), low sugar presence in blood.

Now that diabetes has become a widespread problem for millions, having a dead man switch for a case of hypoglycaemia with a Big Bro phone call to check on you can save lives, I guess, by letting the subjects quickly reach the emergency room, where we are now

To be fair, when a person is not reacting after the sequence described a medical emergency seems likely & a checkup might be a good idea.

Sure, I’d agree, but the report is that they asked if they were in a collision. Seems like some better reporting to ask if they were ok (and not assume a collision) would be better.

People in state of shock have reduced cognitive abilities. Makes sense to ask a series of simple yes/no questions to determine what happened. "Are you ok" is too generic.

Exactly this. After a collision people will be walking around with half their guts spilling out and insist they’re “ok”.

I fell off my bike today. As I was wheeling it off the road and onto the pavement, someone in a passing car rolled down the window and asked if I was alright. My answer was "Ask me in ten minutes". And yes, ten minutes later I was sat on the ground against a shop window with my vision gone dark, apparently as white as a sheet, and a lovely old lady calling an ambulance for me. It's funny how the body works - it gave me a couple of minutes of being able to get myself off an active road before initiating shock symptoms.

Yeah. In the rush to board a train to my mother after hours of delays just before Christmas, I tripped and bashed my leg pretty hard against the step of the train, a woman asked if I was OK and I reflexively answered "I'm fine".

Once seated I thought I ought to see exactly how "fine" I really was, rolled up the leg of my heavy black jeans and discovered I was now bleeding significantly. I thought about it, decided if I tell the train operator they're going to insist I go to hospital to have somebody check it, at hospital triage will (like me) conclude that I'm not in real danger and put me at the back of the queue and I won't get seen for hours, so likely I don't get a train until tomorrow, meanwhile I'm in the wrong city. So, no, I'm going to stick a Kleenex over this wound to keep it clean(ish) and stay on the train.

It wasn't mortal, but it was a sizeable hole, a day later it was still bleeding so my mother drove me to an Urgent Care and a nurse practitioner glued it shut. Kind of wasting their skills, but it feels better to have someone overqualified do it than guess I can just use glue at home & never know if that was a good call.

Regular superglue can produce heat when applied to skin, to the point of thermal burn. Medical glue is safe in this regard.

Can you expand on this a little? I know that there is medical grade cyanoacrylate/superglue, and I'd expect it to have the exact same exothermic properties as regular cyanoacrylate glues.

Asking out of interest, because I don't know much about medical glues, and I often just use a little dab of superglue on cracked skin and haven't experienced any burns from it (I have, however, experienced a superglue burn while crafting - for anyone who doesn't know: don't use cotton to wipe off excess superglue, it will rapidly polymerise and heat up, and it'll stick to your skin while it's doing it)

All I know is the medical superglue has “two phases” and gets hot for the first one a bit, and then there’s some sort of second curing a bit later.

Huh. Today I learned.

Yeah, that seems like a minor improvement that could be implemented... But the call is the important thing, check if someone answers.. if not -> call emergency services.. if yes, discuss next steps

Calls are also sometimes available when data is not/just plain faster

> asked if they were in a collision

Would you prefer "have you been involved in a loss of life incident?"

My point is to not take the question at face value, rather take it as a compliance tool. Most people will answer it automatically because either hell yea they were, or they weren't.

Take a deep breath and let's start again.

If I ask you "did you kill somebody?" are you more or less likely to answer with something other than "fuck you" than if I ask "how is your package?". I get it, it depends on set and setting. Good thing they have so much beyond telemetry (extending into humint) in that alleged "car", eh?

Yeah, I've wondered that too. I've triggered the audible alarm many times, but I'm still not sure what happens if it actually needs to emergency brake and cut engine power.

How does it handle steering/skidding? Is it gonna cause the person behind me rear end me? I hope I never have to find out, but it'd be nice to know ahead of time...

