Comment by redwall_hp
17 hours ago
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
>Automatic braking alone is a huge deal
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Any time I crossed a bridge near me that is kind of steep and has a structure over it, the automatic braking engaged HARD. Like hard enough that I nearly caused accidents until I figured out how to turn it off.
Not great.
Fords seem notorious for this but usually can be fixed. Have you tried driving it to a dealership and trading it in?
Multiple times actually, lmao. Unfortunately its only worth $19,000 currently (sticker price of $67,000 three years ago)
I wonder if there will be some extra liability if the driver kills someone and the logs show automatic braking would have engaged. Something similar happened near me where a lamborghini driver disabled traction control, spun out and killed a girl on the way to school. They had to add new laws increasing the liability if you disabled TC.
Good news, everyone. Soon you won't be able to switch it off.
I suspect this will just lead to people pulling the ABS fuse and losing ABS and ESC along with AEB.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
>was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives
To be fair, if the cars behind you had automatic emergency braking you would be at much lower risk of getting rear-ended when there's a false positive.
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Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
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> The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Yep. ADAS should be mandatory like seat belts and airbags. A regulatory body should be able to come up with a minimum standard for it.
Even airbags were phased in over decades. Front-seat airbags were first available in the early 70s and didn't become mandatory until 20 years later.
Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!
Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.
I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.
It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.
This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.
The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?
Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.
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i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.
As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.
Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.
Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.
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