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Comment by Arch-TK | Hacker News Reader

Brake lights should be activated whenever the vehicle is significantly slowing down regardless of whether the brakes are being used or not. And this should be standard across _all_ vehicles, not just motorcycles. I would say brakes should also override any automated method too, just in case of malfunction.

This is just (I am not trying to trivialise the incredible amount of effort required to take a hardware project, even a simple one, to market) an LIS3DH wired to some brake lights. Every single road-vehicle could easily have this technology.

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I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).

There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.

I don’t understand the voices against it: even if it’s recuperating, the car _is_ decelerating, which is why it triggers (and it should). What’s the problem according to them?

The threshold can be a problem- you don't want the threshold to be too low, or else the brake lights come on when even slight deceleration is occurring. This would give an annoyingly too-common signal that would possibly be disregarded/ not be an effective form of visual communication.

Ok, the threshold should be correctly set, but recuperation doesn’t change the threshold, it just makes it very visible when the threshold is too low…

As I understood it, it's less of a real problem and more of a perceived annoyance. People accelerate, let go of the pedal, realize that a deceleration sets in, accelerate again, etc. so their brake lights are flashing all the time (instead of just using their cruise control to have this happen much more smoothly and ideally below the relevant thresholds).

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