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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

I never went to driving school but isn't it obvious to both brake and steer away from the obstacle?

Not that long ago I had some idiot driving the wrong direction, in my lane, and speeding, and was about to have a head on at about 200 km/h. I credit my survival to pulling hard to the right while slamming on the brakes, with the ABS allowing me to steer freely. It put as much space between me and the idiot as possible.

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You only have a certain amount of traction budget to accelerate. You can spend that budget on trying to stop, you can spend that budget on turning. Spending it on both can end up with you losing grip and having less traction overall to achieve your goal. A modern car's computer will assist with trying to keep traction on the road so can be good to try to do both if you're not 100% sure what to do.

But also, turning often means you're going to enter another lane of traffic with potentially other cars/people/obstacles in there. So blindly swerving can sometimes end up with a much worse collision.

I'm not going to say you should always do X or you should always do Y or always do X + Y. There's a lot of situational conditions on that. But only kind of turning and only kind of stopping is probably not going to work.

The biggest argument against swerving is that if someone else does something stupid and you hit them it's usually their fault, if you avoid them and hit something else it's your fault, unless it's on camera.

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