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by erisian 1318 days ago
Fuck no. I had to deal with a rental that had driver assist technology and it damn near killed me. There was a boulder on the road around a blind corner and the car fought me trying to swerve out of the way, I barely avoided it.

Imagine auto braking on black ice or because of a faulty sensor. We're giving immature technology too much control of the vehicle.

2 comments

Yeah, everyone’s got that one story in a billion that tries to be the counter example.

I remember back in the day when seatbelts were controversial because someone was thrown free from a car.

It's a bit of a stretch to compare software overriding intentional input from the driver to the introduction of seatbelts.
AEB is absolute magic for preventing rear endings by distracted drivers in stop and go traffic. People who's behavior doesn't tend to come with much risk of this will experience mostly false positives from AEB hence why "everyone" has a story.
Also, as shown in this very comment section, lots of people swear "the machine is just wrong" while being terrible drivers and tailgating
Many of us are quite familiar with the reliability of software, and have serious concerns about trusting it to make the right decisions in a complex real-world situation.
Yes, that would include me.

We really should work on software reliability.

As for humans, 35,000 Americans die every year on the roads and 6 million accidents occur.

I think we should be able to get software reliable enough to reduce that by 10x

Many of us are quite familiar with the reliability of humans and have serious concerns about trusting them to make the right decisions in a complex real-world situation.

There are almost 2 million rear end collisions in the US every year. Humans just don't have the reaction times to handle many situations. That is also best case. Many people are distracted while driving.

That's bad driver assist, not a bad premise. My car will fight you a little, but it always gives me control when I insist.

Wrt. black ice, if there's a stopped car in front of you, black ice or no you want to try to stop.