Looking at the comments here I need to double check if I'm on some gearhead forum where automatic transmission is considered appropriate exclusively for teenagers and geriatric patients.
Anyway, I'll add my anecdote when my Toyota surprised me with a panic brake in a blind corner which probably saved my life by not ending up under a stopped bus. But the kicker is that my insurer gave me quite a steep discount when I originally bought the car, specifically due to the emergency brake feature. They may have more data comparing collisions for cars with/without this feature than anons on internet forums, who knows?
Wanting to have control over the vehicle is not some "gearhead forum" thing at all. I barely care about cars and I still care about this.
I'm the driver, I should be in control and there's literally no need to justify it any further. Anything that forcibly takes away control is automatically wrong from a basic human dignity perspective. I couldn't care less what governments or insurers think, I'm the goddamn human and I should have total control over this machine. I'm driving, not being driven.
I'm baffled by this comment. For one thing, this is literally not how vehicle regulation has worked in any western country for at least half a century, probably longer. There are already legally mandated systems that take away driver control in certain circumstances, notably ABS.
For another, the NPRM being discussed assumes that essentially 100% of new vehicles will eventually come with AEB systems in the near future. The proposed rulemaking is just formalizing that situation and setting performance standards.
Huh? ABS doesn't take away my control, it improves my control by preventing conditions that would reduce traction. This system is always engaged by brake pedal input from my foot. It's not something that cars just do out of nowhere.
The emergency braking system will automatically stop the car without your input whenever it wants. Judging from this thread, that could be due to anything. False positives have been reported. People should absolutely be able to turn this thing off if they don't trust it.
> People should absolutely be able to turn this thing off if they don't trust it.
Absolutely not. There are other people on the road. Families. You don’t get to kill other people in a preventable accident because you believe you’re an above-average human who can outperform a computer.
For what it's worth, I think you're misunderstanding the sentiment here.
The argument isn't that a human is better at avoiding accidents than an automated system, the argument is that, as an average human, I'm good enough and the marginal difference isn't worth the complexity and risk that the system introduces.
I literally couldn't care less how well the computer performs. I'm the human, it's my vehicle, I'm driving and I should have total command over the machine. I refuse to be dehumanized into some well-controlled variable in the name of so-called safety.
It should be optional period. You want to save lives how about disable stolen cars, so joy ride Kias dont kill pregnant mothers. Imagine emergency braking a F-350 with a gooseneck and two tractors on it. Does not end well.
What if it being optional increases death statistics massively? Should we really be ideologically driven instead of relying on data and measurable effects?
We can easily pass a law requiring AEB in new cars. Can you explain the mechanism that would allow legislating free will? Or were you just looking for any counter example, no matter if it makes the least bit sense?
You think statistics override basic principles of human dignity. I'm merely exposing your argument for the absurdity it is.
> What if it being optional increases death statistics massively?
What else would you like to make mandatory to satisfy your death reduction statistics, I wonder? Vaccines?
Let's just go all the way: you're talking about eliminating human agency, autonomy and free will. You want to replace it with decisions made by committee with optimized outcomes and make them mandatory with force of law.
> Should we really be ideologically driven instead of relying on data and measurable effects?
Yes. Do you not have principles, values you won't compromise on?
ABS improves your control in normal circumstances. There are (uncommon) circumstances where it will actually harm your ability to handle the vehicle, same as other mandatory systems like ECS and optional safety features like traction control. Some vehicles have ways to disable some or all of these safety features for control purposes.
The proposed rules include false activation tests, monitoring/reporting of unnecessary braking, and NHTSA retains the ability to order recalls if false activations are unreasonably common. It also includes a request for comment on whether manual disablement should be allowed at high speeds. Feel free to submit one if you feel strongly about it.
Can you elaborate on that? Everything I've read about the ABS technology suggests it always improves steering and almost always reduces braking distance. Exceptions include surfaces like snow and gravel where it actually increases braking distances. If there's more to it than this, I could change my opinion on the matter: might be wise to have the option to disable in some situations.
Also wet conditions, and worn concrete, etc. Worse, the control systems behind ABS systems are not equally effective at all speeds either, and typically have regimes where they introduce significant amounts of yaw oscillation during maneuvers. That's not good for the panicking driver and can result in them being unable to control the vehicle as effectively.
Note that these are all very niche concerns and I think ABS is a fantastic safety feature, but it's still a compromise to improve the averages. This is true of virtually all safety technology.
> might be wise to have the option to disable in some situations
Snow and gravel are the only valid situations where ABS can increase braking distance.
