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DoT Proposes Mandating Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communications
schwit1 sends word that the Dept. of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has given notice of a proposal (PDF) for a new car safety standard that would require vehicle-to-vehicle communication equipment in all new passenger cars and light trucks. The NHTSA thinks this will facilitate the development of new safety software for vehicles. They estimate it could prevent over 500,000 crashes (PDF) each year. "Some crash warning V2V applications, like Intersection Movement Assist and Left Turn Assist, rely on V2V-based messages to obtain information to detect and then warn drivers of possible safety risks in situations where other technologies have less capability. ... NHTSA believes that V2V capability will not develop absent regulation, because there would not be any immediate safety benefits for consumers who are early adopters of V2V." The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
I'm already quite good at vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Official Vehicles should have a special V2V tag so we can be warned of firetrucks coming around blind corners and police hiding behind billboards.
Let's trigger all the cars to slam on their brakes with the Gameboy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Soon there will be a mod so you tell the guy who just cut you off, "fuck you, you fucking fuck, right in the fucking fuck-fuck-fuck" at max volume using their cabin speakers. I'll probably hear it a lot.
the day all the traffic laws are repealed.
This will be a great safety boon for motorcyclists. If that inattentive driver's car will let him know I'm coming, then he won't turn directly into my path.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
This will simply open up new attack surfaces on unsuspecting vehicles.
But also sounds like the bridge that connects one of the major avenues of exploitation from the movie Dragon Day ...
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
Is that harm/risk equal or greater than the benefit to automated systems' safety?
> transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
We already had this debate when they mandated installing lights on vehicles, which also transmits the location of a vehicle and raised privacy concerns. In the end, the ability to not crash into invisible cars beat out the privacy concerns, IIRC.
And no government official would every request a kill switch option.
Coming to a cell phone near you next year and in your car just a few years from now. lol
Oh look, Protesters. Let's brick their car with V2V.
I'm sorry. I have ZERO confidence that V2V will not have a back door for abuse by authorities, never mind the hacker/crook people.
It would have to be passive and have an OFF switch.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns" Hardly a secret is it? It's the chuffing big bit of metal about to slam into your vehicle. Look out the windows and there it is.
Cars cannot trust communications coming from other cars. It doesn't matter how many signed certificates and whatever bullshit you throw at the problem, there is no way that a car I'm driving should ever trust any information coming over the airwaves.
I can't text and drive but my car can....
Let's start a pool to guess when the first accident due to a hacked communications system will occur.....
Make sure the police kill switch is implemented without any meaningful security.
This is the wrong way to go about it. The government should not be involved in this at all.
Mandate the standard not the use of the technology. i.e. "IF you are going to implement this safety feature, communication with the other vehicle must happen via RF (or whatever) on X frequency. Pulse Y indicates speed, pulse Z indicates direction..." etc...
Thankfully, we have the most open and technologically-savvy Administration in history. He uses e-mail like, OMG, daily (!!11!) and has, like, the most Twitter-followers of any US President too. Seriously, like, ever!..
Nothing to worry about... Our lives, rights, and freedoms are in good hands. Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And no government official would every request a kill switch option.
Coming to a cell phone near you next year and in your car just a few years from now. lol
According to this, it is already a "feature" of OnStar, just like the LEO ability to SILENTLY turn on the cabin microphone, which was (supposedly) outlawed by a Court decision, NOT because of privacy concerns, of course, (afterall, why should there be an "expectation of privacy" when having a conversation in your car with the windows up and the doors locked?), but because the designers of OnStar were so stupid they couldn't make the system do a manual override by the occupants in an emergency...
A 'warning system' to supplement the drivers' own sense of situational awareness would be fine. However: No 'taking control of the vehicle from the driver' for any reason. Anything that facilitates drivers to drive more safely is good thing. Similarly I'm all for better driver training and better driver testing.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That's not the point at all. It's a chicken or egg problem - it makes no sense for me to spend $ to have V2V in my car if nobody else has it. So, nobody would get it, so there's never a critical mass, so nobody gets it, etc. etc.
Mandating it avoids that problem.
I actually have always thought that vehicles should all have a protocol such that they talk to other vehicles within a certain range - so I'm all for this technology as long as it isn't server based. That is, i'll be pissed if all the cars communicate to some server that is a go-between. It should work as a direct link to whatever the signal range is, and then i have no privacy concerns, as anyone around you already knows that you're there.
Anything, that is "not a bad idea" for a personal vehicle, is also not a bad idea for a person. The argument for mandatory license plates (which we have accepted so long ago, freaks like me objecting appear as, well, freaks), for example, would apply just as convincingly to mandating people not only carry identification at all times, but also keep it visible from distance.
