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Rearview Car Cameras Likely Mandated By 2014
Hugh Pickens writes "Every year around 17,000 people are injured and over 200 die in backover accidents involving cars, trucks and SUVs. Now the Chicago Tribune reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will send Congress a proposal mandating a rearview camera for all passenger vehicles starting in 2014. 'Adoption of this proposal would significantly reduce fatalities and injuries caused by backover crashes involving children, persons with disabilities, the elderly and other pedestrians,' says NHTSA in its proposal. But the technology won't come cheap. In its study, the NHTSA found that adding a backup camera to a vehicle without an existing visual display screen will probably cost $159 to $203 per vehicle, shrinking to between $58 and $88 for vehicles that already use display screens. Toyota of Albany Sales manager Kelvin Walker says he believes making backup cameras standard on cars made after 2014 is a good idea. 'If you want to get a backup camera with a mirror in it now, it may cost you $700 to $800 as an additional dealer option or you have to purchase a navigation which is about $1,500 to $1,600. So $1,600 compared to $200? You do the math.'"
First I was tempted to make a joke, something connecting rear- view and up-skirt with car analogy. But I won't do that, and instead say that, here in Japan rear view cameras has been fairly standard for a long time. My 11 year old car came with one that recently broke. And it is one of those things you don't miss until you had one and it is gone. We live in a neighborhood with lots of kids running around and playing on the small streets between the houses. And with the rear view camera I could be absolutely sure there were no toddler on a three wheeler behind my car when backing out.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
This, as with all car safety laws, isn't a retrofit law. They aren't saying "You have to go buy this and put it on all cars out there." They are saying (or rather considering saying) "All cars made from now on must include this feature."
Same shit as passive safety systems, window mounted stop lights, seatbelts and so on. You needn't retrofit them on something that didn't have them, manufacturers just have to include them on new vehicles.
Am I the only one who has seen drivers with a rear camera hit something or someone because they looked ONLY at the camera and not at the mirrors or out the windows. I think that when more vehicles come with a standard backup camera, there will be more such incidents, not fewer.
And if the person behind you is shorter than the peak of your trunk? Children can and do put themselves right behind cars, and some of them do get killed because of that.
While there may be a way to avoid this by combining a walk around the car before entering the car, with near-constant use of the mirrors from the moment you get in the car to the moment you finish reversing, the plain fact is that it is not easy to know if someone less than 3 feet tall is right behind you. I suspect most drivers have avoided hitting kids while backing up more out of luck than out of assiduous mirror-usage.
I don't often say it, but: think of the children!
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I've never had cancer. Clearly cancer isn't a risk then.
People back over other people because they aren't looking behind them
This is about sight lines. The problem it's trying to solve is backing up over someone who's too short & too close to be seen over the back of the car even if you *do* look in the mirror.
Technically I could do this, but it's a distraction. If I can't see the side of my own car, then when I look in the mirror I have no frame-of-reference for what I'm looking at. Yes, I guess I can deal with this, but it makes me very unsure while driving. I suspect a great many people are like me in this regard - it's very distracting not to be able to see the side of the car, since you have no real idea what you're looking at or where.
And as you say - since what you see changes based on how you position your head, having a "floating" frame of reference in the mirror means you can never be entirely sure you're see all the important spots.
Even if you do have your mirrors angled right, you'll still have blind spots.
That said - there's nothing wrong with turning your head and looking into those blind spots.
When I was taught to drive, the first thing my instructor did was park up round the corner of my house and showed me how to angle the mirrors. He told me to describe what I could see. Then he told me to look over my right shoulder at the fence behind me. One of the large panels had graffiti on it - which I couldn't see in any of the three mirrors I had. That lesson, out of all them has stuck with me the most.
No - I don't think these cameras will do what they say they will do. I'm not even sure they will save that many of the 17k accidents from occurring because in my experience these accidents are caused by people who aren't paying attention. If they aren't paying attention their mirrors and turning round to look in their blind spots - what makes you think that they will pay attention to a screen on their dash?
Why could these only save 200 people, max? Will they be uninstalled from the car after the first year?
Beyond lives, I see potential in preventing "oopsie, I backed into a parked car"-type accidents, avoid just one of those over the life of the vehicle and the camera more than paid for itself.
I am not a sig.