However, disabling ABS is still a really poor idea.
ABS increases braking distance in the snow because it allows the wheels to rotate so they can grip the road. ABS allowing your front wheels to rotate is why you have any marginal ability to steer and brake simultaneously. Without ABS in the snow your front wheels will lock while steering before your rears and you will lose control of the vehicle.
On top of that, disabling ABS usually disables the vehicle's entire suite of driver aids like traction control and stability control which are extremely helpful in snow.
I can't think of any situation, however contrived, where I would willingly disable ABS on a vehicle in snowy conditions... unless you were trying to slide a car around.
ABS does what I tell it I want to do, giving me greater control of the vehicle. When I press the brake all the way down, it means I want to stop as fast as possible, which I can't easily do without ABS. AEB does whatever it wants, without any input from me, leading to "surprises". ABS is user engaged, AEB takes control away from the user. Stop being disingenuous.
> You are not the only person on the road, you are creating risk for other drivers and pedestrians every time you drive.
Aren't you notice, my dear safety fan, that the thing you are propagating is effectively adding one more person/actor on the road - a programmer of potentially buggy software, totally not FOSS and without any responsibility for any possible outcomes of possible bugs?
Your comment is very hard to disagree. But how are you going to test if there might be some interference of two changes? For example, negative effect from screen/touchscreen and positive from auto-breaking - isn't your next proposal to gather more information including video of driver's moves? I have a strong feel that an argument that the drivers must be video-streaming while moving will be equally hard to disagree.
Why should drivers be video streaming? I'm just suggesting that regulators should compare accident rates of cars with and without automated breaking. I'm not saying we should spy on anybody, surely regulators already get this data.
Because nobody has drawn a red line and Ron Jones in 1967 has shown us how vulnerable our freedom is.
We already has a lot of mandatory non-FOSS software in cars which use to phone home which effectively is a streaming (not a video yet, but amount of data is never decreasing). And a lot of so-called safety (surveillance in reality) devices are around us nowadays - phones exposing a lot of uncertain data about us, bank cards which allows banks know where we are right now, etc. If some crackpot politician proves to safety-demanding influencers that video streaming from every moving car helps us to prevent $bad_things_list so that kind of demand is totally possible, especially if using cars for mass killings would become more common than mass shootings.
> I'm just suggesting that regulators should compare accident rates of cars with and without automated breaking.
It's impossible because you have not 100% of the data.
So what? If that's the price to pay to maintain control, fine.
These precedents are also creating risk by the way. It hasn't been that long ago since news was posted here of security researchers remotely cutting off car engines or cars repossessing themselves if you don't pay on time. That's the sort of existential risk you're paving the way for by accepting "safety" in exchange for control. It's not really your car anymore, it's the government's car, the insurer's car. What other policies would they like to set, I wonder?
Right, it's a slippery slope. Today they're making your car save lives, tomorrow they'll be draining your bank accounts and seducing your significant others.
The examples I cited were not hypothetical. The "tomorrow" you dismiss as some unrealistic joke is already here. Search HN for the news if you don't believe it. Want another? Not too long ago some car maker's data leaked and we discovered they were recording people while they were driving. Got any other bright ideas you feel justified implementing in the name of "safety"?
They're "making your car save lives". How? By taking away your control. You're not in command of your vehicle anymore. Don't forget it.
How many lives makes it worth it? Just one? Should it make an appreciable difference? I am hesitant to hand the reigns of society to safety nazi bean counters who are more interested in appearing to "do sometihng" than actually improving our lives.
Fallibility is not a valid reason to remove control from humans. A human should always have command over the vehicle, no matter what. You could argue that some humans shouldn't be driving cars at all and I'd agree.
It's not exclusively a "gearhead" opinion to not want a system in your car that can violently take control away from you unexpectedly
Statistics are meaningless to the individual. Sure, emergency braking might be safer across the board, but that means little compared to an individual who already drives safely without it.
I mean, it's not. Statistics describe how society on average acts, not how you personally act. Someone telling you "Statistically you're more likely to drown if you own a pool" doesn't mean as much if you bought a pool and then became a paraplegic, for example.
Saying "emergency braking will bring down average car deaths" is probably true, but that might not make a difference for Joebob who drives his truck down empty County Road 230 once a week to check his mail.
Joebob’s car insurance premiums and taxes cover others’ car crashes. He is statistically impacted even if he’s a recluse without a car at all.
(He might even be statistically more likely to run into the car he’s not used to seeing on the usually empty road via the stop sign he usually blows right through. Who knows?)
