Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 512 posts

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#51

Post by lsaferite »

jacquesm wrote: post #45
lsaferite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that you cannot disable the collision warning and lane keeping. What Make/model is it?

Usually you can disable it but on a per-ride basis and it takes a lot of menu scrolling and tapping to do it again. It defaults to 'on' when you start the car, and there is no physical switch to disable it permanently.

Yeah, I meant it's weird you cannot just disable it and have that saved across starts. Mine allows me to disable those features and they don't turn back on when you restart the vehicle. I don't think AEB is a feature that can be disabled though. Just the collision avoidance feature. They are similar, but not the same. AEB is supposed to only trigger when a crash is imminent while collision avoidance is what triggers when it thinks you are about to have a crash that can be averted. I've never had AEB trigger, but CA triggers regularly enough that I know when to expect it now.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#52

Post by opwieurposiu »

The quality of these systems varies wildly IME. If your car has a good one, they are quite useful. If your car has a glitchy one they are dangerous.

How do we keep the glitchy ones off the road? Extended return policy? Make the unit swappable/replaceable?

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#53

Post by jacquesm »

peter422 wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies are run by people that are good at statistics, and there is a fair chance that statistically this works out well but that does not mean anything for any particular individual. Chances are that EAB will cause some accidents and prevents a whole lot more, and that's enough for the insurers.

Every possible change to a car’s safety system will cause some deaths and save others… look at airbags. The aggregate stats are the most important things to look at, especially for something like AEB which has the ability to save pedestrians, which as of late are getting mowed down more and more frequently.

Agreed that overall it can be an improvement. But I've clocked up a good 40K km since I got rid of the car that was equipped with defunct EAB and I'm fairly sure (but of course can not prove it) that I would have been in an accident by now on account of it triggering falsely. Conversely, I've never had a problem with airbags deploying without cause and my seatbelt is on just to move the car 10 meters because it is deeply ingrained and I refuse to drive - or be in - a car without it.

But faulty EAB caused more trouble for me than any other safety feature to date and I really wonder what caused Mercedes Benz to release this feature in such a horrific functional state. It is beyond belief how broken it is and I would love to see their internal stats for how often their EAB caused - not prevented - single vehicle accidents.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#54

Post by r00t4ccess »

ddalcino wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #6

This almost got me into a serious accident, twice. Definitely would not recommend and I switched cars because of it. The last thing I need is buggy software with the capability of instantly changing the trajectory of my vehicle (slippery surfaces, cornering). A brand car as well (MB) so really, really disappointed, what should have been a safety feature actually was the opposite. Dealer said everything was fine so th…

Would you care to elaborate on what went wrong? The other comments here make ‘automatic emergency braking’ sound like a really good idea, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this particular feature would be so problematic. If you’re talking about other automatic steering features, that’s very different, and your comment makes more sense to me.

Not the poster

Vw golf r 2016 the sensor was low to the ground and it would randomly brake for stuff it thought was a threat like a cardboard box.

Subaru crosstrek 2018 - would brake for no reason, cars turning up ahead of me, etc.

VW atlas 2019 - brake for no reason would also scream at me and show a red symbol on the hud when nothing was in the road in front of me.

Subaru impreza 2023 - brakes for turning vehicles up the road, had it brake in a car wash.

On my vw vehicles i bought a can bus programmer so i could turn off as much if the safety stuff as possible because it made the car less safe to drive. In the impreza (current car) turning off the eyesight features is part of the pre-drive ritual.

I also had the lane assist on the crosstrek almost cause an accident on the highway at speed. Roads here are inconsistent and it was violently jerking the wheel trying to stay between lines.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#55

Post by jacquesm »

lsaferite wrote: post #51
jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually you can disable it but on a per-ride basis and it takes a lot of menu scrolling and tapping to do it again. It defaults to 'on' when you start the car, and there is no physical switch to disable it permanently.

