[bobthepanda]

It is crazy how many things are downstream of the structural issue where US regulations favor ginormous SUVs and pickups where this is a problem, but if we introduced legislation to fix this we would end up ruining US automakers which have pivoted almost entirely to this segment alone

[kimbernator]

While I agree with you that the issue is far worse with larger vehicles, I do find that backing up in my wife's 2011 camry (without a backup camera) feels significantly less safe than I feel backing up my 2017 accord with a backup camera. I'm all for fixing the structural issue you are referring to, but I think the requirement for those cameras is sane in an age where the added cost to the manufacturer is miniscule.

[Zancarius]

I have to agree. Backing up my Tundra (8' bed) feels substantially safer since I can see immediately behind the vehicle than any pre-regulation vehicle I've driven. That doesn't even account for the convenience with lining up for towing, hauling, etc. (It's no replacement for GOAL—Get Out And Look—but it definitely helps!)

[harrall]

I like it because I can see kids, no matter what vehicle I’m in.

I have unusually good spatial skills. I have parallel parked and reverse parked perfectly every single time for over 5 years…

…but no matter what, I cannot see behind my bumper. No mirror on any car points there.

[jjmarr]

The law was passed due to sustained lobbying from a man, Greg Gulbransen, who ran over his child

[brabel]

What an absolute tragedy it must be to go through that. Hopefully he finds peace knowing this law will save many other children.

[icemelt8]

What an amazing piece of information in a thread about a game engine, thanks for sharing this.

[RHSeeger]

I bought a new car last year (my first actual _new_ car, vs pre-owned) and one of my most important features was a 360 camera. That extra visibility is just amazing for safety.

Another was a HUD. Being able to see how fast I'm going, what the speed limit is, and other info; all while keeping my eyes on the road... is safer.

[jnrk]

I agree. Going back to a car without a 360 camera is unthinkable now that I've gotten so used to it...

[abustamam]

This makes my wife's Tesla seem very outdated. It only gets a rear camera when backing up, and a side camera when activating a turn signal.

[allenrb]

Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.

[tempest_]

My 2010 Tacoma has a 2 inch square in the rear view mirror that works wonderfully.

[allenrb]

I actually like that a lot. Does the job without providing a (practical) target for infotainment. TIL.

[falcor84]

You piqued my interest. What is the alternative output for a camera without a screen?

[glaslong]

These days I guess we could do gpt with voice out to recite a poem about the kid you're about to hit?

[harikb]

Haha... I think gp meant touch-screen, but thanks for the chuckle :)

[JoeBOFH]

My old F150 had a screen in the rear view mirror. I miss that.

[tracker1]

My SO's Buick Enclave has a screen behind the rearview mirror that can be set to show the backup camera. Works okay, but I prefer the actual mirror and just use the dash display. That said, vision issues, so not driving since around this time last year.

[tracker1]

I think it was a Dodge Neon from the early 00s that had the worst rear view I'd experienced. My Challenger was close, but the backup camera and blind spot sensors helped a lot. You could hide a bus in the blind spot on a Challenger, not to mention the passenger seat headrest blocks most of the corner/A window.

[alt227]

Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.

[ncallaway]

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them?

I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.

[stefanfisk]

Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.

[numpad0]

oh yeah. I've once bought a $10ish one on Amazon out of curiosity.

There's the yellow composite plug, a 12V input, and a small bit of wire to be cut to rotate image 180 degrees, at the other end of a 30ft cable from the camera. The composite goes into the existing infotainment. There would be a wire from shifter to infotainment that switches the display to external composite video when the gear lever is in reverse. I think it even came with a miniature hole saw in size of the camera module.

$10 and one afternoon later, I could have upgraded a dumb car to have one, complete with auto switch to backup on reverse. No software hacking needed. It's fundamentally an extremely simple thing.

[dotancohen]

I believe that in some vehicles the backup camera actually runs on a separate (possibly real time, otherwise certainly heavily nice'ed) system. Tesla has a recall where they had to nice the backup camera software. The problem was if the display freezes or is delayed, then the driver is backing up and not aware that he doesn't see where he is going (he thinks that what he sees is representative of the area around the car currently).