Would you support a law mandating, that people carry personal beacons at all times? Those can be made small enough to make it practical already... In fact, if you aren't careful, your cellphone is already acting as just such a device — should a law prohibit you from turning it off?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What's wrong with hitting the brakes in an unexpected emergency to assess the actual danger, exactly? If the person behind collides with them, they were following too closely for the speed the person behind was going in the first place. That's not the fault of the person who slowed down or stopped their car.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yes. I totally agree. We should get rid of all those things that governments mandated but car companies did not want to make. I suggest we start with your personal seatbelts and your personal airbag.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just info could be acceptable, although unfortunately even that can get horrifyingly exploited, whether used by cops to slam your brakes when going at highway speeds to avoid an illusory incoming truck.
But that won't be how it's used, will it. No, the potential for abuse is so great here that NSA, CIA and police everywhere in the united states are turning their offices into that southpark scene with randy marsh at the end of the "no internet" episode, when he finally sneaks himself some porno, just thinking about how they're going to fuck people up with impunity through this.
I cannot imagine this technology resulting in any sort of good when compared to what will be done TO people through it.
I have frequently wished there was a reliable way to tell somebody "your tail light's out," "your blinker's on," or best of all, "stop tailgating me, you stumpcock."
A "tattle on that vehicle" button would also be nice.
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns. "
For the purposes of reducing accidents and facilitating things like lane changes, there's no reason for the location to be transmitted more broadly than a few hundred metres around the transmitting vehicle, nor for either the transmitting vehicle or receiving vehicles to store that location for more than 10 minutes or so. I'm not too worried about the impact on privacy if that were the case. And I'm expecting car manufacturers to go with the cheapest possible solution which meets regulation, so they certainly have no interest in installing the kind of equipment needed to broadcast location beyond 100m or so, and lost of interest in resisting regulation which goes beyond that.
OnStar is not a mandated feature in all vehicles.
Is this the same DOT that for years defied US legislation mandating backup-cameras becoming standard equipment in vehicles?
In 2008, Congress passed a law (signed by GW Bush) requiring the DOT/NHTSA to put together rules requiring backup-cameras in cars. The law set a deadline of 2011 for the DOT. And 2011 was just a deadline, so they could have implemented the rule in 2009 if they wanted. Instead they put off the setting the rule until just about six months ago in 2014. It won't be finalized until 2015 and won't take effect until 2018.
The reason DOT dragged their feet? The stated reason was that they needed more time to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of prevented deaths caused by cars backing up. Never mind that Congress already decided that matter, and that most of the measurable benefit is not going to come from personal injury, but from property damage averted when you don't dent your car backing out a parking spot because you can see how much space is behind you in the video-monitor. The unstated reason is that mandatory backup cameras would cost PROFIT for Detroit auto manufacturers.
And keep in mind these are lousy backup cameras which are mature, uncontroversial, and easy-to-implement tech. This V2V tech is still under development.
So what's the deal with this rush to mandate V2V? Is this Obama trying to establish legacy?
Similar reasoning can help along the process of mandating all sorts of stuff.
Well, yes, if I want to cut the weight out of my vehicle (and also cut some of the cost), at great risk to my own safety, I should be allowed to do so. Would I? Well, if I'm buying a car for the track, I'll be ripping out the airbags and seatbelts anyway, in favor of a roll cage and a harness, the lot of which actually costs less than 2 airbags; in that instance, yes, please. And let's face it, most people who drive like shit and cause the majority of accidents are the same people who would drop prefer to drop that weight and cost on a street vehicle, as well, making the problem essentially self-solving.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
And 20 year old cars will be using 20 year old encryption, the system will get cracked, and then there will be problems.
The future is autonomous cars that rely on their own data to see what's going on, and that will prevent accidents.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
OnStar is not a mandated feature in all vehicles.
So?
I was simply pointing out what LEO (and OnStar themselves) is ALREADY doing with automatic (not user-controlled) "vehicle communications"..
.. but only in binary.
shocked i tell you that California didn't think to mandate this first! we are slacking.
The difference is that I can choose to buy a vehicle without OnStar. This is a government mandate for all vehicle manufacturers. I no longer have a choice.
Again, you are missing the point.
Sheesh! I only mentioned OnStar specifically, because it is OBVIOUSLY the bellwether for LEO's uses for, and "interest" in, this type of technology in general.
