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Rear-View Cameras On Cars Could Become Mandatory In the US
According to the Los Angeles Times, "The federal government wants automakers to install back-up cameras in all new vehicles starting in late 2014. The plan, announced Friday, received a strong endorsement from insurance industry and other analysts and is likely to get some level of support from car manufacturers. ... The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that, on average, 292 fatalities and 18,000 injuries occur each year as a result of back-over crashes. The agency said children and the elderly were the most common victims. About 44% of the fatalities in such accidents are children and 33% are people over 70, it said. NHTSA said its proposal was designed to keep drivers from running over pedestrians who might be crossing behind their vehicles. It could also prevent parking-lot bumper thumpers. The camera systems show motorists what's behind them via a video display on the dashboard. They typically feature a bell or alarm that alerts the driver if an object is within the camera's field of view."
Yes this mirror is illegal in the us:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=drivers-med-rearview-mirror-sans-bl-2009-01-19
292 fatalities a year in a country of 300+ million, and they want to legislate mandatory backup cameras...
If you legislate everyone be strapped to a medical exercise device and fed a perfectly balanced diet through a tube, everyone would be almost perfectly safe.
Ban them, and no more problem.
blah.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Then, once cameras are everywhere, how about a little storage of the videos.
This coupled with the mandatory GPS units, etc would be just great for the insurance industry, and the govt...anyone that would like to see/monitor your driving habits.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
... that a company that manufactures cameras is on a lobbying spending spree?
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Cameras aren't necessary - mildly enhancing the standard ultrasonic parking sensors would address this problem for a fraction of the cost.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Will they now ban all existing cars so we have to buy shiny new ones?
No. About twenty years ago they issued a similar mandate for a brake light at or near the bottom of the back windshield (before that, almost no cars had them). The automakers said fine, give us 6-9 months to integrate it into our designs and manufacturing process, the government said OK and that was that. Probably has helped prevent a lot of rear-end collisions, especially on the highway when cars stop suddenly for an obstruction. At any rate, clearly a good bang for the buck. The older cars w/o the extra light were grandfathered and have gradually disappeared from the road.
This is nothing new...the federal government has been mandating safety features in cars for decades. Once seatbelts became available, they were mandated. Same deal for airbags. Now backup cameras are available, they're dirt cheap (relative to the cost of a new automobile, anyways), and they have the potential to save a lot of lives, not to mention property damage. And no, they won't ban all existing cars, just like they haven't banned cars from before the advent of seatbelts or airbags.
Sorry, I know you really wanted to uncover some vast conspiracy between the government and the auto manufacturers, but this is just business as usual...
I watched my sister-in-law in a vehicle with a camera shortly after she bought it. She couldn't back up to save her ass, since she spent more time looking at the camera's feed then actually turning her head to look behind her. Took her three tries to back out of our neighbor's crowded driveway with no success. Then her sister's husband did it first try. He just looked out of the damned window. Newsflash - the camera has a limited field of view. The difference is that if you turn your head to look, you've probably got a better chance to see what may be outside of the camera angle, or moving into it.
I can think of one good use for rear-view cameras... dealing with tailgaters! Imagine being able to record some video of some primo dickbag in his BMW X5, angrily following five feet behind you at 50mph because you aren't willing to go significantly above the speed limit for him. The computer's technology can measure how far away the other car is and overlay it on the screen. Then, hit a button on your dashboard, it sends the video (with a capture of his license plate, if he's got one) off to the police and they mail him a ticket. If enough people catch the same person doing it, fuck'im, take his license away and force him to take the bus.
On a more cheerful note, there is another use that Jeremy Clarkson recently suggested on Top Gear -- looking at pretty girls in the car behind you while sitting at a traffic light. Lech-o-matic!
Of course you know the NASA space pen story is a myth. Fisher invented the pen on their own dime. Both NASA and the Russians used pencils before these pens were available. They went to these pens because broken graphite in zero G and pure oxygen can cause shorts in electronics and burn in a fire. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The taillights will be lit whenever the headlights are lit. These can look exactly the same as older brake lights, except for being slightly dimmer. The additional brake light makes it easier to see the difference.
Stop mandating this crap. I don't want traction control in my car, I don't want more screens, I don't want want my car to drive itself, and I don't want my car to disable cellphones.
I enjoy driving, and I drive a lot. My car is comfortable, gets good fuel economy (45-48MPG), has a manual transmission and drives like a car (not a golf cart). There are no screens (aside from the 1"x2" LCD clock and Odometer) and my speedometer and odometer have needles (so you can see how fast you're going out of your peripheral vision (is the needle straight up? I'm good)).
I agree, there are some safety features that should be in all cars... Seat belts, and airbags are important. But back up cameras? 292 fatalities a year. This is insignificant, seeing as how there are about 40,000 automobile fatalities per year, 0.7%? More people likely die from just being poor drivers. Why doesn't the government require better driver education before issuing licenses? Why don't we require retesting at certain ages? (Do you really think that all of the people out there driving in their late 80s drive just as well as they did when they were 19?) I'm betting fixing these problems would save a lot more lives than making us have more crap in our car.