[pornel]

In Hyundai and Renault I've seen it first hand that it's a separate subsystem that works even when the infotainment is dead/unresponsive/glitchy (it's like that probably everywhere, these two are just the sample I have).

[hedgehog]

Stability control, pre-collision braking, lane departure warnings, the complexity is pretty inevitable as we improve the safety of vehicles.

[bastawhiz]

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

Call me old fashioned but in my opinion, processors/ram/chips/components are a good trade-off versus squished children

[TylerE]

All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.

[nebezb]

All of that is worth the extra safety.

[AngryData]

I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.

[pornel]

Legacy automakers still use these for upselling trims.

It's so silly when they make some "Advanced Technology Package" with a VGA camera and a 2-inches-bigger infotainment screen that's still worse than junk from Aliexpress, and charge $3000 extra for it.

I know it's just a profit-maximizing market segmentation, but I like to imagine their Nokia-loving CEO has just seen an iPad for the first time.

[dylan604]

That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.

[AngryData]

My point is that if a 3rd party manufacturer can produce and sell a combination screen and camera for $20 for a profit, an automotive manufacturer has no reason to complain about the "expense" of such a setup. It is even cheaper for them than a 3rd party addon supplier since they buy in larger bulk and can integrate mounts for those devices into the car, rather than trying to devise some sort of one-size-fits-all mounting system that the addon manufacturers need.

They might as well be complaining about the costs of a rear view mirror, it is nonsense from the start. If a $20 gadget breaks the bank on a $30,000 minimum vehicle, they are a shitty business to start with and we should all be clapping our hands when they go out of business.

[dylan604]

The 3rd party guy isn't paying someone $40/hour to install the $20 unit. The $20 unit will not be as integrated into the car and will have the look of an after market part. Does the $20 part only come on when the car is in reverse, or is it on all the time? There's a lot of reasons the after market thing can be $20 and a lot of reasons the auto manufacturer's is not. It's not all down to greed

[Dylan16807]

Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.

[spease]

A gigabyte!?

You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet.

And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display.

Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes.

Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.

[bastawhiz]

I just went on Amazon and a 1GB stick of DDR3 ram is about 30% cheaper than a 128mb stick of RAM. Why would any RAM company make tiny RAM chips when they can make standard-sized chips that work for every application that needs less?

[spease]

I really feel like a lot of the people objecting in this thread are people who have just written web apps in Python whose closest experience with the audio-visual space is WebRTC.

Tech for cars is “standard-sized”. Not everything revolves around datacenters and tech, the car industry easily predates the computer industry and operates on a lot tighter margins and a lot stricter regulations.

So having a smaller, simpler chip that ultimately costs less physical resources at scale and is simpler to test is better when you’re planning on selling millions of units and you need to prove that it isn’t going to fail and kill somebody. Or, if it does fail and kill somebody, it’s simpler to analyze to figure out why that happened. You’ve also got to worry about failure rates for things like a separate RAM module not being seated properly at the factory and slipping out of the socket someday when the car is moving around.

Now - yes, modern cars have gotten more complex, and are more likely to run some software using Linux rather than an RTOS or asic. But the original complaint was that a backup camera adds non-negligible complexity / cost.

For a budget car where that would even make sense, that means you’re expecting to sell at high volume and basically nothing else requires electronics. So sourcing 1GB RAM chips and a motherboard that you can slot them in would be complete overkill and probably a regulatory nightmare, when you could just buy an off-the-shelf industrial-grade microcontroller package that gets fabbed en masse, dozens or hundreds of units to a single silicon wafer.

[wizzwizz4]

Your CPU's L4 cache is normally DRAM, and it's cheaper to shove some RAM into a microprocessor than to have a separate chip.

[wat10000]

Back in the mists of time, we used to do realtime video from camera to display with entirely analog components. Not that I'm eager to have a CRT in my dashboard, but live video from a local camera is a pretty low bar to clear.

[spease]

Yeah, I cannot understand why people are thinking a gigabyte of RAM in this context save for their context being imagining what this would take with a python HTTPS server streaming video via WebRTC to an electron GUI running out of local docker containers or something. Because that ought to be enough memory for a hour of compressed video.

