Humans aren’t very good drivers. We’re unable to watch everything that’s going on around us at all times, we’re easily distracted, and many of us seem utterly incapable of putting the cell phone down even when we’re driving. Not surprisingly, especially when you consider the number of vehicles on the road, a lot of collisions happen every day. The State benefits from this because it has create numerous laws that allow it to rake in cash when people crash into one another but do fuck all for safety. Fortunately the market is here to help and it doesn’t even need a gang of armed agents to shoot our pets:
In what may not come as a surprise, vehicles with automatic braking systems are involved in rear-end crashes (that is, accidents in which a vehicle hits a car directly in front of them) at lower rates than vehicles not equipped with the systems, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS.
The research focused on Forward Collision Warning (FCW) and Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), as well as the suite of systems made by Volvo called City Safety, which includes advanced versions of those two technologies. The research examined vehicles from a number of different automakers including Acura, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru and Volvo, which were equipped with FCW and AEB, as well as vehicles that included just FCW or no crash prevention tech at all.
According to the IIHS research, equipping vehicles with both warning and autobraking systems reduced the rate of rear-end crashes by 39 percent and rear end crashes with injuries by 42 percent. That’s an overall reduction in crashes by 12 percent and a reduction in injury crashes by 15 percent.
Machines can be far better drivers than humans. With the right sensors they can watch everything that’s going on around them, they don’t get distracted, and they can multitask so sending information over a cellular connection doesn’t hinder their ability to drive. Adding automation to automobiles has been improving safety since, at least, power brakes became a thing. As the amount of tasks an automobile can do itself increases we will likely continue to see a correlating increase in safety.
What’s beautiful about these safety systems is that they don’t require the threat of violence to create. I’m sure the State will take credit for these automated breaking systems by making them mandatory but the State didn’t invent them, the market did. Automobile manufacturers have voluntarily developed these systems to make their vehicles safer and therefore, they hope, more appealing to customers.
Meanwhile the State will continue passing laws to needlessly change the roadways and highways, make more things a finable offense, and other such nonsense under the false claims of increasing safety while really increasing its revenue.
While auto-braking systems have some great utility, I don’t want to lose the ability to hit something in front of me that needs to be hit.
I also don’t want to cripple every medium duty or larger commercial vehicle’s ability to have a snow plow installed without “deleting factory safety features” and the crap that can follow in a lawsuit if there is a subsequent crash.
Whether the technology is intelligently added where it makes sense or mindlessly mandated on everything will depend on the State. Were the market allowed to do its thing the technology would end up implemented where the buyers wanted it implemented.