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Building the Zero-Fatality Car
CWmike writes "In the future, new cars might include an appealing sticker: 'This car is rated for zero fatalities.' John Brandon reports that Volvo, for instance, has launched a program called Vision 2020, which states, 'By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.' It includes not just new protective measures in the car, but technology for communicating dangers to and from the car. Other car companies have similar, less formalized programs. As ambitious as it seems, Ed Kim, an analyst at automotive research firm AutoPacific, says the zero-fatality goal is achievable. In the next 10 years, there will be a confluence of safety technologies — such as road-sign recognition, pedestrian detection and autonomous car controls — that lead to safer cars, says Kim. Will your next car look something like this?"
Volvo drivers are shitty at driving anyway. They buy a car because they assume they'll hit a lot of things.
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Humans are inherently flawed in their driving skills. Widespread autonomy won't be deployed until after 2020.
Unless you are going to build a tank, this is a marketing dream, kind of like Elon Musk retiring to Mars.
Perhaps if you built the whole car out of the material they build the black box of the plane out of...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Thanks foor the advicer, resident grammmer nazi.
The fact that you are regularly bumping up against the limits of your vehicle means that you're driving too fast, following too closely, and merging with too little margin.
Occasionally my vehicle needs to do something I didn't plan for, like evade a driver that merged 30 feet in front of me from a dead stop.
Also from time to time I find myself riding around on I-95 with traffic going 80mph... with 3 carlengths between cars. Sometimes the next lane to the left(!) is going 65-70. That means I'm merging rightwards into a slower lane. I signal, I watch the cars around me, and I take extra time to allow drivers to register that I'm about to merge in front of them. However, with a clutch I stay locked in third gear right up to 90mph; when I use the throttle, the car does exactly what I expect. In an auto, I'll back off the gas to maintain distance from the car ahead of me just before merging, and my car goes right to high gear and stays there; flooring it doesn't make me go any faster for about a full second, which means merging causes an emergency situation that the drivers around me have to react to.
I take issue with having a vehicle that applies behavior I can't control, or behavior I can't predict. If the difference between being a "Bad driver" and being a "Good driver" is using a car that can actually do exactly what I'm trying to do, then the problem is the car I'm in. If my car's engine can supply the power and the suspension can handle far, far more intensive maneuvers, then the car should not actively change dynamics into configurations that might not allow me to safely execute a rather banal and boring lane change. Seriously, I don't need a fucking race car for this shit; I've got a 300% margin of error in a ~1.5 second part of a maneuver (so about 4 seconds for someone else to react if I fuck up) in a Mazda3. If that suddenly becomes a collision if the other driver doesn't react due to the gear my car's in or some other automated function, I'm driving the WRONG car.
As an aside, I'm not sure traffic is flowing quite efficiently if the cars are packed that close together at that speed, or if the difference in speed between adjacent lanes is greater than 10mph. Case in point, stretches of I-95 south from Delaware where the far left lane runs 100mph, and the immediate next lane runs 70mph. And yes, I've had my amazing brakes bring me to a firm stop just after the next guy's brake lights came on, dropping from 65mph, and seen the guy behind me suddenly jump into the emergency lane and skid to a stop next to me... following too closely, guess he was annoyed the left lane of 695 wasn't 80mph today....
What world do you live in where everyone leaves 60 feet of space at highway speeds, and merging between traffic lanes is a simple affair? Can you drive in the right lane without dealing with on-ramp mergers pulling 20 feet in front of you at 20mph while traffic is flowing at 65?
Another anecdote, I drive Franklintown Road in Baltimore to Woodlawn (look it up on Google Maps). There are a lot of blind curves, and near Woodlawn there's a really big one where opposing traffic sort of appears 30 feet away. So coming around this at roughly 30mph, I'm suddenly on my brakes hard; there's a big SUV 30 feet away going 45-50mph (!!!), passing a row of 3 cars going the nominal speed of (get this) 40mph. Great, I'm facing a 70mph head-on collision with some moron who decided to pass in the opposing lane of traffic while speeding on a road where the nominal speed is 15mph above the speed limit anyway... around a fucking blind curve.
What's even more ridiculous is because I only go at most 5mph above the speed limit there (and 5mph under in the rain, even though everyone still wants to go 40), I've had an idiot in a Lexus do the exact same thing to me coming the other way, trying to pass me around that exact curve. I braked and yielded ... just as he merged ahead of me, a Benz SUV came around the other way. Yeah, I've
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