But if they really want to reduce child deaths they should maybe look at other causes first, since this cause seems to be relatively insignificant compared to other causes. Of course it's easier to raise a "hidden" tax than to use actual tax money to invest in health care instead of say military.
One of our installers ran over and killed his 3 year old just two weeks ago. It would have been nice to have a camera, as th e child darted out of the house as the father was backing out. I know another fellow who killed his daughter that way thirty years ago.
I have a back up camera installed on my RV, along with a fresnel lens, and west coast mirrors. The back up camera is so inexpensive that it seems a crime to not require them. And I'm not even a safety first person
But here we are in 21st century America, where a no brainer like a requirement for backup cameras becomes a political issue like taxes. You've said your part, maybe next up will likely be someone saying that if people can't control their children, then don't make ME pay for it! I think that if we tried to mandate headlights today, someone would be complaining about "Those Damn socialists telling us how we're supposed to outfit our cars!"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have a car with a rear backup sensor. I feel like this is better than a camera, because rather than having to interpret what I see visually on a small screen, I get a simplified display of objects anywhere around the rear of the car along with an audio alarm as things get closer to the bumper.
So I don't feel like mandating cameras is a good idea, when there are other possible technologies that could work as well or better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It isn't the number of people that die that determines whether it is worthwhile, it is the cost/benefit ratio. Fortunately, TFA provides some of the needed information, but it doesn't seem very consistent.
"But regulators say that 95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle." (Compared to the 200/17000 numbers, it looks like they believe the cameras will about halve the number of accidents.)
"...regulators predicted that adding the cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year, or $160 to $200 a vehicle." Wikipedia says 5.5 million vehicles sold in USA in 2009. (I presume this is new sales only.) This would imply about $500 per vehicle to reach $2.7 billion.
"For the 2012 model year, 45 percent of vehicles offer a rearview camera as standard equipment." Is that 45% of vehicles sold, or 45% of models? If 45% of vehicles, then only 55% are going to have extra cost if the cameras are required.
Optimistic cost/benefit ratio: 112 deaths prevented per year, 55% of 5.5 million vehicles at $160 per vehicle = 484 million dollars per year = $4.3 million dollars to save one life and 75 injuries. (75=8374/112)
Pessimistic cost/benefit ratio: 95 deaths prevented per year at a cost of $2.7 billion per year = $28 million to save one life and a bunch of injuries.
(Note that the cost is up-front, but the benefit is spread out over the ~10 year lifetime of the vehicle, which makes the investment a little less attractive, but I'm not trying to account for this.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Why do I have to buy one because you want one? How about if you want one, YOU buy one and leave me the hell alone.
More targets for your angst:
air bags, turn signals, High and low beams, secondary hood latches, center brake lights, brake lights, child restraint seats, removing hood ornaments, crumple zones. tipover fuel line cutoffs, lap seat belts, shoulder belts, reverse lock-outs, rear view mirrors, side lights Gas tank connection isolation. Safety testing, collapsible steering wheels, non-metallic soft dashboards, laminated windshields, tempered rear and side windows, side beams, roll cages, Bumper heights.
Why should you have to pay for any of this stuff? You won't ever need any of it if you aren't in an accident.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
what idiot lets their toddler out in the driveway alone to wave goodbye to someone?
They're called "toddlers" because they know how to "toddle", i.e. walk around by themselves. That means that all it takes is you looking away from them for 5 seconds and they could be behind the Canyonero before you look back.
if the kid is too young to not know that standing behind a backing up car is dangerous, he's too young to be out running around by himself and it's 100% the fault of whoever is supposed to be watching them.
You're right -- but blaming the grieving parents for their 5 seconds of inattention won't bring their dead child back, or save the next one either. In particular if your solution is to demand that parents never make a mistake, ever -- well, that's not a solution at all, it's just a way to make yourself feel better by blaming someone else.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You also run over less bikes that way. If you also kick the tires, look at the lights and (in winter) make sure your plates are clear...lot of hassle avoided simply by a quick loop around the vehicular before entry. Lazy man's circle-check.
Suppose that these cameras could prevent half of all backup deaths.
TFA says that 200 people are killed by backover accidents, so that's saving a hundred lives a year.
TFA also gives a range for the cost of these things. Let's take $200, since we all know government tends to underestimate cost.
