Studies find automatic braking can cut crashes over 40%

It feels like a simple thing but I also suspect it is effective from my personal experience.

We have automatic braking (fixed: breaking) on my Toyota Rav4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbnoFbb8G8Q

It is a simple thing but the PCS has been triggered 4 times in the last 5 years and never incorrectly. I think I would have stopped soon enough without it (as I've never hit anything in my 20+ years of driving), but it was always in those unexpected situations like a car rapidly slowing down in the middle of the highway for something I can not even see.

It feels like initializing values to 0 automatically. You shouldn't need it if everything else goes perfectly, but it doesn't hurt to have it.

Headline claim only pertains to rear end collisions (which to be fair, are a large portion of collisions on our modern cell-phone filled roads). AEB won't save you from losing your shit in the woods trying to dodge that deer or road debris you couldn't see until last minute nor will it save you from entering a corner too hot.

I wonder how many extra crashes will something like this trigger and who will pay when accidents happen because the car decided to break for no apparent reason. I've seen PCS working well at slow speeds and, arguably, they would be more helpful at higher speeds. But would you trust such system with your life at high speed on a busy motorway ?

Fuck no. I had to deal with a rental that had driver assist technology and it damn near killed me. There was a boulder on the road around a blind corner and the car fought me trying to swerve out of the way, I barely avoided it.

Imagine auto braking on black ice or because of a faulty sensor. We're giving immature technology too much control of the vehicle.

Oof, my experience with with auto-brake in a 2021 Subaru Crosstrek (anecdotal, sample size of one, all that good stuff) is much the opposite. It's too sensitive and tends to brake shockingly hard during fairly mundane maneuvers.

When backing up near a wall/obstacle, the auto-brake seems to kick in when anything is closer than three or four feet away from the bumper. I use my mirrors and have an accurate impression of where the four corners of the vehicle are - I don't need the computer slamming on the brakes when I am reversing in a tight spot. It feels _more_ dangerous and I fear that one day, my knee-jerk reaction will be to fight the machine (press the gas harder, or get distracted looking at the console which emits lights and sounds every single time auto-brake kicks in) and wind up wrecking with even more force than I might have otherwise.

Also, in traffic, I'll often take my foot off the gas and coast/idle, letting the vehicle slow down naturally. I try to do this instead of braking sometimes as I believe it assists with keeping the flow of traffic predictable for others. Usually this is no problem because I follow the next person at a safe distance.

Sometimes, while decelerating as described above, I will allow the distance between myself and the next car to close, for example, if they're turning and will be gone in a second anyway. The Subaru then ruins my slowdown maneuver by slamming on the brakes because it thinks I'm approaching the vehicle ahead of me too quickly. Well, yes, maybe, but they're also halfway out of the lane already so it's not terribly significant that I'm closing the distance. Another half-second and they'll be gone, restoring my follow distance. (This has only happened once or twice but I imagine it gives the person behind me quite the unnecessary shock.)

I wish there was a way to fine-tune the sensitivity, or at least an option to say "I am an attentive driver, please switch auto-brake to a lower sensitivity level." Currently the only option is to disable it each time the engine starts, which feels wrong to do...