You're never supposed to operate your vehicle outside of your comfort zone where you know you'll be able to react correctly and optimally. If the conditions are sub-optimal and you think you might not be able to handle your car correctly in case of emergency you should drive slower or not drive at all.
I won't pretend that I've always been a perfect driver, quite far from it actually, but I don't think the law should find me excuses. If I drive too fast and find myself unable to avoid a collision I definitely don't expect to get a pass for my reckless driving because it was at night and raining.
Hopefully in the not-so-far future we'll finally get those self-driving cars we were promised and we'll be able to leave all of that to the past.
Drivers aren't trained to follow checklists and usually don't have dozens of seconds to respond to mechanical emergencies. Cars also don't fall out of the sky if they break down. It's not a great metaphor.
Personally, I rather enjoy driving my car; and I would enjoy driving a Tesla, too, and they're not [as] bad [supposedly] for the environment. Or at least their badness is a one-off rather than a continual thing. To each their own, I suppose.
That said, I frequently train myself to drive just a little bit better in just a little bit harsher conditions. Learn where my car's tires limits for sliding are, and learn how they gradually change over time as the tires wear down. Learn how much I can accelerate at a given moment at a given speed, so that I can use that for avoiding an obstacle. Learn how efficiently I can brake and turn under braking, so I know how well I can avoid other kinds of obstacles.
It's an experience, to me, to drive a car, and control it and tell it where to go; and the only way I've ever gotten better at it was to actually drive and drive quite a lot, in many unique situations. Rain, snow, heavy traffic, low traffic, light, dark, fog, low visibility, high visibility, and so on.
But meh, to each their own.
Back on topic. I think we need proper drivers education that has a physical foot-to-pedal, hand-to-wheel sort of education for our drivers :/
What you are complaining about is being restrained from being a danger to the public.
Great read for the letters to the editor page of a car enthusiast magazine that specialises in draping hot chicks over shiny bonnets and pretending that road hypnosis is as desirable a state as zen flow. But back here in the real world where driving happens on crowded roads with other people shuttling themselves and their families to work and school, not such a great read. Your attention should be on the road ahead and the cars around you, not where the gear shift needs to be for a clean gear change, or how much throttle you can apply before fish-tailing into the soccer team in the next lane.
Bring on the cars where I don’t even need to touch any controls, mostly because that means the hoons and idiots won’t be touching any controls either.
The reason most people can handle driving on shitty dirt roads, in snow and other "uncommon" situations is because they've first logged thousands of hours of practice driving under more normal conditions. Remove that experience and routine and why would you expect them to have any idea what to do in those tricky situations where the AI fails on them?
I agree, but it's largely academic in the real world. People drive to work in bad conditions because they fear if they don't they'll lose their job. People drive in bad conditions because someone they know has fallen ill and they need to get to the hospital.
Most people drive to their limits, or their comfort. Some people do stupid things and drive beyond what is safe, but dependent on where you live this may or may not be in the minority.
What fascinates me is that we are not giving drivers the skills they need to be able to avoid accidents should the worst happen. Instead we say you shouldn't drive at speed X or in condition Y.
My argument is that we should be teaching drivers these skills not only so they can correct their mistakes, because at the end of the day we are all human and make mistakes, but if we also show drivers how easy it is to lose control of a vehicle they may just respect the road a little more than they do already.
Well, but are you human? Then you are not qualified to operate a car safely.
It's obvious that humans can't drive, and while the majority of car accidents are perfectly avoidable if humans would at least not be reckless, that doesn't mean we can raise the bar to a point where it will be safe.
Oh I don't want to force anyone who has that fear through that, and I'm not suggesting it. All I'm saying is put a barrier to prevent it being easy to be classified as this type of driver so that it isn't abused.
if you’re prone to being overwhelmed by stress while driving a machine that can potentially kill you, that’s a sign to get more training, not to mollify oneself with an illusion of safety. ignorance is not bliss in this case.
If you want drivers to be safe (read: boring), your goal is to make sure their skills are as poor as possible.
After learning to drive, I started to do the kinds of things that insurance companies/parents didn't want me to (sailing along straight, empty freeways at night, hard acceleration, hard braking, slight drifting on snow, but mostly very fast turns) because I felt 100% in control of the car the whole time. And I was. It's part of the hacker thing. You've given me a machine; I want to find out what I can make it do. And G-force is fun.
I don't touch the things that you really don't touch (distraction, intoxication, trains) but the rest of it, absolutely, because I can. I built up to things slowly - what happens if I wait just a little longer to take my foot off the accelerator before making a right? And then I figured out what was just past the threshold of comfort, and backed down. Never with pedestrians around, and never with passengers, but enough that I felt like if it were really a bad idea, it would have caused problems by now. I lost control exactly once, playing with snow alone on a deserted street well under the speed limit, and was still nowhere close to hitting anything.
When I see "maniacs" weaving through traffic or bikes not stopping at intersections, my response is usually to maintain course, because I know what they're thinking. They're thinking "I know exactly where I am, I know what space I occupy, I know what space I will occupy, and I know that I have a reasonable margin such that we're not going to collide." I'll often think that their appetite for risk is irresponsibly high, but I have a certain respect for their certainty and I do my best to make sure they're right, and usually that means maintaining speed.
Drivers who are obviously distracted, on the other hand, freak me out. If someone is slow reacting to a green light, for instance, I will hate them intensely but I'll also stay the hell away, because they're probably still texting.
Engineering is actually at odds with safety here: a car that handled better would only have made me more comfortable. If you want people like me to always brake/accelerate/turn slowly, then you actually want us to feel less in control and less skilled.
Surveillance would probably work also, but I just found that marketing copy interesting. You don't want skilled drivers, you want drivers who are scared shitless and correspondingly conservative.
I find some support for my theory in the fact that the road up to Pike's Peak in Colorado is, statistically, one of the safest roadways in the United States. There are tons of hairpin turns with no guardrails where missing it by a few feet would mean a 3,000+ foot fall. But people respect that, and are consequently extremely careful and attentive.
That's true for virtually everything. Most drivers have no idea how much danger they are in or may cause since our tests are a joke. Put them on a skid pad and/or autocross course (TireRack had a defensive driving AutoX program), and then they might start to learn about the vehicle dynamics.
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