Does this apply to only US manufactured cars because I have adaptive headlights on my 2021 Subaru Forester.
The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
231–240 of 290 posts
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lane following isn't the hard part of self driving cars. I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it's a minor detail compared to everything else that also needs to work reliably 99.9999% of the time. Such infrastructure might help make cheaper lane-keep assist as standard options I guess, but at the speeds where it matters for safety, you need significant look-ahead on the trajectory rather than just lateral position error.…
Do you need everything to work reliably 99.9999% of the time? Is that the reliability rating of human drivers?
Even assuming one "event" per mile that needs to be handled satisfactorily (pothole, pedestrian, inconsistent embedded reflectors, chipped or graffitied sign, ....), 99.9999% is about the same reliability as the rate that human drivers crash in the US, and fatal crashes are around 100x less common. If, as in this comment thread, self-driving cars are being proposed as a solution to the deaths caused by human ineptitude then 99.9999% seems like an absolute bare minimum for reliability.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#233I'd be happy if local and state police just started issuing citations in earnest for misaligned headlights on pickup trucks. 99% of the pickups I come across at night have their low beams pointing straight instead of down at the road. It's so common that it can't be a coincidence that nearly every pickup truck has an illegal headlight configuration. And it isn't due to higher ground clearance, that's just their lame…
This should maybe happen during a vehicle inspection. The last thing I want is another subjective reason for cops to be able to pull you over on the road.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#234Can anybody tell me why all my US cars have enormous side-mirror blind spot? And my European cars have none? Are European cars using curved mirrors to prevent this? Edit: I just googled it. That’s exactly what’s happening - EU side mirrors are curved to prevent blind spots.
American drivers are simply too stupid to be able to comprehend curved mirrors, so the US government bans them on US-spec cars, and instead you get flat mirrors with a warning message.
That’s a ridiculous hot take. What’s so hard to understand about curved mirrors? The mirrors already have a warning on them that objects are closer than they appear.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they worried you'll kill someone with your electric scooter?
They're worried you'll kill yourself
If people can get on an escorted i wonder if they wall or uber. If they walk i could totally see the total number of fatalities being hire than escooting.
Similar to how drunken walking has a higher fatality raid than drunken driving/biking.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we replaced every car, it would be an easy problem. The issue is having to replace one at a time while everyone else on the road is still human.
Or... Just make public transportation work? Is this just that difficult to get on the anglosphere or something? I still cannot grasp what people are trying to do with this, really. Why are they trying to do public transports... With cars? You guys do realize most of accidents come from urban/chaotic areas, right? You don't have to use a car to solve this.
The percentage of people in the US that live in an area dense enough where even an ideally designed public transport system would match the convenience of a car is in the low single digits. When I go to European cities with these great public transportation systems everybody loves to talk about, what to I see on the road? Lots of cars. Cars aren't going anywhere.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#237Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a claim with no source. Are you claiming that the manufacturers are making trucks with illegal headlights? Because that seems pretty far fetched. Or that drivers are modifying them? Because that is very rare.
> Quite a claim with no source. I am the source. Anyone that gets blinded at night by oncoming traffic is the source, because this should not happen with properly aligned headlights. Regardless of ground clearance, low beam headlights should angle down towards the road to focus on the road approximately 125ft from the front tires. The higher the ground clearance, the steeper the angle. > Are you claiming that the man…
I don't believe that you can determine which headlights are illegal by looking at oncoming traffic. I don't believe that dealers or or drivers are modifying them in illegal configurations at more than a minimal rate. This would be quite the conspiracy.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
"People drink and drive in America because they have no choice." They always could choose not to drink if they have no choice but to drive. How is that not a choice?
Because you have the wrong premise. It's not "do I drink or not", it's "I have drank, do I drive or not?"
So we seem to agree -- there is a choice.
Re: The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, the NHTSA should be more proactive on this stuff. But to be fair, drunk drivers kill 28 people a day in this country, or about 10k people per year. 3k people die at signalled intersections every year, or around 8ish per day. While Tesla shouldn't be beta testing their self driving cars on public roads, it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse.
> it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse Is that true? Those human statistics take every human car and driver into account, not just Teslas. I have never seen data that shows self-driving cars anywhere close to human driving capability. If we replaced every car on the road with "self-driving" Teslas, it would be mayhem.
I guess it depends how you classify crashes when the automated car goes "Meh, I've got no idea, you take over" and then crashes 2 seconds later.
But America isn't too concerned with road deaths (equivelant of one 9/11 per month, or 240 9/11s in the period of time the US occupied Afghanistan in response.
Financially the response to 9/11 cost about $950b - $300m per death. By that reckoning the US government should be spending about $12.8 Trillion dollars a year on reducing road deaths, about half of the US GDP.