I’ve been wondering this the whole time. Does it gently stop on the right shoulders so you can comfortably get out the vehicle to meet traffic from behind?

I thought the same, it's poorly titled IMO. "Automated emergency braking," to me, means the system that brakes if it thinks you're about to hit something. I would have never thought about the cruise-control hands-off-wheel behavior (which braking is only one piece of, anyway).

I recently backed into a parked car — not a big deal, just left it in Reverse while waiting for someone and then forgot. Bumped the car parked 12 inches behind me the entire time. If my car can’t figure out to “not do that”, then I have zero faith in any emergency braking.

Not sure how your backing into another vehicle gives you "zero" confidence in emergency breaking systems meant for entirely different situations

And keep in mind that it doesn't have to be 100% accurate to save more than zero lives

Automatic braking on my car kicked in to prevent something similar (it stopped me reversing into a tree, in the first week I had it, when I thought I was in first but was actually in reverse). In the following five years it has given me a false proximity alarm maybe two or three times, but never wrongly braked. I’d call that a huge success. (This a SEAT, so VW tech).

I keep having mine trigger from trying to park next to a snow bank. The system doesn't know that the snow isn't harmful and will stop me in a very sudden, jarring way.

This is on a MK7 Golf, so it's been around on a very common vehicle for well over 10 years.

There was no danger to life in this scenario. It’s not for the car to figure out how to “not do this”, it’s for you.

replace “parked car” with “child”. Would it have stopped then?

I have no idea what car you’re driving or what safety features it has.. but more importantly, your response to a crash caused by your own carelessness is to be morally indignant… towards your car?

Depends on your car. Some cars only activate these systems after a certain speed. Even then you can still overpower the system.

In cars with parking sensors, it would likely have beeped at you aggressively unless you disabled that.

It doesn't auto-brake but does do a good job of avoiding such impacts by alerting to objects nearby you might not see, including cross-traffic detection when backing out of parking spaces.

I've seen commercials specifically advertising automatic braking upon detection of a child. The technology seems to definitely be out there.

The level of automation in cars today is designed to _assist_ the driver, not replace the driver or absolve them of responsibility for their vehicle.

How is your negligence relevant to the topic of AEB in a highway setting?

I observed automating breaking save someone’s life recently. Driver was in a rage and attempted to run someone over. Automatic breaking kicked in and prevented them doing it.

I read that headline to ask about a cat's emergency stopping at first and that sounded like a much funnier article.

It’s an interesting experiment but knowing the behaviour in an evolving collision situation would be more valuable I think.

My VW Caravelle (van) is quite aggressive when e.g. a car is braking to turn left and I start to run close. It applies the brakes hard, displays a crash warning and chimes. The chime is almost irrelevant because the ABS braking shudders the whole car.

The rental I am driving today (a Kia) responded to emergency braking traffic in front of me. I was already braking but the car decided to apply more aggressive brakes, switch on the hazards, sound an alarm and cut the audio entertainment.

Echoing another commenter: I’ve never activated the emergency braking function in 6 years of driving my Honda. A warning chime rarely, but never the brakes. Never in various rentals, either. You may be driving badly.

I think this also depends where you live. Driving in NYC is very different from driving in Montana.

You should reflect on the possibility that you might be tailgating.

Oh, I do. Tailgating vs efficiency.

Assuming you don't get in front of the car in front of you, wouldn't the maximum efficiency gain be one car length?

In some jurisdictions tailgating is essential. Most drivers are super aggressive and cut in, making the people behind you angry and you get nowhere.

It’s not your responsibility to make people behind you happy.

It is your responsibility to maintain a safe distance between you and other vehicles.

I’d be surprised if traffic regulations in your area don’t talk about minimum safe distances. Not maintaining those to 1) get somewhere faster and 2) avoiding being honked at by some psycho, kinda sounds risky.

