The tech exists, and vehicles on the road already have it, yet a consortium of carmakers doesn’t want to make this lifesaving equipment standard. The reason is as old as the hills—money.
The tech exists, and vehicles on the road already have it, yet a consortium of carmakers doesn’t want to make this lifesaving equipment standard. The reason is as old as the hills—money.
Absolutely some luck sure. I’m not nearly cocky enough to pretend that I am some magical all seeing God driver. I simply pay FAR more attention than everyone else seems to.
My father has totalled like 6 cars in his life. He’s a terrible fucking driver. Absolutely zero awareness. Never shoulder checks. I hated being driven around by him. Even at a young age I was pointing out to him that he almost hit several cars with his oblivious driving habits.
My mother is a very aggressive driver and she’s gotten in a handful of minor accidents but I don’t think she’s ever totalled anything. She’s much more observant than my father but she is also a distracted driver. Often eating, doing makeup or fuckin around with her phone for maps or music while she’s driving.
My older brother is a straight up wreckless driver. He used to drive on a suspended license or no license for a decent chunk of his life. He has gotten tickets for the most ridiculous stupid driving in the world. I honestly do not understand how he is still able to have a license these days. I am almost positive he doesn’t have insurance right now, but he also finally joined rehab for his drug usage so we are taking one victory at a time with him.
Little brother 1 has totaled 4 cars already and he’s only 23. He is an aggressive driver that lacks the observation skills to be driving the way he does. I have talked to him about it several times and my family has asked me to teach him “how to drive like me” but he has too much pride about how he drives to listen to me.
Little brother 2 (they are twins) has been in s few minor accidents. He claims he was hit on his moped once but seeing how he drives I suspect he just wasnt paying attention. The few times I’ve been unfortunate to drive with him he was driving with the passenger tires often on the line or over the line. He has absolutely no clue where the outer edges do his vehicle are. He is also stubborn and takes any advice on how to drive better as a personal attack. I told him he needs to turn his headlights on when it’s overcast or anything other than a sunny day and now he constantly makes jokes about how there is one cloud in the sky so I better turn my headlights on. He’s unbelievably stubborn and mocks anyone that even attempts to critique his horrible driving habits.
My little sister only started driving last year. She’s already curbed her wheels so bad they had to be replaced and backed into my mom’s car. I don’t know how she drives as I have not allowed her to drive me around yet, but it doesn’t sound particularly confidence inspiring.
My mother had a roommate for years who was constantly being rear ended. I think by the time she finally moved out she had been rear ended something like 16 times in her life. She was an unbelievably scared driver who was known to panic brake at the worst times. Timid drivers are far more dangerous than slightly aggressive drivers in my opinion.
I drive with what I like to call aggressive defensive driving. I am not afraid to hammer down and push the car to its limits to avoid an accident or move my car out of what I am predicting to be a harmful location, but I also drive very cautiously while giving myself space to work with should something happen. I almost always have an escape path in mind at any given moment and I tend to be driving with my foot resting on the brakes so I can stop much quicker than someone who needs to pull their foot off the accelerator and then switch to the brakes. A car traveling at 60mph moves ~40 feet in the ~500 milliseconds it takes to see something and move your foot from the gas to the brakes. By covering the brake whenever I am near other drivers I can significantly shorten my reaction time and therefore braking distance.
In my entire extended family I am the only person who has never gotten into any accidents or received a ticket. You can say that is luck and it would absolutely be true to a certain extent but I feel that also severely downplays how much work I put into driving safely and defensively at all times.
I find that the grand majority of drivers do not put almost any thought into how they drive or what they could be doing to drive more defensively and be hyper observant. They treat driving as this slog event they have to get through instead of the highly dangerous activity that it is. You’re controlling these massive chunks of metal with enormous amounts of potential energy. Too many people are too careless.
“I need auto braking so I can scroll Ticktok”
Distracted driving is the core of the problem like you said. My experiences with other drivers proves that pretty hard.
Too many people are incapable of getting behind the wheel of a vehicle and committing 100% of their attention and energy into driving that vehicle.
I have my phone with maps to my destination and music playing but once I am driving I never touch the phone again. My family knows if they text me while I am driving I will never see it. They have to call me to get me to answer on my hands free if they need to get in touch with me while I am driving.
Even at stop lights I’m checking my mirrors constantly. I have avoided being rear ended twice by seeing someone coming up behind me with too much speed and then I jump outta the way into an open spot beside me.
Honestly I don’t even do that. I’m both Autistic and ADHD which means that I am very monotropic. I can’t divide my attention since I can only focus on one thing at a time. I also have time blindness so if I were to focus on something like the radio I would get distracted. (Which is probably what happens to a lot of people)
How fascinating. I have ADHD and I find the music helps me stay awake and focused. If I’m in a silent car I just want to take a nap lol.
Autism means that I don’t have a natural filter to remove irrelevant sensory input. I can tune things out but it takes mental effort.
I still listen to the radio some but I’m always careful not to let it interfere with my focus on driving. It is mostly for the red lights that take forever.
You might like a motorcycle. Those require 110% focus on the act of riding. It really helped with my inability to focus on one thing at a time.
Now obviously super dangerous and no matter how careful you are you can still die from someone else not paying attention but I do really enjoy motorcycles. I just don’t trust other drivers. So I stick to the occasional dirt biking now.
Ok you still literally talk about taking extraordinary risks while pretending you are more observant which is not something you can know.
You’re just a shitty driver.
Shitty driver that has no accidents. No tickets. Reduced insurance due to how safe of a driver I am. Only person in my entire extended family with absolute zero accidents or even minor fender benders.
Yup I must be a really shitty driver.
Just like a great ball player can be the GOAT and have no championship rings you can be a bad driver and haven’t had an accident yet.
Again all of this starts because you literally describe taking unnecessary risks while claiming to be “better” than others around you which you cannot actually know.
I don’t think it’s a massive leap in logic to claim I am a better driver than most when I haven’t hit anything and I can park between two lines correctly. Most drivers have no clue where the edges of their vehicles are and they seem to really struggle with parking correctly.
And you have really latched onto an incredibly specific example that I gave of where a car automatically braking would cause an accident where there otherwise would not be an accident. I’m sure I could have explain that rare hypothetical better in my original comment, but it was just the first example I could come up with where an automatic brake would be an issue.
It’s not something I do often just for the hell of it. It’s something that has come up on a few very rare occasions that I identified as a scenario where having the car automatically brake would be bad. You seem to think that’s a maneuver I’m pulling daily when I can assure you it is not.