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10 Major Automakers Agree To Include Automatic Emergency Braking On New Vehicles
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Transportation, and Institute for Highway Safety announced today a landmark agreement from 10 of the world's biggest automakers to include automatic emergency braking on all new vehicles as a standard safety feature. The car manufacturers are: Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo. "Automatic emergency braking includes a range of systems designed to address the large number of crashes, especially rear-end crashes, in which drivers do not apply the brakes or fail to apply sufficient braking power to avoid or mitigate a crash. AEB systems use on-vehicle sensors such as radar, cameras or lasers to detect an imminent crash, warn the driver and, if the driver does not take sufficient action, engage the brakes."
You mean that automakers are allowing the police to stop people's vehicles at any time for any reason, remotely.
bullshit, no way I'm letting the car brake for me.
I am terrified of poor implementations of things like this in conditions of fog, or even worse, heavy snow. You _can_ have intelligent filters to deal with these things, but it becomes extremely fuzzy when the snow is very thick with big fat poofy snowflakes.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
If I want to use my phone and send elaborate txt messages to my friends and family, then that is my right, and I'll be fuggin DAMNED if some muhfuggin ENGINEER is going to take that right away from me. I pay for car insurance for a muhfuggin REASON. All you dumb fuggin white people think you know what is best for us, but I say this to you: fug you.
That's right. Fug you in your fuggin ass, you muhfuggers.
Fuggin faggots.
#blacklivesmatter
I bought a new car this year, and it has it. I'm very glad to have it, even though it has triggered once or twice when there was nothing there due to a sensor glitch. The reason I have a new car is that I failed to brake in time to avoid an accident.
Yes, the technology isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than not having it.
As we get more of these features, it should result in fewer accidents and lower insurance rates.
My last 2 accidents came from being rear ended by jackoff distracted drivers. One of them was quite serious.
Robbing cars if all you have to do is stand in front of them :-)
Technological solutions to social problems never work.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Why isn't Honda on the list? Very popular brand of Civic and Accords...
I like that all of the Big Three American automakers are included: Ford, GM, and Tesla.
The biggest names missing are Fiat/Chrysler, Honda, Hyundai, and Kia. I'm not surprised that the Koreans aren't included, as they are going for the bottom of the market where there's not as much padding for added costs.
Why don't we put some effort into human factors and get people to put their hands on the wheel and pay attention?
If you're going to get fancy and throw technology at the problem, how about spending some effort to force people to shut their fucking cell phones off while driving? There has to be a way that you can brick cell phones while it is in the vehicle. Get some people on this, find a way. I see idiots fumbling on their phone and drifting off the highway or across lanes of traffic all the time. Let's fix this, OK?
Automating car response like braking is not going to work well on a snowy day with slick roads. Might be dandy in sunny, dry California, but the rest of the world actually has weather and precipitation. Having cars slamming on the brakes randomly because the computer mistook a drift of snowflakes or blowing leaves for a car bumper is going to cause more accidents, not less.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
...so when someone hacks into my vehicles electronic systems, it will be even easier to call the vehicle to a stop by calling this function?
I don't want to spill my beverage or hurt my dog when my car decides I need to brake more quickly than I actually need to, nor do I want to be rear ended when I see a clown coming in hot behind me and needing another foot to stop while I've got 3 feet in front of me.
And what about when I WANT to hit something? Will this shit prevent me from pulling my car ALL the way into the garage? Will it prevent my from driving through light brush? I'll accept these if you can guarantee that it will be enabled permanently on police vehicles so the cops can't ram people in high speed pursuits.
Most of all, I don't want to fucking pay for this shit. And no, insurance premiums won't go down if you have it, they'll simply go up if you don't at some point. Once most cars have it, they'll go up again every time your car reports that it activated that "feature".
I'm all in favor of getting retards off the roads, but we should be doing it by licensing cyclists (the most dangerous things on the road) and registering their bikes. After that we can get to work on more stringent licensing requirements, including immediate revocation pending retesting for anyone at fault in a collision, driving under the influence, or over the age of 65.
