Maybe they drive safer, but when something out of their control happens they're dead with such speeds. Also, I don't see how you can be an optimal functioning driver after sixty hours behind the wheel.
I strongly suspect that most fast acceleration, fast cruising, fast cornering, etc. is undertaken 1) in cars that are designed to handle it, 2) by drivers who are 100% in the moment focused on enjoying the act of driving.
I expect these behaviors to be at least an order of magnitude less dangerous than
- having slept less than 8 hours
- texting
- eating fast food
- having a conversation with passengers or on the phone
- interacting with small children in any way
- driving a car which is not up to the fun you're trying to have with it
- driving a car with serious damage
And yet of these, only texting is frowned upon.
I'm thinking of all the times my mother turned her head away from the road at 60mph to mediate a fight in the backseat and feeling significantly less bad about my cornering habits.
Driving feels dangerous. It feels like whenever I commute into the city, there's a motor accident of some kind.
It's not surprising since you're basically forcing million of people to control 2 tons vehicles. Inevitably, for one reason or another, someone's going to make a mistake.
I guess I don't know what roads you are driving on, but as a counter example, class 8 trucks (tractor trailers, etc.) have abysmal acceleration but most of their drivers have gone millions of miles without even a fender-bender.
I wonder how many of these accidents have automatic lane assist or braking as a contributing cause.
In my opinion, these features are inherently unsafe (braking hard regardless of road conditions when someone cuts in ahead of you, for example). But also, it seems plausible that the restrictive feeling of driving a vehicle with these features may contribute to the same "breakout arousal" phenomenon the article associates with lockdowns and mandates.
Which is also true. This is perhaps the underlying issue: "we expect cars to be safe, while also expecting driving fast in inherently unsafe conditions." In other words, the actual driving risk appetite is atrocious, but nobody's willing to admit it when human drivers are in the equation. SDVs are disruptive to this open secret.
Driving is certainly the most stressful activity I’m doing on a regular basis - the stakes are really high, death is just a few seconds away. It feels strangely archaic to have this level of risk built into day to day life. I recently got a car with modern safety features and life really feels safer just because of that. I know that the car will start beeping if I drift off course, and on the highway it’s quite unlikely to crash into the car in front of me.
Totally agree; beginner and truly dangerous drivers share a quality: unpredictability. Even the most aggressive, fast drivers can easily be accounted for when defensive driving. Unpredictable drivers are how collisions happen when speed and weather are not factors.
Even the simple automatic emergency braking features in my model 3 result in some dangerously unpredictable behaviour at times. I have them set as off and insensitive as possible and they still do some awful stuff from time to time. I was on a road trip in northern Ontario this week passing a service vehicle moving very slowly along the shoulder on the right. I was doing 105 km/hr in the right lane of a 3 lane road: 2 lanes in my direction and 1 opposing. The 2nd lane switches directions every 5-10 km to serve as a passing zone. Posted speed limit is 80 km/hr, but prevailing speeds on this road are 90-110 and you’d never be ticketed for anything under 110 in this region. There was a truck gaining on me coming up on the left, so I signalled left and partially moved over to give the service vehicle some room, but didn’t fully take the left lane to let the faster truck know I would let them through as they came past. Very common pattern on this type of road and circumstance. The AEB slammed on the brakes as I came level with the service vehicle despite the fact there was plenty of space to complete the pass. I wasn’t expecting my car to slow down let alone apply emergency braking force, so in my surprise I nearly collided with the service vehicle. I have no idea what the other drivers thought, but neither of them could have possibly been predicting or expecting me to slam on the brakes. I was really upset with the car since it took a highly dangerous action in an otherwise perfectly safe and common situation. And that was the automatic stuff that can’t be turned off; I don’t let autopilot drive ever because it is the worst type of driver: unpredictable. The choices it made in the extremely short time I tested it about lane placement, follow distance, defensive driving (and the complete lack thereof), and general behavioural clues provided to other drivers were genuinely terrifying.
I think it's more that experienced drivers are presumably more defensive and therefore more likely to avoid situations (tailgating, etc.) where a sudden acceleration would be tough to recover from.
Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission, yet the drivers there are much safer than than people in the US or Australia.
There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do.
I wonder if other technology would have a similar effect of ultimately making driving less safe and enjoyable. I've never driven a super-modern car, but I do know that I zone out a bit when cruise control is on...
Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration.
Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW?
The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy. The vast majority of 1st world residents know how to do it, and very very few of them make mistakes severe enough to affect anyone else's lives. The average driver is nowhere near as bad at it as most people seem to think.
But taking the driver's commitment to and awareness of the risks inherent in driving away and placing that burden on active "safety features" is a bad thing. I know their hearts are in the right place and that I'm not the person these systems are designed for. But they're going to get people killed.
My issue with Mercedes's Traction Control in particular isn't even that it makes drivers lazy. It's that in at least that situation, it can't tell the difference between power-induced oversteer and breaking-induced oversteer. In that situation, it reacted EXACTLY WRONG. It doesn't matter whether the driver is competent or not if the system makes the opposite changes that it should.
Problem is, you are not alone on the road. And if somebody else does something really stupid, you can die as a consequence, without any chance to avoid it.
We are definitely not there yet, but I think of myself as a decent driver, and some assistant tools on high-end models are way better (just faster, probably) than me predicting stuff. For the first year this summer, I've driven a car that was quicker than I in an emergency break situation: while I started breaking, it depressed the pedal, and I was quite surprised, 'cause the car in front of me didn't begin breaking yet.
Not only that, but people driving faster because they feel confident in their seat belts hurt other people to a greater degree since they're increasing their own kinetic energy.
I think this is commonly called risk compensation, but I prefer the alternative name risk homeostasis [1].
On the flip side, when trucks hauling heavy, dangerous loads have a frontal collision, their loads go forward through the cab, killing the drivers instantly. Makes them think twice before speeding and tailgating.
In an AI future, maybe we'll have cars that purposefully hurt drivers when the AI determines they're driving recklessly. Don't like it? Turn on autopilot.
If I have to pay more attention to the car while I'm attempting to trust it to adequately respond to a situation it put itself into, then why would I be using AP in the first place? It's not relaxing, it's making the trip more stressful.
Sometimes I wonder about the folks who think AP makes for a more relaxing drive. I think that's only true if the level of defensive driving it does matches well with the driver's innate driving style. I'm not prone to having close calls on the road because I avoid them well before they get exciting. I've ridden with people who just don't drive that way, though. They'd probably be okay with AP.
Maybe temporary in the sense that once the driver is out of the naked area, back to the "forgiving road" where any obstacle that might possibly hinder the flow of speeding automotives has been removed, the alertness probably falls back to zero again.
I don't think it's temporary in the sense that everything goes nicely for the first year and then everyone gets back to normal and accidents increase again.
I think that once you're sloshing through flocks of living people with your car and never get a chance to actually clear your way and speed up over 10-20km/h, I suspect that you will always become alert whenever you hit that area.
Conversely, walking around in an area where there are 1.5 ton blocks of moving metal without ever getting a chance to actually become absorbed in your thoughts and ignore the environment that you're in all together, you'll certainly feel less secure because you never know what's coming next and from where.
Because there's no "known" in the equation and speeds are forcibly slow, people are both more careful and more able to stop their vehicles before anything happens.
reply