I'd strongly encourage you to take advantage of any driving school that Mercedes offers. I've read countless messages from individuals who insist that these safety systems (ABS, TCS, and ESP) are a detriment to their ability to drive the car, but I've experienced them in two makes of automobile (VW and BWM) now, and I now know from first-hand experience that they work fantastic. There is no replacement for testing them out for yourself.
But haven't we all seen Fight Club? It isn't a question a confidence, it is a question of financial math.
This decision tells us nothing about the safety of the Mercedes system compared to its competitors. All it tells us is that adding these limitations to ensure the system is only used in the safest possible scenarios makes taking over liability more reasonable. That isn't surprising. Their competitors' systems are also very safe if used in this manner. The only difference is that the competitors are not satisfied with releasing a system with enough limitations that it only works in stop-and-go highway traffic in clear weather. It is that added functionality that is more dangerous and the reason other manufacturers don't take on liability.
Odds are the marketing and accounting wings of Mercedes had just as much if not more influence on this decision than the tech team.
You really think Mercedes legal filings guarantee a safer system? It is more important to focus on the technical capabilities of the systems than who can add more asterisks to their crash statistics.
You are comparing a mature system with billions of miles of testing to a system which you will struggle to keep engaged for 2 mile intervals.
Yes. You can find the same kind of bs regarding safety belts in cars, ABS, airbags and so on. The part where I'm seeing a difference is when safety gear starts to actively interfere with operating the vehicle.
It doesn't matter what they say or how trustworthy they are.
The car is Level 3, which means you can still die using this system anytime you might take your eyes off the road and something happens in that moment on the road that leads to an accident.
And Holda will not be liable for it. But if you want to be a "beta tester" of anything prior to Level 5 (and even that is still a pretty arbitrary level of autonomy that will likely be quite different in how it works across car makers) then go ahead. You're only only risking your life.
Advanced driving courses have a decidedly mixed record on improving safety, unfortunately. I believe the evidence suggests that they improve confidence more than they improve skill.
As for the Plaid, from what I’ve read the yoke and the high-speed handling are frankly dangerous. If somebody gave me one, I’d sell it and buy something where the drivetrain, the handling, and the aerodynamics are better matched.
If you don't know if your brakes are ABS, or what happens when ABS kicks in, or how to drive with/without ABS then IMO you don't know one of the very elemental basics about driving safely; that's what I was (poorly) communicating.
With a new car, you can probably get away with not checking the oil or knowing how to top it up (ditto the coolant); both of which are part of the UK driving test IIRC. But having the engine seize because you didn't add oil or the car over-heated can be very dangerous. All the vehicles I've owned have had manuals that describe oil/coolant/tyre checks and test them as essentials for drivers, maybe that's a UK thing - like how toasters have a leaflet telling you not to poke metal objects in them, keyless say not to run them empty, etc..
Fuel injection I don't think pertains to safe driving?
>You call it ignorance. I call it abstraction. //
Ignorance and abstraction are different. Choosing to be ignorant of the workings of your vehicle is not an abstraction per se. Like knowing how to stack Lego isn't an abstraction of the, chemical manufacturing process or physical theories involved.
Again, there is a difference between fixing a non-safety critical system in a non-spec but commonly used way, and completely disabling a safety system.
If they were disabling this car’s airbags or ABS to solve a different issue, this would be a good comparison. But they’re just not the same at all.
while I generally agree with your point, that new cars with great braking, enhanced safety and in perfect technical conditions are safer than average, I'm not entirely convinced if BMW is the right make for this kind of examples
I'm against just heaving that technology out over the fence into the hands of consumers and leaving it up to consumer reports and/or individual consumers to decide if it's safe enough.
Safety is a 'picking up nickels off of railway tracks" problem. A thing might work 10,000 times in a row, but then suddenly, catastrophically fail because something is different that hadn't been tested before, like dealing with a woman walking her bike across a multi-lane road.
this is not a good scenario to leave up to consumers to decide whether a thing is safe. Not even with consumer reports to help out with testing.
Now as to ABS, the comparison is not even close. I do not buy ABS by purchasing brakes and then flashing some ROM with code I download from the internet. ABS is covered by all sorts of regulatory frameworks around the world, it isn't simply cooked up and offerred for download like it's an MP3 player skin.
Even though it's a much more mature technology, the problem with ABS is again, consumers cannot give informed consent to a disclaimer when purchasing it from some random person.
When I buy it as part of an automobile from a manufacturer that complies (I'm looking at you, VW) with regulations, I'm consenting to trusting something in a completely different way than when I download code and there's an MIT license or whatever weasel-wording somebody em ploys to say, "If you die, sucks to be you. If you kill someone, it's your soul that will be in torment."
Your equivocation of 1. downloading code for a safety feature from the internet that's marked "alpha" and has been tested according to whatever the author feels like testing because it's not offered as a "product," with 2. purchasing an automobile that has ABS brakes which are tested and maintained within a global safety regulatory framework...
You're entitled to whatever workdview you like, but on this pointI believe our discussion ends. There is a fundamental axiomatic belief I hold that is not compatibvle with a fiundamental axiomatic belief you hold.
I don't want to spend all day trying to explain why I believe Volvo selling a three-point harness is not the same as some random person knitting a seta -belt, selling it on etsy, and leaving it up to you and I to read the consumer reviews to decide whether it's safe enough.
You believe the free market plus informed consumers will sort all this out. I do not.
No? I mean there might be some of that (although I doubt it), but you can just look at test data which has nothing to do with the driver. Crash tests, rollovers, crushing , glancing, etc all dramatically safer with modern improvements.
Mostly yes? Safety systems aren't a binary thing. One of my vehicles is a 20 year old car that I'd be pretty sure doesn't have all the safety systems required in a new car being sold today. That doesn't mean it's unsafe.
Just because it looks the same, does not mean that it's the same under the hood. Designs are constantly improved and re-worked for safety. Look up what happened when the IIHS introduced the small overlap test. Several manufacturers (including luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz) failed the test before re-enforcing the same design to make it pass. Not to mention active safety systems such as pre-collision braking and the like, which don't exist on older models.
Antilock brakes and stability control are mandatory now, but they've been common for a long time. Most cars probably still don't have blind spot and lane departure warnings standard, and I'm not sure how much safety they add.
My sense is that if cars are safer now, compared apples to apples (i.e. a base model mid size sedan) to ten years ago, it's marginal. And the same will be true (driverless cars potentially excepted) in five years.
Your car is also using metrics to keep you safe, maybe even alive at many moments. Active stability control and ABS are massively data-driven and essential parts of modern driving safety and are always on.
I think there’s also an issue of layers of decision making and the requisite metrics at that layer. Abstraction is useful in business just as it is in operating a car.
None would get more than 3 stars as you can't get a higher score without active safety systems. Pretty much all results would be compressed in the 0-2 stars range.
Even if a 2003 car would be perfectly safe in a rollover or a offset frontal impact it would be deducted points because it doesn't have lane assists or drive fatigue warning or radar cruise control (barring some S class or 7 series that might have had these features).
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