Yeah, I meant it's weird you cannot just disable it and have that saved across starts. Mine allows me to disable those features and they don't turn back on when you restart the vehicle. I don't think AEB is a feature that can be disabled though. Just the collision avoidance feature. They are similar, but not the same. AEB is supposed to only trigger when a crash is imminent while collision avoidance is what triggers…

> AEB is supposed to only trigger when a crash is imminent while collision avoidance is what triggers when it thinks you are about to have a crash that can be averted

If that had been the case I would have still driven that car... very frustrating because - touchscreen aside - it was a nice and comfy car and I had planned to make it the last car I ever bought.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#56

Post by mint2 »

lsaferite wrote: post #39
mint2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that Not every car brand has the executional prowess of Tesla. As the others have mentioned I’ve never experienced phantom braking on my Subaru while driving. It hasn’t even done the object detected warning beeping when driving on actual roads, which I assume happens prior to the braking. The times I’ve had that warning are parking head on against walls and approach fast, and on one particular 15 mph off…

My Kia likes to trigger the ~~AEB~~ Collision Avoidance warning when people are turning off the road in front of me. It's really only triggered when it _thinks_ a vehicle is in my path, but it's really exiting the path and just still in the periphery. I get about as many false positive type events with the lane keeping feature. I've learned, the hard way, that not all lane markings are to spec. The worst are when you…

Yeah the lane keeping for sure is bad because even if perfect there is a lot of real word situations where one needs to deviate from the center of the lane.

So unless the vehicle is fully self driving to the level of an alert good driver, it’s going to mess up. And lane keeping is definitely not claiming to be that.

The lane departure warning beep is fine even although its 90% false alerts for me due to non-lane lines or snow etc, and 9% when two lanes merge and I get lazy about the turn signal with no cars around. But if I were to get more tired or something it could be a helpful alert of last resort to stop driving, hope I never wait that long though because that would be dangerous.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#57

Post by jacquesm »

r00t4ccess wrote: post #54
ddalcino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to elaborate on what went wrong? The other comments here make ‘automatic emergency braking’ sound like a really good idea, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this particular feature would be so problematic. If you’re talking about other automatic steering features, that’s very different, and your comment makes more sense to me.

Not the poster Vw golf r 2016 the sensor was low to the ground and it would randomly brake for stuff it thought was a threat like a cardboard box. Subaru crosstrek 2018 - would brake for no reason, cars turning up ahead of me, etc. VW atlas 2019 - brake for no reason would also scream at me and show a red symbol on the hud when nothing was in the road in front of me. Subaru impreza 2023 - brakes for turning vehicles…

Why not get a car without that stuff?

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#58

Post by sidewndr46 »

caconym_ wrote: post #34
sidewndr46 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so if someone merges over into your lane where you are it doesn't activate? I must not understand the point of this feature then.

On my Honda if a car merges in front of me and is accelerating, it maintains its speed presumably on the assumption that the separation will continue to increase. If a car merges in front and is slower than me, i.e. separation is decreasing, it will brake in an attempt to maintain the set following distance. In practice it does leave a bit more following distance than most human drivers, but your worry of constantly…

OK, it's good to know that it won't stop. But if it slows automatically it will still result in the same thing. All the other drivers just continue to cut you off indefinitely.

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#59

Post by jacquesm »

ics wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #6

This almost got me into a serious accident, twice. Definitely would not recommend and I switched cars because of it. The last thing I need is buggy software with the capability of instantly changing the trajectory of my vehicle (slippery surfaces, cornering). A brand car as well (MB) so really, really disappointed, what should have been a safety feature actually was the opposite. Dealer said everything was fine so th…

I wrote up a long comment that got scrapped by my focus filter but I feel the need to voice strong agreement here. I have a recent Mazda which in almost all ways is my perfect car except for the newfangled safety features all new cars seem to have. Lane correction and emergency braking, even set to the lowest sensitivity levels, are bad to outright dangerous in city (and some country) driving. In NYC it's common to h…

That sounds like there is a lot of commonality between the two cases that I had and the ones that you have experienced. My car was a Mercedes Benz C class July 2014 issue. The AEB relies on a lot of gear supplied by Bosch (I dug into it a bit to see if it could be disabled without surgery but that wasn't possible). Maybe Mazda has the same unit? (it sits behind the front license plate and there is a camera behind the windscreen).

Re: Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

#60

Post by jacquesm »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #52

The quality of these systems varies wildly IME. If your car has a good one, they are quite useful. If your car has a glitchy one they are dangerous. How do we keep the glitchy ones off the road? Extended return policy? Make the unit swappable/replaceable?

Set some standards and 100% transparency on cases where they fail, mandatory disclosure of every case where they phantom brake and what the cause and end result was.

Unlike seatbelts or airbags where there is very little downside these can cause perfectly safe situations to turn into nasty accidents.

Post reply on HN