Prediction for 2019 (made in 1999):
"Most roads now have automated driving systems - networks of monitoring and communication devices that allow computer-controlled automobiles to safely navigate"
wikipedia
I see you want to make a left turn. I think you better start spinning donuts on that flying bridge instead, with the engine at full-tilt boogie.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just yesterday, I was driving on I-80 in Reno. There was a lot of traffic backed up (Burning Man) at one exit that I didn't see and had to come to a screeching halt (fortunately stopped in time and they guy behind me was able to swerve into the next lane).
If I had had V2V, I theoretically would have had warning of the problems in time to avoid the panic stop.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Airbags, when first mandated by government ahead of when manufacturers were prepared for roll-out, were in fact quite dangerous. Does your car have an airbag off switch for the front passenger seat, so a child can sit there? It took a while for people to catch on and socially impose a "no kids in the front seat" rule, after many unfortunate incidents involving children. It was an total fuck-up, a perfect example of government do-gooding directly injuring people - children and the elderly in this case. And it was years before the problem was properly addressed with weight-sensors in the seats.
There's a strong market for safety features in cars today. You really don't need ham-handed government applying force for adoption.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People wonder how we'll ever convince Americans to give up ownership and switch to rented, self-driving cars...
We'll do it by:
a) Jacking up insurance rates on people who still want to drive
b) Jacking up the price of vehicles by mandating expensive equipment
In 30 years, you won't be able to afford a car, much less afford to drive it. I'm not making a moral judgement here, I just think it's bound to happen.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
No-one's going to willingly pay for it because it's retarded. Any system that relies on external communication will be spoofed and abused.
Whereas pretty much every auto manufacturer is now offering optional collision avoidance systems based on cameras and/or radar, which are relatively hard to spoof and improving all the time. Clearly no-one needs to mandate broadcast systems which aren't needed and are inherently unsafe.
I'm sure that the intent is to allow vehicles to pass around packets of info about heading and velocity. I immediately thought about proposing adding a packet type to the specification that contained the message: "Get off the road, asshole!".
in retrospect, it is probably for the best that I am not a DoT engineer....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In terms of safety impacts, the agency estimates annually that just two of many possible V2V safety applications, IMA and LTA, would on an annual basis potentially prevent 25,000 to 592,000 crashes, save 49 to 1,083 lives, avoid 11,000 to 270,000 MAIS 1-5 injuries, and reduce 31,000 to 728,000 property-damage-only crashes by the time V2V technology had spread through the entire fleet.
These figures are quite amusing ... how can the range of estimates vary by several orders of magnitude while concurrently expecting anyone to take anything you have to say seriously?
A malicious driver only needs to transmit fictitious messages while driving to cause traffic jams, or even worse cause traffic accidents.
An interesting person may force traffic to part for them like some kind of modern day hacker Moses.
Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.
Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.
Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.
If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.
V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.
New versions of OnStar do not have this limitation, and can spy on you without disabling safety features.
And besides, the Court ruling only affects the 9th Circuit, plus, "Law Enforcement" NEVER disobeyed a Court Order, right?
Every year, about 16 million cars are sold in the US, vs. a fleet of about 240 million. So, the fleet turns over roughly every 15 years.
How about we just implement a system that when a vehicle brakes hard it also send out a low power directional signal (to the rear) that reads "Hard Braking, #1 vehicle, ".
Then every vehicle that receives it replies with "Hard Braking, #2 vehicle, " and every vehicle that receives it replies with "Hard Braking, #3 vehicle, ", etc. Then at some predetermined cutoff point (number dependant on the vehicle's speed) the vehicles stop propagating the message.
The point of the random number is so that your vehicle can ignore multiple receipts of the same braking event while not identifying the vehicle.
That should cover the vast majority if situations that you want your vehicle to warn you about.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
That still gets you rear-ended, which is still a huge pain in the ass.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So much so that court cases were thrown out due to the use of GPS devices installed in cars.
This sounds even more unconstitutional.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A more interesting person would make a video of cars pulsing to a soundtrack, after a successful cascade hack, and upload the vid.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And if drivers always did the right thing, we wouldn't need seat belts.
Only *IF* the person behind was following too closely for their speed in the first place. Generally speaking, rear-end collisions are open-and-shut with insurance companies... and the person behind is ordinarily considered 100% at fault for the accident (the exceptions to this typically require separate and unbiased testimony from quite a few witnesses, or what would work even better is an actual video recording of the incident to show the person in front was at fault), and insurance will fully cover all of the expenses applicable for both vehicle damage restoration and any injury claims.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You can't turn it off even now. The GPS tracking is built into the circuitry and there is no way to diable it. And no, tapping the "please don't track me" option won't work. Its lying.
FYI people died near where I live when OnStar killed a stolen car and it was stopped in the middle of a busy highway and got hit.
