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Comment by donaldihunter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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