> (He might even be statistically more likely to run into the car he’s not used to seeing on the usually empty road via the stop sign he usually blows right through. Who knows?)
That's not how statistics work. Again, statistics mean little to the individual.
Forward emergency braking systems don't detect such situations. You'd be hit regardless. They only have a 170 degree field of view at the best of times in their current implementations. Somebody two hundred feet away closing at sixty miles an hour will hit you in the side regardless of forward emergency braking simply because it's not designed to look for something moving that quickly that far away at that extreme of an angle.
That said there's also a balance in safety systems between personal responsibility and systems responsibility. Relying too much on systems responsibility actually causes more harm because the person becomes more careless or is entirely at the whim of the system responsible for their safety. We put railings on stairs in public places but don't require everyone to put on a safety harness and latch it onto the guide to climb stairs for example. There's an expectation that system safety has hit a reasonable limit and the safety harness is too costly in time, money, and attention to implement.
The car doing the T-boning can see forward, and even slowing down by 10 mph can halve the lethality of the resulting crash. Full success isn’t necessary for benefits.
I’ve never had a bad accident in a car, but the closest I have ever come was in my friends new VW with lane assist on a dark country rode on a bend when the lane markers vanished due to wear.
I started to get lazy and distracted as the car was mostly driving, my friend was talking at me and the assist disengaged, next minute we were going pretty fast towards a barrier. We recovered but it was close.
The article cites a 38% reduction in crashes. Random anecdotes to debunk that are not super compelling.
Some habitual drunk drivers never have an accident and may even claim it makes them a better driver, but that doesn’t make it the right choice on a population level.
No snark, and every avoided accident is a good thing. Policy makers at the national level just have to weigh all the cases over individual anecdotal ones.
This often means one person’s risk goes up while thousands of others’ goes down. Sometimes that’s hard to balance, but if the 38% reduction in crashes cited in the article is true, this particular decision seems fairly simple.
I suspect the real issue is people using phones while driving, I know of at least one person who is dead from this. I rear ended a car when I was in my early 20s while on the phone, I se people driving trucks in narrow streets while on the phone in my area.
I don't like enforcing things like this as a band aid, it's fine to try improve a situation, but let's be honest, many people who are involved in these accidents are doing something with their phone.
Sure. What we know, though, is "stop doing that" doesn't work. That's why aviation, highway safety, healthcare, tech postmortems, etc. have discovered that "please ask the human to stop doing human things" isn't the approach to take. Instead, we try to engineer away the opportunities for human error to kill people. (Quite successfully, in a lot of cases; as an example, aviation safety in the developed world is overall an incredible success story for regulators.)
People will continue to use their phones in their cars. That's a fact we have to accept.
This reminds me of the fact that many foreign subway systems have outer doors (so you can’t just walk onto the tracks) and inner doors. Most people won’t just walk onto the tracks in America but the outer doors address inattentive people, tired people, and people who want to do the wrong thing.
In a lot of places the outer gate is only chest high which isn’t insurmountable but is enough of a barrier to avert 99% of the bad cases. I think the analogy to automatic braking holds.
I realize you already had some discussions on this point, but perhaps I can shed some light — I think your disagreements come down to a difference in interpretation of language.
Here's one interpretation of "statistics are meaningless to the individual": If X makes people in general statistically more likely to do Y (such as "avoid accidents", in this case), it does not say anything about the effect it will have on a particular individual's behavior, such as you or me. In fact, it could very well make you or me less likely to do Y. As long as it averages out over the population, the statistic is still true. But you need to know the individual in order to know how X specifically affects them.
I think you are taking a different/broader-scope interpretation of the statement. Something like: if X makes people in general (...as above), then given that we live in a society of various people, it will have some at least some impact, perhaps indirect, on all of us (c.f. your comments about taxes, insurance rates, etc).
Maybe you got that already, but I'm a sucker for helping people be aware of when they're talking past each other (:
This statement is blatently untrue. If a "driver gets in an accident every X miles/km" does that mean if you drive more than X miles, you're "overdue?" No, that's a statistical fallacy. Aggregate statistics are only meaningful if you're within a standard deviation of the mean. If you are a safe driver, it's likely to be meaningless. If you are a reckless driver, you're unlikely to live long enough to find out.
> If you are a safe driver, it's likely to be meaningless.
No. You are sharing the road with others, of variable skill, and things like deer and pedestrians who can dart into traffic. I’ve been crashed into from behind while stopped in traffic; no fuckup on my end, but still would have likely benefited from automated emergency braking.