And can we PLEASE get some sanity back with regards speed limits (i.e., throw them out)? There was NOTHING wrong when we had no speed limits and relied on cops to patrol for people who drove recklessly. Shitheads got punished, everyone else enjoyed the open road. Driving 80 MPH in the left lane is much safer than driving 65 and weaving in and out of traffic to get a few car lanes ahead, yet with current speed limits the person going 80 in a straight line is guilty of "felony speeding" in my state while the person dangerously assholeing their way through traffic gets a stern talking to, at best.
Oh, speeding tickets generate revenue? How about you get that revenue from your own fucking ass?
And another thing, who the FUCK thought it was a good idea to put roundabouts everywhere? I'm not going to call it a fucking "traffic circle" because it's a fucking roundabout. They made sense in Ye Olde' England when Lord Grantham was being driven around by his chauffeur and there were no controlled intersections - they forced you to consider traffic from the right and left (remember, those ninnies do everything backward) because you couldn't barrel straight through. But a controlled intersection is much safer, faster (if setup properly and not just a dumbass 4-way stop or poorly-timed light) AND you don't have the problem of not being able to fucking see because the city thinks they need to put a fucking arboretum on every patch of cement.
But no - the chauffeur fucked the Lord's daughter and knocker her up and she died so he left England and brought that shit over to the US. We fought a fucking war over this shit and won, and almost 250 years later we're just regressing to the point of "Chip, chip, cheerio I can't wait for King William to tax me for owning a TV!"?
WAKE UP!
Can't wait for someone to come up with a device that projects a vehicle signature out the side so it will slow down the car beside me so I can cut in line! Bwwwwaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is the low speed limits. They make driving so boring. If you could actually drive as fast as conditions allow I would spend time enjoying the drive and paying attention not dozing off because someone decided 45 mph is the safe speed.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The so-called Big Three automakers in America are Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Tesla has yet to ship even 100,000 vehicles in one year; the rest each have over a dozen models that ship that many, several that ship well over a million, and there's a few models between them that ship into the tens of millions.
Sorry to be so pedantic and punchy in correcting this, but I think it's a little annoying - bordering on delusional - how often slashdot people, reddit people, etc. give Tesla and SpaceX credit for things far, far beyond what they've actually accomplished so far. Those companies have impressive potential, but they're **far** from replacing Chrysler, NASA, Lockheed, or any other the other entities in their markets.
too expensive for the average person is succeeding. Between airbags, ABS, 5 MPH bumpers, pedestrian protection, ODBII, etc. cars are just too damn expensive now.
they guy with the older car behind you from rear ending you instead? Or are these systems going to optimize between the risk of crashing into the guy in front of you vs the risk it will stop too quickly for the guy behind you to respond (yeah I know we all leave sufficient space between us and the car in front to brake)?
They should take your license away for life.
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred fourteen years ago that sparked two wars and millions dead or homeless and you people are discussing useless details of automotive safety. My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of nearly 3,000 dead people could give a good god damn about the advent of LAN parties, your childish Lego models, your nerf toys and lack of a "fun" workplace, your DOTA/Diablo/MGS5 addiction, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life".
Source from CDC (as of 2011).
Source from IIHS (as of 2013).
This will save lives. Even with excellent drivers behind the wheel.
Maryland just abolished the parallel parking requirement, because of the growing moron population. Automated safety systems can come none too soon.
http://heavy.com/news/2013/06/michael-hastings-death-conspiracy-wikileaks-cia-fbi/
... announced today a landmark agreement from 10 of the world's biggest automakers ...
They used to call such agreements "illegal collusion" or "a trust" under anti-trust law.
"Voluntarily" adding an expensive new system as "standard" (i.e. you can't not buy it and still get the car), in unison across a broad swath of the market, keeps the consumers from making their own tradeoff of cost vs. functionality and voting with their dollars.