If these cameras are mandatory, will they be included in states "safety" inspections? Will I be required to fix it if it breaks? If I swap out the stereo in my car for a different one, will I be required to reattach the camera?
> Why? Do rear-view window brakelights alert the drivers behind you better...
Yes, they do. In particular, the so-called "cyclops" does not come on with the headlights, only with the brakes, with the result that "car ahead has lights on" and "car ahead is braking" give different configurations of lights, not just different brightnesses. The change in configuration is more attention-grabbing than just brightening an already-existing light configuration.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Why not simply mandate minimum rear visibility standards? Style has shrunk rear and side windows in many new cars. Sit in a car from the 90's or earlier and there is a huge improvement in rear visibility.
What I want is radar or sonar with a HUD on my windshield that shows me a 2D representation of everything around me relative to my location. If there's a kid behind the car, it would show up as a blob behind the vehicle. If there's a car in your blind spot, it would show up as a blob off the back corner of your car. And so on. Such a system, unlike a camera, would make normal driving safer instead of just focusing on a single (and relatively rare) aspect of driving. The only hard part is deciding what is ground clutter and what is something important.
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It is silly to compare the two. For one is the scope, how much does adding a few lights cost? Not much at all. What does adding in cameras, adding in LCD screens, adding in extra hardware to process it, etc. cost? A shitload more money. Secondly, you seem to have made the incorrect assumption that somehow car manufacturers don't add safety features when pressured by consumers. They do. All extra government regulation does it add in big bucks for a handful of "approved" suppliers while eliminating the competition in most cases.
And as for the "bang for your buck" this is a pretty insignificant issue. Yes, 292 people lost per year to these things is tragic but it doesn't require massive costs. As for pedestrians, simply get away from cars that are backing up. It isn't that hard to see that a car is moving backwards and then move outside of its path. And what all does it add? We can't say that 292 people weren't seen by the driver had the driver been fully aware and the pedestrians using some basic common sense so we can't even eliminate that statistic. It is more government regulation with little to no true upside, will result in people relying on cameras or alarms rather than actually paying attention all the while we lose freedoms and money out of our pockets in both initial and maintenance costs, not to mention the potential for abuse.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So ... every day you see proof that the government isn't interested in banning old cars that do not meet the current standards for new cars? And yet you reject the evidence of your own eyes in favour of your ideological belief that the government is "out of control"?
No wonder American politics is so messed up, if this is representative of the thought processes of the average voter.
Maybe I'm getting old too, but it seems like oncoming headlights have gotten way too bright when I'm driving.
In addition, I've noticed that some newer HID headlights seem to be more focused, which can make a car behind you going over speed bumps / potholes appear to be flashing its brights at you (with a more diffuse beam, this isn't an issue). This can certainly be distracting, especially driving an old car (when someone could very well be flashing their lights at you to let you know you've lost your running lights / your engine's billowing smoke / etc.).
There's a core concept in decision making, called cost/benefit analysis, that our modern day society has completely forgotten. I mean this very seriously: Once you move from cost/benefit analysis decision making to Precautionary Principle decision making, you are officially insane, because you believe things that are contradictory. This applies (especially) to societies - if you refuse to make a decision because it has any con at all, you will be left with the status quo. This means that the Sierra Club and other Green groups, who oppose pretty much everything everywhere nowadays, are responsible for us being stuck with gas cars, coal burning power plants, and the ongoing destruction of our nation's food supply.
Some examples:
1) 10 kinda-sorta-endangered (threatened) desert tortoises are found near a new, environmentally happy C02-less solar plant in the Mojave. You might call it HELIOS-1 because you've played Fallout New Vegas, but this is a true story (it's actually in Ivanpah, which is a bit south of the HELIOS-1 plant in the game.) The company offered to relocate the tortoises at a cost of $100M. $10M per bloody tortoise. The Sierra Club and Senator Feinstein shut it down. Any downside whatsoever, even if the Pro column in the Green playbook is much bigger than the Con column, causes them to file lawsuits to shut it down.
2) See any number of examples of Green groups shutting down nuclear power plants or stopping them from being built. The really amusing/frustrating irony is that they then say that nuclear isn't a viable option because they continually encounter delays and cost overruns due to, well, their own lawsuits. Even though the Pro side is very good on nuclear from a Green perspective, they still block it because they are too stupid to know the difference between Chernobyl-style positve feedback plants and modern negative feedback plants. Bonus points for stupidity: a Green group that chained themselves to a fence of a local nuclear plant to protest the CO2 emissions it was emitting.
3) They're extending an interstate in North Carolina. 10 river snails on the Endangered Species List migrate up a branch of the river from their homeland downstream. The Endangered Species Act is our modern insanity codified into law - it doesn't matter how the Pro and Con balance works out, the new snail habitat must be protected. Even though rerouting the interstate will cost billions, add 10 minutes to every person's commute, and will cause untold extra car emissions to go into the atmosphere, it doesn't matter. We don't do cost/benefit analyses any more. They're going to reroute the interstate.
