[guelo]

Yea, it really doesn't seem like autosteer would avoid that many crashes. All that autosteer does is keep you in your lane on a marked highway. Human errors that autosteer would correct are probably relatively rare, things like distractedly drifting into another lane or falling asleep at the wheel. AEB, on the other hand, helps avoid the most common type of crash, rear end collisions.

[JoshTriplett]

Autosteer can also change lanes, and would avoid crashes caused by missing a vehicle in a blind spot. Seems particularly useful on a busy highway, with vehicles in adjacent lanes leaving far too little following distance between each other.

[mikeash]

If the car can detect something in the adjacent lane, then it'll give you a warning if you try to change lanes into it manually too.

[bluGill]

My car has that - there are too many false positives for it to be useful. I most commonly hear get the warning when there are two left turn lanes and I'm in the right one (because I need to turn right at the next road). Sure there is a car to my left, if it doesn't turn left I'll hit it, but the other car would be at fault in that case.

I will admit that there have been a couple times it saw the car I was about to merge into before I did. It is not clear if I would have seen the car a moment latter anyway or not.

[mikeash]

Mine has never had a false positive. I've yet to accidentally merge into anybody with it, so I don't know how it behaves in the situation it's supposed to handle.

[jessriedel]

"Number of crashes" is not as important as "crashes weighted by severity". "Distracted driver" is the number 1 root cause of accidents, and "failure to stay in lane" is the number 1 proximate cause of fatal accidents in most states.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cause-of-the-most-fatal-c...

[guelo]

OK but the cited 40% figure is just for crash rates, not for severity weighted crash rates.