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Comment by SandB0x | Hacker News Reader

This is terrible advice. If you need to make an emergency stop to avoid hitting an object in front of you, it's madness to try and assess whether you should "give a little more room" to a car behind you. If you waste a second on this kind of decision you're much more likely to die from hitting the object in front of you at a much greater speed.

The car behind you should be leaving enough distance to account for their reaction time in an emergency, and while you are driving normally you should be assessing the situation behind you and making sure you're not being tail-gated.

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while you are driving normally you should be assessing the situation behind you and making sure you're not being tail-gated.

If you are being tail-gated, there's not much you can do about it. You speed up; they speed up. You slow down; they honk and go around and then the car behind them tail-gates you.

One of my biggest worries about my commute (when I drive instead of taking the train, typically once a week) is that there is no way to keep enough space in front of me that I can react to full braking. If I leave that much space between me and the car in front of me, another car will move into the "open" spot. Automatic braking might well help considerably.

The thing that boggles my mind about the tailgating is how much of it is done for essentially no reason. There aren't that many defensible reasons to tailgate to start with, but the amount of purely idiotic behavior blows my mind (I regularly see people refuse to switch lanes while tightly tailgating whatever car happens to be in front of them, all this in heavy traffic).

Perhaps the most exciting thing about self driving cars is that they will all have and use the ability to think ahead more than 5 feet.

Put a switch on the break light so that you can activate it without activating the breaks.

Next time anybody gets too close, flip the light. Watch the idiot increase the distance between you rather fast.

Unfortunately(?) that kind of hack will get your license revoked very quickly if you get caught.

Or you can slightly tap the brake to the point when lights come on but very minor or no actual braking occurs, no need to mess with wires. That's called brake check, you might do it a few times to show your agitation to the driver tailgating you.

Agreed. As I understand it, these automatics kick in when there's a certainty of a crash ahead if no action is taken. In those circumstances, it's better to avoid the certain crash and take a risk on a uncertain shunt from behind.

On a similar note, in the UK, where most people have manual gearboxes, the advice for an emergency stop used to be to jump on the clutch and the brake, to prevent stalling. Nowadays you're taught just to stamp on the brake: in an emergency, who cares if you stall? Pushing the clutch can lead to the car "surging" if going downhill, so why risk it?

This is why rear end accidents are always the fault of the following vehicle. (This is also the oldest trick in the book when it comes to insurance fraud--slam on the brakes when you get tailgated, claim you saw an animal dart across the road, and collect.)

Actually, anything short of "I braked specifically so you would hit me" makes it the fault of the following car in most states.

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