Your car insurance also reflects others’ accident rates. You shoulder some of the medical and fire and police costs via taxes. Lots of statistical impact even in a perfect driver or someone who never drives at all.
Can current emergency braking systems realistically stop a t-bone accident?
Sure, if it was equivalent in capability to a class 5 self driving car, it would see the light was red, and notice the partially occluded other car, then stop in time.
But, with just a front facing radar? I don’t see how it would be able to do much. It would only have a few feet to stop.
This is a good point, thank you. I don't think anyone here would argue against this feature if it was 100% accurate. However, mandating something that has many reports of erroneous activation seems like overreach.
Defective airbags blew shrapnel in folks’ faces, too. Anecdotes are of limited value here; I’m sure you can find the occasional person who has been trapped in a car by a seat belt and burned to death. Policy needs data, not unfalsifiable claims of being a perfect driver hobbled by computer interference.
The article notes:
> A metanalysis in 2015 found a 38 percent decrease in collisions for vehicles that utilized such a system, for instance.
I have two vehicles with this system and they have never “violently taken control”. In most situations, the system gives an audible alert while pretension the brakes. If you react within the alert window you retain full control with the benefit of firm brakes (y’all ever remember getting soft brakes?).
I don’t even want to know what situations I’d need to be in for my vehicle to actually emergency brake, but I don’t want to find out. It seems like I’m already going to be hitting something anyways so any speed it can bleed off is better.
Same here: Honda CR-V 2020. It uses single lens (so not a stereoscopic vision) and radar.
Never did it brake hard, only warning and few times brake pretension.
It will occasionally give false positives on a street curving left with cars parked on the right side.
Once it did warn on a highway most likely due to metal comb joint of the elevated road section. (I specifically looked at what could be the cause)
The driver reaction within a time window is likely important factor in preventing the system to elevate. I have good reflexes and will put my feet slightly on the brake in such situations.
Honda had a recall for an older AEB system 2017-2019 Accord and CRV:
Insurance companies are run by people that are good at statistics, and there is a fair chance that statistically this works out well but that does not mean anything for any particular individual. Chances are that EAB will cause some accidents and prevents a whole lot more, and that's enough for the insurers.
Every possible change to a car’s safety system will cause some deaths and save others… look at airbags.
The aggregate stats are the most important things to look at, especially for something like AEB which has the ability to save pedestrians, which as of late are getting mowed down more and more frequently.
Agreed that overall it can be an improvement. But I've clocked up a good 40K km since I got rid of the car that was equipped with defunct EAB and I'm fairly sure (but of course can not prove it) that I would have been in an accident by now on account of it triggering falsely. Conversely, I've never had a problem with airbags deploying without cause and my seatbelt is on just to move the car 10 meters because it is deeply ingrained and I refuse to drive - or be in - a car without it.
But faulty EAB caused more trouble for me than any other safety feature to date and I really wonder what caused Mercedes Benz to release this feature in such a horrific functional state. It is beyond belief how broken it is and I would love to see their internal stats for how often their EAB caused - not prevented - single vehicle accidents.
Those would be good stats to mandate sharing with the proposed rules. Would likely cause them to rework the system if they started losing sales over it.
There needs to be a tiered license then - if you pass the more rigorous exam you can drive cars without the extra "safety" features. Making AEB mandatory would increase the survival rate of poor drivers and punish people who actually pay attention on the road.
> EAB will cause some accidents and prevents a whole lot more, and that's enough for the insurers.
It should be enough for everybody on the road. People always say "don't be a statistic" but we are all part of these statistics whether we like it or not. AEB can also protect occupants of other vehicles, so using it or not is not a choice whose consequences only affect the individual making it.
Which is funny considering the explanation that was presented to me about why is it legal in the US to ride a motorcycle without a crash helmet. The explanation is: in case of an accident, the motorcycle driver has a lower chance to survive without the helmet. From the insurer’s perspective paying out a one time death insurance might be cheaper than paying someone money every month for the rest of their life.
> As of 2021, 18 states and the District of Columbia had universal motorcycle helmet laws, 29 states had laws requiring helmets for certain riders, and three states did not have any motorcycle helmet laws.
Yes everybody here seems to be ignoring that car accidents are the leading cause of deaths for children and young adults… car safety is not a solved problem!
Anyway, I'll add my anecdote when my Toyota surprised me with a panic brake in a blind corner which probably saved my life by not ending up under a stopped bus. But the kicker is that my insurer gave me quite a steep discount when I originally bought the car, specifically due to the emergency brake feature. They may have more data comparing collisions for cars with/without this feature than anons on internet forums, who knows?