[mrguyorama]

We had manual transmission cars that could slow down from engine braking for decades and that never lit the brake lights. I'm not convinced this is an issue. It is your responsibility to keep a safe following distance from any car in front of you regardless of circumstances. You should be able to safely not rear end the car in front of you even if it immediately hits a brick wall and stops completely, and even if the brake lights are entirely missing.

[iggldiggl]

> You should be able to safely not rear end the car in front of you even if it immediately hits a brick wall and stops completely, […]

I don't think that's the usual expectation. Maintaining absolute braking distance is what railways do, whereas cars commonly operate on relative braking distance plus a safety margin accounting for your reaction time.

Over here, both driving schools and other general road safety education talk about keeping 2 seconds following distance (or half your kph-speed in metres, which corresponds to 1.8 seconds following distance), and traffic engineers commonly give the capacity of a single lane of traffic as 1800 vehicles/hour, which again corresponds to 2 seconds distance (this time as measured vehicle front to vehicle front, instead of tail to front of following vehicle).

[Ancapistani]

Yep.

I drive a Jeep Wrangler and between its manual transmission and the fact that it's less aerodynamic than a cow, I can and often do slow from highway speeds to ~25 MPH without touching the brakes. It's never been an issue.

[pseudalopex]

EU regulators were convinced it was an issue. And do many drivers follow you so distantly?