Statistics are meaningless to the individual. Sure, emergency braking might be safer across the board, but that means little compared to an individual who already drives safely without it.
This is just blatantly untrue.
> means little compared to an individual who already drives safely without it
Until emergency breaking stops a bad driver from T-boning you in an intersection as they run a red light.
“I’ll just drive safely” was the argument against seatbelts, airbags, and antilock brakes. Motorcycle helmets, too.
Sure, if it was equivalent in capability to a class 5 self driving car, it would see the light was red, and notice the partially occluded other car, then stop in time.
But, with just a front facing radar? I don’t see how it would be able to do much. It would only have a few feet to stop.
The point is even a perfect driver may benefit from safety devices in the hands of other drivers they encounter.
The article notes:
> A metanalysis in 2015 found a 38 percent decrease in collisions for vehicles that utilized such a system, for instance.
That said there's also a balance in safety systems between personal responsibility and systems responsibility. Relying too much on systems responsibility actually causes more harm because the person becomes more careless or is entirely at the whim of the system responsible for their safety. We put railings on stairs in public places but don't require everyone to put on a safety harness and latch it onto the guide to climb stairs for example. There's an expectation that system safety has hit a reasonable limit and the safety harness is too costly in time, money, and attention to implement.
Or sub in a high speed rear-ending scenario.
In a lot of places the outer gate is only chest high which isn’t insurmountable but is enough of a barrier to avert 99% of the bad cases. I think the analogy to automatic braking holds.
I started to get lazy and distracted as the car was mostly driving, my friend was talking at me and the assist disengaged, next minute we were going pretty fast towards a barrier. We recovered but it was close.
I’d just prefer to drive honestly.
Some habitual drunk drivers never have an accident and may even claim it makes them a better driver, but that doesn’t make it the right choice on a population level.
Cheers.
This often means one person’s risk goes up while thousands of others’ goes down. Sometimes that’s hard to balance, but if the 38% reduction in crashes cited in the article is true, this particular decision seems fairly simple.
I don't like enforcing things like this as a band aid, it's fine to try improve a situation, but let's be honest, many people who are involved in these accidents are doing something with their phone.
People will continue to use their phones in their cars. That's a fact we have to accept.
You can go ahead and do that but I think people are justifiably pissed that we require invasive technology to coddle the idiots who can't be bothered.
>This is just blatantly untrue.
I mean, it's not. Statistics describe how society on average acts, not how you personally act. Someone telling you "Statistically you're more likely to drown if you own a pool" doesn't mean as much if you bought a pool and then became a paraplegic, for example.
Saying "emergency braking will bring down average car deaths" is probably true, but that might not make a difference for Joebob who drives his truck down empty County Road 230 once a week to check his mail.
(He might even be statistically more likely to run into the car he’s not used to seeing on the usually empty road via the stop sign he usually blows right through. Who knows?)
That's not how statistics work. Again, statistics mean little to the individual.
I don’t think you’re clear on the definition of “statistically”.
Citing things with >90% probability does not, actually, prove your weak point that "all statistical probabilities are individual certainties".
> This is just blatantly untrue.
This statement is blatently untrue. If a "driver gets in an accident every X miles/km" does that mean if you drive more than X miles, you're "overdue?" No, that's a statistical fallacy. Aggregate statistics are only meaningful if you're within a standard deviation of the mean. If you are a safe driver, it's likely to be meaningless. If you are a reckless driver, you're unlikely to live long enough to find out.
No. You are sharing the road with others, of variable skill, and things like deer and pedestrians who can dart into traffic. I’ve been crashed into from behind while stopped in traffic; no fuckup on my end, but still would have likely benefited from automated emergency braking.
Your car insurance also reflects others’ accident rates. You shoulder some of the medical and fire and police costs via taxes. Lots of statistical impact even in a perfect driver or someone who never drives at all.
Here's one interpretation of "statistics are meaningless to the individual": If X makes people in general statistically more likely to do Y (such as "avoid accidents", in this case), it does not say anything about the effect it will have on a particular individual's behavior, such as you or me. In fact, it could very well make you or me less likely to do Y. As long as it averages out over the population, the statistic is still true. But you need to know the individual in order to know how X specifically affects them.
I think you are taking a different/broader-scope interpretation of the statement. Something like: if X makes people in general (...as above), then given that we live in a society of various people, it will have some at least some impact, perhaps indirect, on all of us (c.f. your comments about taxes, insurance rates, etc).
Maybe you got that already, but I'm a sucker for helping people be aware of when they're talking past each other (:
I don’t even want to know what situations I’d need to be in for my vehicle to actually emergency brake, but I don’t want to find out. It seems like I’m already going to be hitting something anyways so any speed it can bleed off is better.
Honda had a recall for an older AEB system 2017-2019 Accord and CRV:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/nht...
I appreciate your informed opinion!
https://udayton.edu/blogs/erma/2022/06/lakewobegon.php
My 'boomer' relatives refuse to wear a seatbelt, regardless of how many fines they've incurred, exactly because they already drive safely.