Comment by aenis
1 day ago
"So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period."
The "on the road" extends to mirrors (or screens that have replaced it) - I assumed that was obvious.
So screens can replace "mirrors" and not "buttons"? Seems like excuse-making to me. I repeat: I'd prefer to see more analysis and less sloganeering, especially where you "assume that was obvious".
My argument was to keep the attention of the driver on the road. To that end, I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one (as long as its good, high res, low latency screen) - I am looking in the direction I am driving and focused on steering the vehicle.
For the same reason I don't mind (in fact, I appreciate) the silent helpers such as ABS, ESP, 4x4 and so on - all of those systems exist, work, and never utter as much as a beep to distract me. Great.
Popups, imbecillic charging/energy distribution animations, elaborate sequences needed for basic functions such as AC controls, are the things I don't like. Sure, people designing this stuff should engage in research, but some things are actually obvious. Such as the need to mind the mirrors when reversing.
> I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one
You may care when you grow older. Looking at the reflection on a physical mirror of something far away is very different from looking at an image of the thing displayed on a screen close to your face.
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> I am looking in the direction I am driving
Unless you're using a backup camera...
I mean, I know that this seems like a pedantic and silly quip, but the point is that doing actual safety analysis requires careful thought and precise decisionmaking, and the stuff you're doing here is exactly the opposite of that. Slow down, say what you mean, measure what you think is "obvious", and be prepared to be slightly wrong on the margins.
And to repeat my second point: the industry as a whole has been getting inexorably safter on a decades-scale trend. So my prior is to treat arguments of the form "The Auto Industry Sucks And Is Making Everything Unsafe" as ill-founded absent real evidence to the contrary.
No, screens cannot replace mirrors, but we’re doing it anyway.
Van (Mercedes Sprinter) where there's no way to fit a central mirror in the first place?
There are literally thousands of people alive today who would have been killed absent backup cameras. This point is laughably wrong.
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