Forget the happy horseshit about super-safe robot cars. We don't have those, and they won't work when we do. This is about the ability to track all the vehicles in the world, either by private entities who will backdoor the info to government and political groups, or straight-up security force tracking. Not just here, but all over the world. We are building turnkey police state infrastructure. If you can't grasp this, you might want to contemplate how privileged you are not to ever feel endangered by cops or polical opponents like Scientology or the Moonies. Do not give the monkeys the key to the banana plantation. Once you are in a worldwide prison, there is no escape.
Cars cannot trust communications coming from other cars.
This is an awful idea even without the idea of human malice. With it, it's an Orwellian nightmare mated to a Murphyesque fuckup. Cars which depend on communications from other cars cannot in fact be said to be self-driving. They're part of a hive mind, and if there's sickness in that hive, it's going to affect them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I doubt, that's entirely true. While I'm sure, cell companies keep track of each phone's approximate position (relative to their towers), the phone's battery drains considerably quicker, when the "location service" (an iPhone term) is turned on. If it really were on all the time, there would not have been such a pronounced effect on the batter from starting the "Maps" application or "Uber"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Smoke signals.
Have gnu, will travel.
There you are on a public road plainly displaying a license plate and you have some expectation of privacy! That is just plain nuts. Obviously people in public view are not in any form of private state. A license plate makes an even more public declaration of where you probably are. This nonsense has gotten so off base that people have no clue as to what private really means.
Yes, it would be a good idea to have a law mandating that people carry a personal beacon at all times while they are travelling on foot on the interstate highway system.
Considering half of the road deaths are pedestrians and cyclists, and the deaths are caused by drivers playing with their phones etc, I don't think this is the right way forward towards improving safety.
"Pedestrians are 1.5 times more likely than passenger vehicle occupants to be killed in a car crash on each trip"
Making motor-vehicle safer for the driver has not helped pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
Yeah, because V2V has about 300 m range. Posting my location to people within view range is really a massive "privacy concern".
We complain about patent trolls getting trivial patents for non-inventions by taking something totally normal and adding "with a computer" to it, but sometimes we do the same. Licence-plate reading cameras are a privacy concern because they can enter your location into a global database in near real-time. Telling people electronically what they could see with their own eyes? Hardly a privacy problem. If we were talking about a system to intercept these signals and update some global database, yes - but that is just the license-plate-reading-camera problem with a different technology. The problem in either case is not having a license plate or having V2V, but the people turning local information into global information.
And other than license plates, it's easy to solve it. Your car could automatically generate a new random ID for itself every time it stops for more than a minute, for example. Pseudonymity is quite cute when you understand it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
For your own safety, of course....
V2V doesn't have to be limited to reporting just your own vehicle's data. Each packet could include data known about other nearby vehicles. Why does this matter? Because my car has radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors that detect all sorts of nearby vehicles today, so its packets could include reports on all the nearby vehicles it detects, including your old car.
Additional data on other vehicles helps identify failing systems (or cheats), and can theoretically provide some corroborating information about the nearby traffic. Let's say that one of the paranoid people who have posted above tries to dodge tickets by rigging their V2V to always report they're traveling the speed limit, even when they're exceeding it by 30 km/h (even though it's obvious that reporting your coordinates every 100 milliseconds will reveal your true speed.) But if a couple different cars with radar report "vehicle at X,Y, bearing B, change in bearing -3.000 d/s, velocity 38.00 m/s, acceleration +0.1 m/s/s", then even if the offending car self-reports that it is going at 29.00 m/s the rest of the cars in the area can still respond as if it were traveling at 38.00 m/s.
(It's also interesting to consider that evolution will tend to remove incorrectly reporting cars from the road, as they will be involved in more accidents.)
Note that this doesn't even violate anyone's privacy in order to achieve safety. The packet doesn't have to identify the vehicle, as its location is (or at least should be) unique. That way if my right side ultrasonic blind spot sensor picks up a car that is 2 m away, it can simply report the existence of a vehicle at the computed X,Y.
Finally, how does this benefit you, in your old vehicle that doesn't have a V2V system? Once other cars on the road have V2V, those other cars will control themselves to avoid colliding with you. Every car that automatically steers itself away from harming you is one less chance at an accident you might get in. It won't make much of a difference initially, but as time goes on and more vehicles become equipped, you'll gradually have your risks reduced.
John
You can't say that currently, AFTER the government mandated something, that there is a market for it. Of course there is, people have grown up used to those things. I
The entire point of the original article was that certain things are not demanded by customers until they become widespread. Therefore the government should mandate them.
