Just to be clear, I do think the obvious solution to terrible things like this is vastly expanded public transit so that people don’t have to rely on cars to get everywhere, not overhyped technology and driving aids that are still only marginally better than a human driver. I just thought the article was interesting.
“Let’s invent metal boxes with wheels that follow lines on the ground automatically to get you places.”
“Oh, you mean like trains.”
“Ew, no. They’re nothing like trains, these are ‘self driving cars’. They’re fool proof!”
tesla hits someone in a dense fog because it doesn’t have lidar
Queue surprised pikachu.
Doesn’t even need to be dense fog. The other day I saw a video of a Tesla (on newest firmware, mind you) drove off the road into a tree, in broad daylight, with no visual impairments to the sensors. It’s not ready for any kind of driving, let alone fully automated, not to mention that it’s only really trained on American roads
I’m all for better safety features but perhaps an easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed option to use is city planning/enforcement and change of current regulations. For instance, closing the loophole that lets car manufacturers ignore safety and emissions rules for “light truck” classified cars, which at this point is most of the oversized SUVs and pickups.
Alternatively having safer options for pedestrians and cyclists would help too, like having separated bike roads, and pushing highways and stroads out of residential areas and reclaiming city space for pedestrians. Public transit investment also helps reduce the number of drivers, which helps traffic and safety too.
I don’t hate the idea of these extra AI tools like emergency braking being required or at least encouraged with stuff like safety ratings, but I think it’s going to be very hard to get that implemented anytime soon considering you’d be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don’t want to have to make or license AI tools.
Edit: also the current regime in the US is more interested in de-regulating things to the point where I can get a happy meal wrapped in asbestos with a nice lead toy. So uh… Good luck
The Problem is, the whole pedestrian and cyclist centric society only works of we also restructure the entire economic system to where workers have an extra hour and a half to two hours of free time outside of work. Because we already don’t have enough time for our families and children.
Like me for instance. I have like 3 waking hours to spend with my child (once you minus, cooking, cleaning, adulting) if I’m lucky each day. Driving to work is a highway exit away on the other side of town. With a car, that’s 6 minutes each way. On a bike? 40 minutes minimum. Public transit? With transfers, even longer.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car. And living closer to your work is a funny idea unless you expect every neighborhood to have offices and warehouses representing every industry. I mean it sounds great for the upper middle class with shorter office jobs and the finances for that kind of lifestyle, but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
It’s for singles who can tralala themselves around on a bike or have a leisurely stroll to wherever they’re going and who don’t really cook or anything themselves.
While I agree in concept, redesigning and rebuilding society to be less car centric would NOT be fast or easy.
It’s better in so many ways and I wish more Americans could experience the freedom and convenience of walkable and transit oriented areas to understand how unpleasant their cars really are. But if even if we seriously pursued that, it would be many decades, probably more like a century. In the meantime electric vehicles are much better than what we use now
There is an obvious answer here that both the author and the people in this thread are ignoring.
Driving as a transportation method is a high risk/cost high flexibility/comfort solution.
Pretty much everyone who has accepted driving as their transportation method understands that it’s not the safest way, so a lot of drivers are always willing to take a little bit more risk to save money or something like that.
A better question is, why are we so okay with accepting such high risks for transportation. The human mind is terrible at risk assessment so I think it’s just a culture thing that car accidents are a part of life.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Americans are real good at ignoring issues that don’t affect them personally.
Oh I won’t wreck my car, I’m a “good driver”!
I can’t catch Covid because it’s not real!
School shootings are just false flags the government uses to pass gun control laws!
Donald Trump only wants to remove the dangerous immigrants, not the ones I hire for my business!
We need more people part of the FuckCars, Walk, Bike, & Public Transit online cultures
Need more outreach to get things happening even more. Also my comment on this post would solve a lot of things by not having to redo outreaching to people
Even better, the equivalent irl cultures. Most cities have groups advocating for better bike and pedestrian infrastructure and better public transit.
