Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

You must be joking. Requiring me to have a technology in my car that can apply the brakes without any input from me and without warning? That is most definitely a meaningful restriction. You're forcing me to trust the government's estimate of the relative risk vs. benefit. To be blunt, the government sucks compared to me at estimating my relative risk and benefit. Plus, government institutions have repeatedly shown that they will lie to me about such things to serve political ends. So no, not buying it.

> I'm restricted such that I have to wear seatbelts. I can't buy a new car without rear view camera. I can't buy a new car without antilock brakes. Headlights. Brake lights. I could go for a long time on this list. Are you claiming none of those make driving safer?

The question is not whether these things make driving safer as compared to not having them.

The question is whether the government regulations we have, which include requiring these things but also include lots of other regulations that have far worse justifications (if they even have justifications at all and aren't just blatant attempts to extort the public, such as speed traps), are a better system, on net, than a system in which such things were a matter of voluntary choice, but we forced people to bear the consequences of their bad choices. Oh, you weren't wearing a seat belt and you got in an accident? Sorry, your insurance company will not cover the medical costs due to injuries you suffered that the seat belt would have prevented (or you have a much higher deductible in such a case). Oh, you hit something while backing up and you didn't put a rear view camera in your car? Same sort of answer from your insurance company. Oh, you hit something because you didn't have anti-lock brakes and so you couldn't steer to avoid the collision? Same answer.

In other words, if it is in fact true that these various technologies reduce the risk of accidents, then people who know they will have to take the consequences if they cause an accident will use these technologies to reduce that risk. But in our present regime, our society appears to be violently allergic to such things. The very existence of no fault auto insurance, for example, indicates that we don't like the idea of having to take the consequences of bad choices--but the result is that everyone pays more for auto insurance (IIRC, average rates in no fault states are about twice what they are in states that don't have no fault).

We would all be better off if we abandoned the idea that government regulation can magically protect people from bad consequences. We would also all be better off if we abandoned the idea that we can somehow magically have a government that only makes good regulations, and accepted the inconvenient truth that government regulations come as a package, which even if it contains some good regulations contains many more bad ones, and all things considered is a net cost to us all, not a net gain. We need to stop depending on the nanny state to protect us and be responsible adults who are capable of judging risks and acting accordingly.

I think that may be true in all cases - for example seat belts and airbags requirements may affect people differently depending on height and weight?

In meantime, every time it misfires, we’re risking an accident. Yes, it’s an accident caused by the poor following distance of the car behind us, but the blame isn’t much of a consolation when there’s no guarantee you can walk away from the crash without an injury.

This sounds like the beginnings of the McNamara fallacy: that there is some abstract "data" where all the relevant variables can be explored to decide the best course of action. The reason it's a fallacy is that data is itself only a reflection of conscientious decisions about what to measure and how to measure, and these are invariably limited to what we already appreciate and understand, not accounting for the things we don't know how to measure and don't know we should be measuring.

To be more concrete, let's say we follow your suggestion and focus on crashes. Maybe it's found that automatic breaking reduces the number of crashes so it's mandated. But maybe automatic breaking also increases the likelihood that a crash is deadly in some sub-population like pedestrians, construction workers, and motorcyclists. So overall we see crashes decline because a large number of minor crashes are averted but we also see deadly crashes increase because pedestrians, construction workers, and motorcyclists are killed more frequently.

So data isn't a free lunch. Every decision about what to measure and what to optimize involves some prior contextual understanding. A misunderstanding of the context means the data will misrepresent some aspect of the problem and you'll overoptimize yourself into a local maximum.