It’s like saying your family of four is going to take a vacation, so you might need to reserve an entire Hyatt for a week, rather than a single room in a Motel 6.

[Dylan16807]

I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed.

So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.

[spease]

https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI

But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes.

NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.

[nobody_r_knows]

As someone who can only afford cars that are 10+ years old, i've never owened a car with a backup camera. And in a way-- good. That part of my brain, let it continue to develop. I am much better at "feeling out" where a car is than my friends who rely on back up cameras.

[turtlebits]

Sure, and you may as well walk around with a blindfold on to develop your "spidey" senses too.

[mosburger]

I understand your skepticism 100%, but I suspect you might change your mind if you, say, rented a car with it for a week. It's definitely a net positive for safety, and it probably costs the auto maker less than the seat belts (literally).

[anticorporate]

I've owned cars with backup cameras since about 2014. I still mostly back up the old fashioned way, and really only use the camera for very tight situations where a few inches matter.

[tsegratis]

ive owned two cars. the modern backup camera means the new one has small "stylish...." rear windows. it is wayyyy more dangerous than the older one with no sensors

i only have those two data points; but give me an older car with larger windows every. single. time.

[skhr0680]

Being good at driving doesn’t fix the huge blind spot you have behind your car

[commakozzi]

unless you're Yoda or Luke Skywalker, you're not "feeling" a 4-year old walking behind you in your blind spot.

[DerArzt]

If they are feeling it, the worst scenario has happened.

[luqtas]

like a vehicle touching a body in a speed of 3/4 km/h and the kid shouting or stepping away? or worst case your motion sensor beeping?

how much the conversation diverts on a commentary about someone not wanting a car shipped with an OS capturing telemetry even of farts on the right back seat

[jdiff]

This is one of those proverbial regulations that are written in blood. So no, that's not the worst case.

[jabroni_salad]

I used to be ornery about this but having a camera mounted on the back of the trunk that can see all the way down both ways of the aisle is actually a huge boon when backing out of a spot. Especially if I am parked next to something that is taller than my golf, which is most vehicles.

[doubled112]

This is what changed my mind too. I was firmly in the “can’t you just learn to drive?” camp before.

I can use my eyes and look around but I can’t see through objects.

The camera and sensors have an incredibly wide view. I only have to get my rear end out a few inches to be able to see everything I couldn’t before. Pray and pull out isn’t very safe.

[StopDisinfo910]

Backup camera are insanely nice. Modern cars give you things that even great awareness won't give you. The bird's eye view you get with multiple cameras is sheer magic.

[badc0ffee]

It's not just ginormous SUVs with this problem, though, right? You're not going to see a 18 month old out the back window of your compact hatchback if they're too close to your car. Especially now that windows seem to be tinier than they used to.

[Aurornis]

No, it's common to all vehicles. You can't see small children behind a small passenger car, either.

Blaming trucks and SUVs for everything is a favorite pasttime of internet comments, but all vehicles benefit from backup cameras and collision detection sensors.

[nsbk]

The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8. The US fatalities have increased by 50% since 2013, while in the EU have decreased by 25% in the same time frame.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm

[Aurornis]

What does this have to do with the comment you're replying to?

The US was ahead of the EU in requiring backup cameras on new vehicles.

The majority of pedestrian accidents aren't involved with backup cameras.

Are you just trying to turn this into a US vs EU argument?

[pasquinelli]

i think they're talking about the types of cars popular in the us vs. the eu.

[Aurornis]

They're talking about pedestrian accidents. If they had some deeper connection to make, it wasn't communicated.

[Bombthecat]

While I think it's more because of the speed difference in cities. In EU you just can't drive fast, because it's crowded. In the USA you have way more space to drive speed limit

[testdelacc1]

What’s really crazy was Trump forcing the UK to change road safety rules so they could sell more American pick up trucks in the UK.

So pedestrian deaths would start rising again.

[badc0ffee]

I'm having trouble imagining American pickup trucks fitting on the road in the UK. Aren't the lanes and the cars all much narrower?

[testdelacc1]

You’d think people would buy cars that fit the streets. And yet I see more than a few people with American pickup trucks on the streets.