Both is good for sure. They both affect each other
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Trains? We’ve been using those for over a century now.
The technologies to end a lot of problems exist. We aren’t using them because the oligarchs think it’s better this way.
Autonomous vehicles. They don’t get high, they don’t get distracted, and if they’re made by literally anyone except for Tesla, they have superhuman vision and not only don’t have blind spots, they can also see in the dark and see through steam and fog.
What a load of fear mongering. Instead of having people take accountability for their actions we should require “safety features” that have a direct correlation to increased distracted driving. Maybe if somebody is killed we should make regulations around driving drunk? Oh yea pretty sure that exists. Problem is we have a bunch of steering wheel holders, hardly anybody is a driver anymore. Would lane assist and auto braking have prevented this? Possibly. But would lane assist not keep him barrel assing down the road doing up through the next intersection where somebody may decide to cross the road? This is not a fix. We have ALWAYS had the “technology” to avoid traffic deaths, problem is most people are selfish self centered pricks with but a ball of lint between their ears.
The technology isn’t great, but rather than implement it, you want us to expect humans to be great.
I wouldn’t call paying attention while you hurdle down a strip of pavement at 60mph in a 2 ton metal cage being “great”, id call it the minimum. And I’m not saying don’t implement it, I’m just saying it’s absurd to act like forcing it in every car is gonna fix the problem. It’s just gonna make vehicles less affordable and add failure points.
It’s clearly not the minimum. The minimum is what we have today. It would be great if they act as you say.
Well that’s why I said we have a bunch of steering wheel holders not drivers. The minimum u can do to drive is pay attention to what your ripping in your 2 ton death machine 🤣 most of the people on the road today should NOT be driving as they are doing less than the minimum.
What technology?
Safety features like lane-keep assist, automatic emergency braking (AEB), and blind-spot detection…
… AI-powered traffic systems that predict and prevent accidents.…
Impaired driving is also solvable. On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors… Uber is already testing real-time driver sobriety verification…
Why aren’t we using it?
The article doesn’t have an answer.
Because of how it will go when everyone assumes the car they are trying to merge with will auto brake if they go for it.
Because its garbage :
I have driven a car with a form of lane assist, it works fine when the lanes are easily seen and the weather is fine. The only way as system like that should be allowed to exist without a disable button is with extremely precise GPS maps because everything else seems to fail.
One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.
They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.
It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.
My cars are old and don’t have any of this, and my one experience in a rental car with lane keeping assist was that it pushed me towards a highway barrier in construction where the original lane lines weren’t in use. Terrifying.
The solution is to raise better humans who make better choices, not to try to use technology to prevent our bad choices from being worse.
Agree also a good catalyst to help solve almost all of our problems is having Revolt, & Matrix community servers setup where people can join based on their State, & also other community servers for their Country too.
With the goal of having a single spot where people get together online to get things done collectively, inform each other about all kinds of good and bad things, discuss topics, make stuff happen for better, collaborate on projects, have fun together, educate each other, & much more
I’m one of a couple hundred people working on it but need more people on board to do it.
We The People means Unity in every sense of the word in person and online to get things done together by doing. Being focused, & locked in instead of all of us doing things by ourselves
Impaired driving is also solvable. On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors are all tools that already exist to stop drunk and high drivers before they even start the ignition. Uber is already testing real-time driver sobriety verification. Why aren’t carmakers racing to put similar tech in every new vehicle?
There’s no fucking way people will buy those cars is why. I rarely drink and will never buy a car that required a saliva test or blowing into a tube before starting. Like it or not, any car that includes that equipment would be DOA and a financial disaster for the car manufacturer.
Autonomous driving. As long as people are behind the wheel deaths will be high. Autonomous driving is not perfection, but it will be safer by an order of magnitude. It will come to scale decades later than it should due to a human sense of loss of control causing resistance to change at the cost of many thousands of lives.
Mountains of shame looking for someone to blame, yet taking away our autonomy is the game.
