Cars that drive for you
 

Anyone else feel like the newest trend in safety equipment for vehicles, i.e. cars that can brake for you or stop you from swerving into a car in your blind spot or whatever, are moreso facilitators of bad driving than the newest version of seatbelts or airbags?

Or am I the only one who seethes with rage when there's a commercial on and some Mom is distracted by whether she left the oven on back at home and would have rear-ended a school bus, except that her car braked for her?


Just seems like there is a big difference between a stronger frame or tires that enable faster decelleration or seatbelts/airbags ... and automatic braking.

I don't think you're wrong on that one. They put more and more additions in cars that distract you while you're driving though, so I guess they have to do something.

I feel lost without a sat-nav if I'm somewhere I don't know...and that's bad enough in terms of being reliant on technology.

All kinds of shit will happen if we're ever driving cars that are totally reliant on computers. No thanks, not in my lifetime I hope. I like driving my own car :p

I would like this (not forced on everyone ofc). For me it would allow me to be more independent. I hate public transportation, and taxi's. However I am moderately seizure prone. So driving isn't too safe for others; when I am behind the wheel.

Just giving people more of a reason not to care when doing things like driving. "hey my car will stop for me if i'm not paying attention. Great. I'll just keep texting while driving and not care"

Yet the evidence to the contrary is staggering. Car accidents and fatalities have dropped in the last 20 years even though there are more cars on the road.

It's wonderful... until it malfunctions.

It's pretty much proven that if you take street signs and other distractions away from drivers, they will drive more safely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/in...rman.html?_r=0

Europe does this "shared space" concept all the time. It reduces traffic and makes things safer. So yeah, I think you're right about these new innovations doing addition by subtraction: they'll make individual cars safer but make drivers less involved in the process, which definitely will cause more accidents. Consider texting while driving, for example. It reduces awareness more so than driving drunk...

That said, roll cages and crumple zones are making cars safer, so I guess you have to take the good with the bad innovation wise.

Roads in the U.S. tend to be fairly rational such that sat-nav isn't as strictly necessary as it may seem. Mostly it might just save a little time. Over the past summer I drove from home to Minnesota and back (~800 miles each way) and didn't even bother to bring a road map or sat-nav devices (I refuse to carry a cell phone). Didn't encounter any undue problems. I would probably want a regional road map if any significant city-street driving would be needed but nothing much beyond that seems necessary.

Traffic fatalities are lower nowdays mostly because federal crash standards have gone a bit haywire in the past 20 years. Notice the significant weight gains in modern cars versus similar models from a couple decades ago. A cramped little Chevrolet Cruze weighs only a couple hundred pounds less than my Coupé de Ville.

Cars with automatic brakes or reverse cameras whatnot don't bother me so long as such features remain optional much as how electronic traction control typically remains optional. Some drivers need those features, especially given the woefully inadequate state of U.S. driver training. Other increasingly common features, such as dash-mounted LCD screens cluttered with multiple menus, strike me as idiotic beyond belief. I wish modern cars still had proper bumpers, too.

What does it really matter, though? Driving aids or no driving aids, it hardly seems to matter in the long run for a different reason: Pretty much all modern general-purpose cars are awful anyway. They're uniformly small, cramped, hard-riding little econoboxes that all look the same as everything else from more than 100 feet away. Driving some wretched sardine can like a Ford Focus feels so dreary and miserable that I'd rather have the car do the driving automatically and save me the bother.

Danth

I hate driving, as should anyone else who doesn't enjoy constantly putting their lives in the hands of other idiots.

I really hope they just make the Google self driving cars mandatory for everyone everywhere.