Per Wikipedia, 5.5 million cars are sold this year. Multiplying, that means that mandating these cameras on all of them will cost about a billion dollars.
I guarantee you that you can save a lot more than a hundred lives if you spend a billion dollars on any number of other things (diabetes education, suicide prevention and mental illness care, cancer screenings for the poor, medical research in general, take your pick).
The idea of "you should learn to be a better driver" doesn't work in practice. A disturbingly large number of drivers are mentally the equivalent of children who are baffled by a parent playing peek-a-boo, yet most of them are issued drivers licenses anyway. Unless you're going to revamp the driver's license system to be biannually test-based, like pilot's licenses, hoping for them to improve is a fool's hope. So any tool you put in their stupid hands that makes the world a tiny bit safer for the rest of us is a good thing.
It'd be different if they only risked their own lives, but in this case they're only risking the lives of others. Darwin's theory doesn't help us out with this problem.
And not only is that base assumption wrong, but his statement fails utterly to take history into account: 100 years of driving has created a new category of fatality rate bested only by our improvements in weapons and war. "Solved problem for the last 100 years of driving" is simply false. It's really a new problem created by the last 100 years of driving.
John
Cars are not a "right". They have to integrate with the rest of the transportation system on a giant grid of shared roads. If they aren't integrating properly, they should not be permitted to be in the system at all. Safety is just one attribute they need to have.
If it were just your car in just your driveway, fine. Back up around your property all you want, drive around it blindfolded, I don't care. And if this was something that affected only your personal safety, and not that of other people, I wouldn't care either. If you don't want to pay for a car with a driver's side airbag, and would rather die in a head-on collision, I'm all for it. Sayonara, cheapskate. But when you are on the public roads, you damn sure better play well with the other drivers. That means a vehicle that minimizes the risks to the rest of us.
If the cost of these keep the price of cars unaffordably high to 0.001% of people, and makes them take buses instead, I'm good with that. I'd rather have you on a bus than driving a piece of shit that's not safe, and endangering me and my friends with it.
John
What an absurd statement. There are all kinds of flashing lights and gates that raise and lower at railroad crossings. Probably billions are spent on installing and maintaining them every year.
Can you see on the ground directly behind your rear wheel? I thought not. A small child lying down to reach something, or fallen down, is way way below any site line from the drivers seat, no matter if you swivel your head 360 degrees and use all three mirrors. You would have to work the side mirror controls extensively; even then it's very dubious you could cover all approaches; and by the time you'd examined all achievable areas, there would have been plenty of time to miss things in the areas your mirrors weren't pointing.
Unless you are staring at ALL approaches to the blind areas 100% of the time (good luck driving), there is a risk someone or something can enter it without your noticing.
I've been driving for over 30 years, and have yet to back up into someone. Why should I have to pay for your inability to drive???
.. and somehow I end up paying more???
.. pay for it. If a car dealer wants to offer it as standard equipment, go for it.
Of course, this is from a country that now has ordered a private business to give a product away for free. That is, ordered insurance companies to cover birth control without any co-pay. Why no co-pay? Because it's so cheap to begin with ($20-$50/month). When do I get my free drugs for conditions that aren't voluntary, like my glaucoma meds that cost me over $100/month with insurance??? But get some special interest group together (like maybe people who make backup cameras and birth control pills???), and suddenly a government mandate shows up.
I'm really getting tired of the federal government deciding what is best for others, and making me pay for it. Sure, it only costs $200. Now, add on anti-lock brakes, 5mph bumpers (which don't work), and a host of other things that the government has mandated 'for your own good', and the cost of just the government mandates for a car probably easily adds another 3 or 4 thousand dollars to the price. Pretty soon those little lights on mirrors that detect someone in your blind spot will be required. Isn't it interesting that people will buy those things that want them anyway, but for some reason the government decides that people that don't want to pay for them have to have them anyway
Enough already. I'll put up with the pollution stuff, since there is an effect on everyone. But seat belts, safety mirrors, and the rest?? If you want it
But the government requiring backup cameras is just going too far. If you are so stupid that you can't look behind you and make sure where your kids are, buy one. If a parent is so stupid they let their kids run around parking lots or down streets without watching them, maybe evolution does work.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.