Airbags may or not have originally been quite dangerous. Without the mandate, they never would have become safe at all, and never would have been deemed necessary. With the mandate, research was done, and modern airbags and now deemed a necessity.
Your argument does make a somewhat reasonable claim that after government mandates do their job, we might be able to remove them. But that is another, entirely different argument.
By your own admittance, these government mandates worked and save many lives. The strong market for safety features exists only after the government mandated them. Before they existed, 1) they were not as effective because not enough testing and research was done, 2) the car companies did not advertise them, 3) people did not know about them. After the rules mandating them, testing and research skyrocketed, the car companies starting pushing them and people learned enough about them to demand car companies put them in.
Your own personal claims prove that you are wrong.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Unfortunately, there are many unintended consequences of your actions. Among other things, people sometimes ride in someone else's cars. Sane people should not be required to double check and insist that the car has a seatbelt, air bags, etc. Not when they are riding with a friend, not when they are renting a car, not when they are getting into a taxi.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So you require seatbelts in commercial vehicles and vehicles carrying passengers. I don't think I've ever been in a taxi that had airbags (in the back, where I was sitting) and some people prefer not having them in the first place.
Having a $16k vehicle totaled after a 10MPH crash that barely cracked the bumper ($500) because the river-front airbag ($1600), driver-side airbag ($1600), passenger-front airbag ($1600), passenger-side airbag ($1600), center console airbag ($1600) -- and now, moving to the back seats, driver-seat-back airbag ($1600), pasenger-seat-back airbag ($1600), rear-driver-side airbag ($1600), and rear-passenger-side airbag ($1600) went off. What should have been an injury-free incident with a $500 repair bill now comes with a $14,900 repair bill, likely with airbag-related injuries. Will they protect me in a more serious accident? Maybe, maybe not.
Attentive driving and separating myself from the pack whenever possible has done a fine job of keeping me safe on the road for the past 15 years, though; proper lane discipline, so assholes who insist on doing 100 on the highway can stay in the left lane where they belong, rather than having to weave through other assholes who have no clue what they're doing on the road (not saying that the 100MPH crowd knows any better, either, making a point about lane discipline) would go a long way toward keeping everyone else safe on the road, as well. Statistics to back this claim? They're out there, google for them; compare the number of freeway deaths in the US to the number in Germany, where the difference is that Germany has higher (or no) speed limits, but the drivers stay the fuck to the right.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The government airbag mandate injured many and killed a few children and elderly. That's not at all unclear. Airbags became safe about the same time the car companies were originally intending to bring them to production. The government did only harm.
But I'm guessing that for you, safety is a smokescreen, that your actual agenda is "more government control is always good", and so my argument that "but it kills children" is irrelevant. It did in fact increase government control, so to you nothing else matters in counting it a victory, yes?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, in that case they'll probably be at-fault, which really isn't much consolation when you have to stop everything you were planning on doing to deal with your damaged-ass car. And if you're seriously injured or killed in the accident, that will further ruin your day. And if you're really unlucky, the other driver will not be carrying insurance. The only time I've ever been in an accident that involved another driver, the other driver wasn't. And yes, it was required by law in that state. And yes, my insurance was pretty good about paying for my damages while they were suing the bejesus out of them. Took a month to put my car back together, and the body shop really didn't do a very good job of it. So in general if you can avoid an accident, it's really better to do so, no matter whose fault it's going to turn out to be.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In the proposed protocol, the Evil bit is always set.
Many more people die in stolen cars that are being driven recklessly, or from police apprehension, than as a result of remote shutoff
In any case, lojack has been killing ignition in stolen cars for years and there hasn't been a big fuss made.
As a resident of said country (and a rider) I believe it's dangerous and will _only_ do it when traffic is stopped and only at low speed.
As someone else pointed out, the vast majority of riders who lane split in moving traffic are on crotch rockets - as are the vast majority of stupid riders(*). Relying on acceleration to get you out of trouble is fine until you run out of road, but it's better to anticipate and avoid trouble in the first place.
(*) I prefer to refer to them as organ donors.
WRT "pulling out" and other "driver didn't see motorcycle" stuff - speaking from a rider's point of view in most cases the rider bears a degree of culpability by loitering in a driver's blind spot, following too closely or failing to "read" driver intention.
There are old riders, bold riders, but not many old, bold riders.
Of course, but I'm not going to go out of my way to try and avoid an accident with a car behind me, since the actualy responsibility for that goes to the driver that is behind me. If I feel I need to stop or slow down to assess an unexpected situation, I will do so, because I have a responsibility to not cause an accident ahead of me with my own vehicle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'