Unless you stop at 0kph you are not getting nowhere. Keeping enough buffer between cars improves traffic instead as it is abrupt stopping which backpropogates through traffic. If there is enough space for cars to change lanes safely the entire mass can go at a constant speed. That might seem slower but it provides better throughput.

The trouble is that individual drivers optimize for perception, leading to a tragedy of the commons situation.

If you leave as much space as you would like to, other drivers change into your lane to use the space to advance, and now there isn't enough space, so you would have to slow down. You are now traveling slower than the adjacent lane, so more drivers move to the other lane to get around you and fill the space you're trying to leave again, preventing you from resuming parity with the speed other traffic is moving. As long as the space is there they'll continue to do this, which is a massive hazard because you're inducing a speed differential and a large number of lane change maneuvers.

The main trouble in my city is certain snarley interchanges in which you’ll never make it to the lane you need for your exit if you aren’t, much of the time, way too close to the car in front of you.

My vw has a setting to for how aggressive it breaks in those situations.

I hope the people getting calls from these cars are trained to deal talking to hurt people, but I suppose the agency the manufacturers have outsourced this service to can recruit 911 operators for a little better pay. They can say on the phone "This is X from Mercedes help center" but I'm speculating that X's work console displayed "Connecting you with a car in need of assistance. Car brand: Mercedes" a few seconds before.

I wonder if the more expensive car brands can jump the queue of getting help after an incident.

There is no queue

So they have enough people on shift for an 1:1 map with every moving car out there?

If not there’s a queue. The capacity may exceed normal demand, so the queue would be of length zero, but there is still a queue as it’s not a non blocking operation

If Capacity always exceeds demand there is no queue. If I call 112 there will also be always an operator who picks the phone directly and no "Your call is very important to us, please hold the line and don't die, your expected wait time is 59 Minutes".

You can’t guarentee that. The system can be dossed as it’s not a 1:1 mapping, thus there is a queue. That queue may never be used, although sometimes it is, and sometimes it just overflows

https://www.insideedition.com/shortage-of-911-operators-is-d...

Is it possible to buy a "disconnected" car these days? People for decades survived loads of daily driving without snooping from manufacturers call centers.

There's still some portion which are disconnected but there's not many. What'll probably be more important soon is learning how different vehicles react when you physically disable their tracking mechanisms. E.g. if I were to just cut and remove comm antennas will the vehicle keep running just fine or will it notice and start throwing codes or refuse to start? Would making modifications like that be legal? We're going to be forced to do such things in the pretty near future to remain untracked.

Maybe an idea for a website someone could make - provide the ability to search by car/VIN and have it list out all the tracking that's built into it and whether each can be forcefully disabled/removed. The ability to search for cars with the least amount of tracking built in, or that has easy to disable tracking, to inform you on what cars to buy.

Not a bad idea actually-- alot of work though to do it accurately :/

You can get an ebike, they generally don’t have any network connection.

My cruise speed control system effectively turns my car into a kamikaze rocket if I ever lose attention.

It needs a dead man button like this one

I wonder how many people will be injured or killed because of errors in these systems.

Given news coverage of collisions with self-driving cars, I suspect we'd see any such crashes in the press. So it seems to be pretty dang low.

From the article, I'd say zero. My take away from the read is it takes absolutely ages for the stopping to kick in. Hands of wheel, visual alerts, making the car shudder, sirens. The driver must be dead or unconcious. In what possible situation is it better for the car to continue on with a completely unresponsive driver?

I wonder how many will be saved.

Now I’m imagining a scene from Fight Club 2: More Fightening:

“Now see, there’s a calculus. If our emergency systems save ten thousand lives a year, those are customers for life. And we look at those as currency to be spent - we have some lives we can waste elsewhere, especially in areas that are indicative of non-repeat customers. Customer who normally doesn’t drink, we detect as drunk? Probably lost his job or got a divorce, we disable the emergency systems.”

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