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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

As someone who commutes in traffic daily, this is not what I need or want. First up, it looks heavy and badly-ventilated, and then there's the potential for distracting info blocking my view of the actual road in front of me. Even if it was really good info (which would take really good sensors, plus a lot of compute to cram onboard), I am skeptical it'd be better than, you know, paying attention to your surroundings. I like ADAS functionality in modern cars just fine, but it seems like a stretch to try and bring it to bikes. What we all could use is some kind of ad hoc network between all road users, so the car that was thinking about turning in front of me could ping my helmet / bike and understand that it should wait and turn behind me instead.

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I also did many miles commuting and riding in the city. A key, absolute rule after too many close calls was to never cross in front of a car about to enter or cross-over the road I was on unless I could see the driver looking at me. No matter how clear my right-of-way was or how obvious I thought I was. One close call about every 10K miles or so was enough for me to realize only purely defensive riding in the city would keep me uninjured (or worse). Sure a lot of riders rail at bad drivers, but that doesn't help in the end if you get t-boned. Hope this helmet helps with that.

+1 to this. I always make eye contact with the driver in any iffy scenario. If you’re going to commit vehicular manslaughter on me, you’re gonna have to look me in the eye while you do it!

What information would your bike send to the car in this example that would help?

We're closer to having lidar in all new cars than this mesh network, so "There's a bike behind you travelling approximately X speed" is something the car already knows. "The cyclist requested you not to turn in front of him" - why would anyone ever send anything else?

Perhaps the car can send you a message instead "I'm going to cut you off and there's nothing you can do about it" but even if that might actually improve safety I don't think it's the change you'd want to see.

> "There's a bike behind you travelling approximately X speed"

Funny how garmin varia gives the exact same information but on cars. "There's a car behind you travelling approximately X speed" (which is most often over the speed limit anyway)

The idea would be more like the car, not the human behind the wheel, would realize that if it right-hooked me that would be bad (read insurance-increasing, citeable offense, etc.) and wait, where the driver would just keep flipping through their playlist and crush me.

This just seems way better and more likely to be solved with lidar, or a similar passive solution, rather than relying on your bike to broadcast "this guy is more vulnerable/faster/more litigious than you expect, so be really sure not to clip him".

Even if the network was there, it's a difficult physical/technological problem to figure out everyone's relative position and velocity to suitable precision with something like GPS, or GPS + accelerometers. But mostly solved with lidar.

I get the impression that this is not where it’s aimed.

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