Comment by sod

What you're doing now is taking a reasonable standard when going 200 on the autobahn and applying it everywhere else. And you don't see any problem with this because... think of the kids?

That's not how you optimize an important metric. At all. You look a how exactly those 60 people die and make targeted interventions with numbers backing them up. Otherwise best case you're doing security theatre, and most likely fuck things up with second order effects. Like things beeping all the time and distracting people - I already can't tell why my car is beeping at me.

the optimal crime rate is non zero and the same goes for traffic death rate, because to bring them to zero would imply a dystopia where personal freedom is seriously limited

> And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.

But according to the article it will ping when you glance at the scenery at 20 kph. If a system is annoying it will be a bigger distraction and source of frustration than what it's supposed to prevent, and people will find ways to turn it off.

Imagine using the same argument for installing government visible in your own home to protect domestic abuse victims.

I don't want a camera watching me. I don't want to pay for repairs or my car being out of commission b/c the camera isn't working.

60 a day for whole EU is a really good number.

Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.

As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.

Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.

And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.

Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?

I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.

The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.

Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.

I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.

Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.

Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.

There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)

As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.

Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.