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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

> safety features such as lane assist and emergency stop systems become mandatory

I've got a cheap $0 lane assist and emergency stop system called "paying attention and not tailgating" that came stock in my 2003 Ford Ranger. I've been using it consistently for 35 years now on different makes and models of vehicles and it hasn't failed once.

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Meanwhile, there are millions of wrecks every year in the US alone. I'm sure a large portion of those drivers said the same until they got hit. You need only browse /r/IdiotsInCars for a few minutes to witness the full range of ways people with the best of intentions can get in wrecks because someone else acted like a fool, and how many could have been prevented with lane keeping and emergency stop features.

The roads are a highly regulated public space where safe, smooth motion depends on everyone working together, and where one little error can throw it into chaos. Everyone will mess up if they live long enough. You can make some philosophical argument against mandatory safety features if you like, but I hate driving as it is and welcome any feature that reduces the odds or severity of the inevitable results of the limits of human perception and reaction time.

In my opinion, the real solution to this isn't to stuff as much driver assistance safety tech into all cars. It's to shift our society to not need cars for basic life necessities.

There are plenty of people who absolutely are not skilled at driving. They never will be. But they have to own a car to live in our society - thus, here we are.

I find the cause for many issues in the US mainly in bad road design. Compare that with France, Germany or The Netherlands. So much better there. lane control hardly needed.

A large part of startup pitches boil down to "what if [thing already done well for decades in Asia and/or Europe], but worse, and expensive?" Ugly patches over the existing horror show might be the only option until there's a major cultural shift.

Our town has been replacing stoplight intersections with roundabouts, and you would think we were trying to castrate all the adult males. How people have any difficulty navigating a roundabout eludes me, but every day I see more drivers just act like they are faced with an alien when they come upon a roundabout.

Roundabouts are ubiquitous here in New Zealand, and have been for decades.

People still don't know how to use them.

Are road design in Belgium worse than in the Netherlands? The death rates per mile driven is same as in the US [1].

I don't think "road design" is an issue. People in Europe drive less in general, risk groups (teenagers and elderly) drive significantly less often, there are less people who need a car to get home after a night out, higher BAC levels (0.08% vs 0.05% or less in EU), etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> but I hate driving as it is and welcome any feature that reduces the odds or severity of the inevitable results of the limits of human perception and reaction time.

None of this will change the fact that, you, as the driver bear primary responsibility for your own safety, and that of your passengers, when in control of a vehicle. Driver aids are helpful but are not a substitute for attentive and defensive driving.

Your post reads like you're disagreeing with something I said, but the sentence you quoted isn't in disagreement when considered in context. Maybe you need to re-read the whole thing.

So in another conversation we were talking about house and car prices. How there aren't cheap 'starter' options available. Partially due to mandated features and codes.

> welcome any feature that reduces the odds or severity of the inevitable results of the limits of human perception and reaction time.

I have very severe doubts this is what is happening since we're just becoming more distracted and the roads are becoming more lethal.

Lane assist and braking assist just allow you to be more distracted without immediately getting punished by it, normalizing the distracted behavior.

I feel like in a forum of programmers there would at least be some recognition that "get gud" doesn't scale while lane assist and emergency stop work for everyone all of the time regardless of how tired or distracted the driver is.

You're the next iteration of the person complaining about anti-lock breaks because you can just learn to drive better on ice.

I'm fine with anti-lock brakes as long as there's a button to turn them off

Why?

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