e
Assisted Driving Stinks. Also, Which Auto Safety Features Do You Love or Hate?
Cruise control is lame, ABS brakes rock
As I and others have argued before, when it comes to autonomous cars, "hand-off" is a terrible idea. I firmly believe that autonomous cars have to be all or nothing.
"Assisted driving" might seem like a good idea in the short term, but I believe it will prove to be a lousy idea in the long term, as it helps desensitize people to the act of driving, making them subconsciously rely on the safety net.
Thatcham Research, a nonprofit British auto insurance research center, put together this short video to disabuse viewers of the notion that they can rely on assisted driving to remain safe:
My own distaste for assisted driving means I don't even use cruise control; I feel it is up to me, as the driver, to maintain the safety of myself and the motorists around me.
Blind spot warnings are neat, but can we rely on them 100%? When I owned a car I had a little adhesive-backed, curved plastic mirror that stuck to the sideview mirror and perfectly revealed the blind spot. That brilliant safety device cost me a couple of bucks and paid for itself countless times over.
The only techno-safety features I like:
- Backup cameras, since auto designers seem hellbent on fattening C-pillars, raising rear sills and generally obscuring rearward visibility.
- ABS brakes, because you can mash on them in the rain without fear of locking the tires.
What automated safety features do you, as drivers, like or dislike?
-
oFavorite This
-
Q10Comment
Directory Company Profiles
Core77
Industrial Design
Resources
Industrial Design
Resources
-
Core77 Directory
Find the Best Industrial Design CompaniesGo -
Formation Design Group
Formation is a product design + development company focused on human centered design innovation. To ...
-
A2
A2 is a product development consultancy focused on design strategy, market and user research, indust...
-
PDR
PDR is a major award-winning, multidisciplinary international centre for design and research with a ...
-
Hatch Duo, LLC
Founded by an award-winning team with over 20 years of combined product design experience, Hatch Duo...
-
Datum3D Product Development
Datum3D is a one-stop shop product development company located in the Greater Boston Area. Founded i...
-
Spitfire Industry
WHO WE ARE Spitfire is a design studio headquartered in Brooklyn. Our founder, Isis Shiffer, an awa...
-
AmmunitionFounded in 2007, Ammunition is led by partners Robert Brunner and Matt Rolandson. Our work is create...
K
{Welcome
Create a Core77 Account
Already have an account? Sign In
By creating a Core77 account you confirm that you accept the Terms of Use
K
Reset Password
Please enter your email and we will send an email to reset your password.
Comments
As a motorcycle rider I have noticed other drivers blind spot warning systems. As I am coming up on a car I can see the blind spot warning indicator illuminate on the side view mirrors (I think most manufactures put it on the mirror). It may be naive of me, but when I see that come on it's almost as good as the driver acknowledging they see me. I ride 5 days a week in and around Seattle, I have no memory of any driver with blind spot indicators getting close to me. I have had plenty of near misses from people without blind spot indicators.
Fortunately, out of all these issues, blind spots are one that can be solved without any additional technology. Check out https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Car-Talk-You-can-eliminate-that-blind-spot-with-1139177.php and/or your state or province's driver's handbook.
Automatic brakes. I was driving a loaner on 3-lane, 45 mph hwy. A car was poised to get on said highway from a parking lot. It was encroaching a bit, but not to the point that i had to swerve. The car was stopped and the driver was looking at me, so i saw no need to slow down as i was in the midst of moving traffic. My smart-alec loaner, however, freaked the fuck out and slammed on the brakes, whipping me forward since i wasn't expecting it. Luckily, no one was tailgating me at the time so no one was hurt. Another reason no one was hurt is that the car has no emotions and was therefore unscathed by the ghastly things i yelled at it for the next 5 minutes.
has your macbook OS ever crashed ? has your phone ever dropped a call ? have you ever used any adobe software that worked PERFECTLY, one hundred percent of the time ? is there any software / app / hardware that is drop dead perfect ? so why the fuck would you EVER sit in the back seat of a car on a live highway while an autonomous car --- which probably has multiple systems in it made by different engineers, that you hope can talk to each other like apple and microsoft do --- drives you down the road ?
Not really a fan of any device that takes responsibility away from the driver because then you get a driver who is, by turn, less responsible. So by that definition, definitely no to lane assist. I'm still trying to weigh if the collision avoidance braking is really that good a thing. I'll bet it prevents accidents, but it's a bit concerning particularly if a driver comes to depend on it or builds a habit around it and then, one day, it's not there or they drive a vehicle that does not have it. That won't end well. I'm sure the insurance companies love it, but then cars shouldn't be designed primarily for insurance companies. I don't mind the rear camera, but then I think it's becoming a necessity as the rear windscreen of many vehicles seems to be getting smaller and a less usable viewport, and there's an increasing number of older drivers who can't quite twist all the way around to see when reversing. I've rented a couple of vehicles that do have side mirrors that tilt down when reversing - rather handy, like it. I do like the cruise control. On a long drive it's great not have one foot glued into one 120km/hr throttle position. Love self dimming rear view and, as another post mentioned, would love to see similar in the side mirrors. Self leveling headlights are nice also. That's a key difference between European vehicles and North American vehicles (aside from the majority of one continent being manual (love!) and the other being of automatic transmissions (loath!)) is that the little dimmer dial on the dash below left of the steering wheel just dims/brightens the gauges on N.American vehicles; while the same switch on a Euro vehicle raises/lowers the head lamps according to load and road. I wish it was available in N.American vehicles, particularly with the prevalence of pick-ups and SUV's (if ever a class of vehicle needed to adjust for load and road: picks-up and SUV's) where those hateful bright blue headlights are right at the eye height of anyone driving anything else. Again, with the older drivers, those blue headlights are brutally dazzling/blinding on the eyes for actual biomedical light physics reasons. Generally I think we're designing cars so that people can be less responsible behind the wheel, and I'm not sure what the motivation is. On one hand, self driving cars will be fantastic and a worthy thing to strive for. On the other hand, we're constantly proving through a combo of stupidity, negligence and design-instilled over-confidence that we, as humans, are not actually up to the task of operating vehicles without these aids.
I recently rented for 2 weeks a car that had blind spot warning. It was active all the time, and I found the constantly blinking lights on the mirrors distracting. However with the turn signal activated, there was both the light and an audio beep, and I found this helpful. I agree with other commenters that cruise control is useful, but I want the speed adjustment to be a wheel or dial, ideally with a target speed bug on the speedometer. Also I want a forward closure rate indicator. Backup cameras that show only the rear view solve only half the problem. I want a rear camera that shows views to both sides, so when I am parked sandwiched in between two minivans, I can see who/what is coming down the isle. Oh and the rental car had an automatic dimming rear view mirror. Not only do I want this on my car, I want it on the side mirrors as well. I really despise all the new high intensity LED headlights in my side mirrors at night.
Lane departure warning, not correction. As for cruise control: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28118033 Don't use it.
I disagree about the cruise control not only for the reason Niels Thorsen mentioned, but also because when I'm using cruise control I lean my right food against the break pedal. I expect this to reduce latency in the event of urgent breaking.
I disagree about cruise control. Many long hours driving with your leg engaging the gas pedal is an ergonomic nightmare. Cruise control has saved my body from a lot of pain. Additionally, I prefer to set a speed that is contextually safe rather than constantly monitoring the speedometer so I don’t get a speeding ticket.
I agree that backup cameras are great, but they also should be paired with an audible collision warning and/or the "overview" camera such as this one by Infiniti