4) A buddy of mine (PhD economics from the University of California) got a job working for Fanny Mae over the summer. He started doing a cost benefit analysis of the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act and similar policies on our housing market, and on the economy in general. The first thing that he found was that nobody had done this analysis before. In Fannie Mae, Fortune 100 company whose entire business is based on these sorts of things. Conclusion number 2, it was possible to codify the costs for each of the lowerings of housing standards congress (i.e. Barney Frank) mandated to Fannie Mae. They kept pushing standards lower until the whole system collapsed. Conclusion number 3: nobody was ever able to quantify the upside of home ownership. Why is it important for people to own homes instead of renting, if all else is held the same. What kind of dollar value can be assigned to owning instead of renting? The whole system was based on a nebulous upside, subsidized by the American taxpayer, and nobody could say why, precisely.
Anyhow, going back to
I'm sorry, WHAT? Do you have some sort of visual impairment that prevents you from seeing the whole car in front of you? I always see the tail lights (on both sides) when driving behind another car - how do you NOT?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I'd like them to focus on less obvious deaths. I bet you could spend a couple hundred grand in factories and save hundreds of lives (or 1000s of additional healthy years).
There are cheaper ways to save lives. $20 * 8,000,000(cars sold per year) to save 300 * 50%? lives isn't exactly the best we can do. It puts the value of a saved human life at 1 million USD. Guarantee it can be done more cheaply. If saving lives were honestly the only factor then they'd have done a study on 'how to save lives cheaply' rather than one about cars. I bet subsidizing condoms would save more lives. I bet there are a million things that could be done for 1/1000th the cost.
It is probably because he is tailgating.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
How much does it cost to add seat belts to a car design today? Essentially zero, because everyone designs for them from the start and the cost of the material is negligible compared to the car. The same will be true of the backup cameras. The cost of the silicon will go towards zero in production. It's just a matter of setting a standard so that everyone does it and people can come to expect it.
Did you know that in 2012 all new cars are going to be required to include electronic stability control? (The horror!) What does that cost? Well, at this point it's basically some software... which probably makes it more expensive than the hardware due to patents, etc. But at some point that issue will go away and it will cost about zero to add to a car.
Pat
Home Theater in the dash is illegal. Video viewable from the drivers seat is illegal.
Rear view camera would probably be enabled only when you back up. That is how mine works anyway. The rest of the time, the display functions as my radio controls and/or my GPS. And the GPS controls are also not usable while driving. There is an override, so a passenger can use it, but the key sequence of the override is so complicated only a passenger could possibly enter it correctly.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
No offense, but someone who doesn't even know how to turn their high-beams on probably isn't qualified to be posting about headlight performance. There are a lot of places that aren't dense urban centers lit up like the Las Vegas strip. I'm not just talking about the middle of nowhere, there are a lot of very populated places that don't have streetlights. For example, there's a highway about half a mile from my house that has no lighting. There's roads right outside my house with very poor lighting,. In addition, I know of a lot of mountain roads with exactly zero lights.
You apparently live somewhere where there's enough light to make you think it's daytime 24/7. If you find it scary to drive at night without high-beams then please stop driving at night, you aren't qualified. That said, turning your high beams on is an incredibly simple matter. It varies from car to car but it's always one of 3 things. Push the stick that controls the lights forward. Pull the stick that controls the lights back. Turn on a switch next to the steering column. (If your car is incredibly old then you might have a foot switch to turn them on, but if this were the case then you'd already know about it)
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Why 2D? Make it 3D. And then project it to real size. That way when you sit in your car you can look around and it would feel as if you sit in your car.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
> If you find it scary to drive at night without high-beams then please stop driving at night, you aren't qualified. ...and that really is kind of offensive. I'm perfectly qualified to drive at night, thank you very much. Although driving at night on roads where there are no streetlights is kind of dangerous, and really no one should be doing it if it can be helped. Btw the road I'm talking about had "exactly zero lights".
That may offend you, but he's right. You're not qualified to drive at night. If you think it's scary, and can't turn on your high beams without checking your car manual, then you shouldn't be doing it. It doesn't matter how qualified you _think_ you are. You can't do it safely. End of story.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere with no street lights. I use high beams at night, make sure they're clean and well aligned, and can see quite well with them.
As for the idiot speeding on the wrong side of the road to avoid the cops....this can happen any time of day, in any location, urban or otherwise. Not exactly a night-only problem.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
What kind of little puffy-cloud world do you live in? Some of us have to drive routinely on interstates at night, and actually, I love it. It's not as busy, the roads are generally well lit, and are open enough to where you don't have to worry about suddenly ending up in a ditch or whatever--it's wide and easy to see where it's going. Small back roads can be more challenging, but that's exactly why you need to know how to use your damn headlights. Some of us live in areas where we have to drive on small, unlit back roads every day, and even we generally slow down and use the high-beams. For someone like yourself who apparently only has to go on back roads every few years, it's even more vital that you know how to use the brights, since you aren't as familiar with navigating them. It's not hard--learn it, practice it a few times, and stop operating a vehicle until you learn to use it properly.
Sincerely,
The Other People On The Road
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10