[drnick1]

> The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8.

Americans drive significantly more miles per year, and larger/more comfortable cars are in part needed because Americans spend far more time in their cars than Europeans.

Euro governments are also increasingly anti-car, which means citizens are loosing their freedom to travel as they wish and unreasonably taxed, policed, and treated like cash cows for the "privilege" of driving.

[myko]

> which means citizens are loosing their freedom to travel as they wish

Most of my European friends brag about how they can get anywhere via train and how much more comfortable it is to travel that way. When I visit Europe I have to agree. Just haven't really seen this viewpoint, though I do think I would feel this way as an American if I moved to Europe to some extent (though I'd be extremely happy to have viable mass transit).

[ikr678]

Collision detection sensors do the job just fine without a screen though.

I have a 2016 vehicle with no console screen and they have saved me from hitting all sorts on things, and are sensitive enough to detect minor obstacles like long grass.

[londons_explore]

I think the difference is that a 3 year old barely-walking child tends to wander behind moving cars far less often than an 8 year old playing football.

[kube-system]

1-4 year olds are the age group most likely to be injured in this type of incident.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5406a2.htm

I suspect older children are more likely to be able to be aware of their surroundings and have better gross motor skills to react.

[discreteevent]

That could be true but the 8 year old gets out of the way. I can remember two incidents on the news where a toddler was killed in a driveway. Tragic.

[stetrain]

Right, backup cameras make sense even for sedans and other small cars. The high-hood trucks and SUVs in the US are the reason we'll probably get mandatory front cameras eventually as well.

[Zigurd]

It's a little ironic that the truck that diverged from the trend for high butch looking hood lines for no real reason is... Cybertruck. We kill pedestrians in the name of macho.

[XorNot]

The front camera is the best thing I added to my 2004 Prius. The hood on that car is very good for visibility, but with the birds eye cameras I can roll it up within centimeters of things in front of me (there's a slight risk that you can absolutely poke the nose under stuff but at that point it's quite obvious out the windshield too).

[globular-toast]

Why are infants materialising out of nowhere behind cars? There must be something else going on here.

When I reverse, there can't possibly be something behind my car, because I've just driven forwards over that area. When I begin to reverse, I'm looking all around behind and I'll be able to see if an infant, or dog or whatever, runs into the path I intend to take.

A lot of people tend to drive forwards into parking spaces then reverse out. I've no idea why, because it's far easier to reverse in then drive forwards out. And I reckon much safer too. If people are sitting in their cars for extended periods then beginning to drive in reverse, I can see this being a problem. But there are also vehicles that you wouldn't be able to see an infant in front of the car either.

[chrisco255]

This has nothing to do with SUVs. A 3 year old is difficult to see behind ANY vehicle.

[torginus]

Personally I don't own a huge SUV, but I feel backup cameras are a godsend. You're so much better off looking from the point of the actual back of the car to judge the distance to the car parked behind you.

The perk of not having to twist your body around while steerins is also pretty nice.

[seattle_spring]

Someone in another thread unironically called a midsized SUV a "matchbox". The vehicle in question has a size comparable to a Toyota 4Runner.

Was a great example of the ridiculous expectations some of us Americans have on ridiculously huge vehicles.

[globular-toast]

You can give people more. You cannot give people less.

That's it. That's all our problems.

[fnord77]

deaths from people backing up over their kids predated "ginormous SUVs".

[rkapsoro]

Wait until you hear what kind of vehicles the CAFE regulatory framework has incentivized US automakers to build.

[bluejekyll]

This is ultimately the thing that needs to be fixed. The exemption for small trucks was stupid, and it should have been reserved for literal farm equipment (as that was intended). The fact that SUVs slip by on this now has created such a dumb market.

[derektank]

The OBBB Act passed by Congress last year eliminated the financial penalties associated with violations of CAFE standards, so there’s presumably no reason why automakers have to abide by them anymore, except possibly for concerns about future legislation.

[next_xibalba]

It wouldn’t be HN without a commenter shoehorning the topic of a thread into proof of their pet problem. See also any topic even remotely tangential to city planning.