Over the last century, the Land of the Free has slowly transformed into a land governed by endless laws, largely by cracking down on vices instead of actual crimes, creating a society that would render us all criminals if our behavior were constantly observed. Meanwhile, the state has steadily expanded its use of mass surveillance, largely under the pretext of fighting “terror.”
This is a toxic mixture.
The problem with this system is the assumption that roads will be smooth and not rough… the last thing you need is the car to decide to power down on a mountain road with lots of blind spots, or somewhere that’s dangerous to suddenly be slowing down well below traffic flow.
The language of the bill doesn’t specify it requires a total power down.
If I were the engineer designed to create this system, I would probably take a page out of a train operator’s book. If you fail to drive safely, it will give you an unignorable alarm as a warning, and if the issue persists it will automatically slow the train down to an eventual stop. Only with the car, it would slowly ramp down the vehicle’s max speed to something like 5mph, enough to get off the road but not enough to hurt people.
How do you know 5 mph is fast enough to get out of harm’s way?
If I were designing it, it wouldn’t be instantaneous. It would ramp down. So it wouldn’t be much different than your engine giving out on you, which roads are already designed to handle.
Except when the road is a shoulderless corridor, and now you’re blocking up traffic. Worse still if it’s caused by faulty sensors and not by the driver.
I would rather have traffic slightly blocked up than a drunk driver kill people.
And as for the sensor thing, it’s not that big of an issue. Trains have 3 speed sensors. If one fails, you get a warning. In a car system such as this, the check engine light should turn on until the problem is resolved. If a 2nd/3rd goes out, then the car shouldn’t start, but it will allow you to finish an existing trip.
If I were the engineer on this project, that’s how I would start, I’d literally rip off how train safety systems work and tweak it to make sense on the road.
I was watching dashcam / accident videos and I’d seen one where a car got disabled in the middle of a highway underpass, which was a blind crest. Car after car after car would enter the underpass, unknowing of the disabled car there, and make emergency maneuvers, barely missing the car every time (and some didn’t). Several vehicles crashed at full highway speed into either side of the underpass trying to avoid the disabled car.
That doesn’t sound like safety to me.
As for trains, remember that trains only need to keep track of one axis of motion, the forward axis, as the train is not going to be maneuvering, as that would cause it to derail if it even could. Maximum speeds are a known factor on the line, and accurate timing is important to coordinate multiple trains on a line. Cars aren’t trains, and the requirements are a lot less predictable.
Will the software know the difference between winter weather and drunk driving?
Will the software know the difference between a windy mountain road and drunk driving? How about drunk driving on a windy mountain winter road?
How about fix the problem of drunk driving being so prevalent, instead of adding additional points of failure to an already overly expensive vehicle?
Sounds to me like the real issue there was the design of the road being such that it didn’t have visibility.
Technically that’s not true, they keep track of way more than that. But I understand what you’re getting at, and it doesn’t quite hit what I’m getting at.
I’m saying we have a pretty good idea of what goes into a safety system on incredibly dangerous vehicles (trains), and some of it can be transferred to another set of incredibly dangerous vehicles (cars).
If you’re swerving like you’re drunk in winter weather, are you really arguing that you should be allowed to keep driving? If you’re swerving at high speed in winter weather, you’re already doing something wrong and going to get somebody killed.
It’s just one more thing to break and adds to the cost of a car.
Cars are overly expensive now. Imagine as they keep adding garbage features.
Car are in general a terrible way to get people where they need to be, and cost is part of that. It isn’t cheap to design/manufacturer a safe car.
Trains on the other hand is where it’s at.
The problem with this system is treating adults like children.
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