I guess it's not supposed to be illegal if the government is pressuring them to do it. B-b
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Out of all of the accidents I have been involved in over almost 30 years of driving, technology like ABS, automatic emergency braking and stability control would have prevented just about all of them. In most cases it was the other driver's fault (the one case it was my fault I was young and had a parent screaming at me when traffic suddenly stopped (AEB would have prevented that one if both my car and the one behind me had it). I've been rear-ended twice (both times totaling the car) because I had to stop suddenly and the person behind me wasn't so fast. The only one that wouldn't have been prevented was when an Asian driver who spoke little English panicked when trying to change lanes and side-swiped a bunch of cars (I was stopped in an exit lane). Even then, it's possible that stability control might have helped, though most of this I attribute to a very inexperienced driver. These systems work because they can react far faster than a human can or doing things that are just about impossible to do otherwise (i.e. stability control controlling each wheel's braking independently, ABS managing each wheel's brake independently for maximum stopping power while maintaining control). A properly designed AEB system can recognize and respond to an emergency stopping situation far faster than a human can.
I'm mixed on traction control. My Toyota Prius had it and it sucked. I'd go over a pothole and lose most of my power. On my Tesla it's not very noticeable other than the blinking indicator when it kicks in. Since the Tesla responds instantly with TC (about 1000 times per second according to Tesla) it's able to apply maximum power to the wheels without slipping, much like how ABS works for braking My Prius, on the other hand, behaved as if it suddenly lost most of it's puny power for about a second.
I've never owned a car with AEB though I'm pretty sure my next one will have it. Hopefully I'll never have to use it. Given how fast technology is moving forward, my next car will likely also have self-driving capability since at this point when I eventually replace my car it will likely be another Tesla.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
so, Big truck is coming from behind, My only way to escape is to crash to a wall. but no, I can't. Because I'm a retard and my car knows better.
awesome.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
My current car (lexus rc350) has this feature. Sure, it sometimes wants to brake when it's not necessary, but you override it with your input effortlessly. It's tried to break 4 times in 3K miles since I got it. One of those times it was because someone decided to stop on a highway in NYC by pulling onto "shoulder" that was about 3 ft wide. I did not realize the guy was actually going to stop on a highway. I probably would not have hit him anyway, but the car beeping and braking was a positive and reduced the likelihood of a stupid accident. The other 3 were false positives that caused no risk and not much annoyance. 1 positive hit to 3 false positives works for me. I haven't had even a mild fender bender in a dozen years. I will get this feature in my future cars if possible. I will get this feature in my wife's future vehicles if possible. And I certainly would be happy if whoever is behind me and my family has this feature.
Have they considered there may be a reason I'd like to intentionally hit an obstacle. Maybe I want to push a stalled car off railroad tracks. Maybe I don't want my road rage options to be so limited.
This will enable drivers to go faster and to drive more reckless, since they know their car will automatically break if the driver makes a mistake.
The string "break" is in eighteen different posts. No one is advocating for a system that breaks things. It's sad that /. used to be a tech site, but now it is mostly reactionary crap. No one is talking about adding a system to cars to break anything.
Normally I would applaud such innovative technology being adopted but right now the blackhats seem to be winning. The era of gansta engineering is holding us all back from a better future.
...a technology that makes carjacking and attacking those in cars easier! All you have to do is pull in front of them, and their car stops for you!!
Ah, is this one of those "unintended consequences....?"
Oh yeah, this will be great on taxicabs. Won't cause any wrecks at all...
Yes, and I will enjoy robot cars. Yet when I drive I am aware that it is only my competence that prevents me from dying or killing someone else. And, yes, every driver with enough miles under his belt has had occasional blind luck that saved him from doing either one of those. What bothers me is the general loss of physical competence in the population. People just don't know at a gut level how the physical world works. Drivers get some training in it and robot cars will take that away. Most people could not bring down a tree safely. Most people don't even know how protect themselves when they fall. I said I like the idea of robot cars, but the only way people learn about physical reality is through risk, injury, and possible death. An argument can always be made that an activity that encompasses these three things should be modified or banned. Is this good? John
These idiot car manufacturers are quickly taking a path where the car's computers are making the decisions instead of the drivers, yet the drivers will be held legally liable for the cars' performance.
In the near future, the computers are in control and the pilots make suggestions which the computers are free to ignore. This is Airbus' major problem: the software don't trust the humans in the seats, but they completely trust the computer hardware and the vehicles' sensors. It doesn't matter one lick if the pitot-static system is frozen, clogged, broken off, or just plain isn't working. Whatever data the software gets, it trusts. Air France 447, anyone? Yes, the 447 crash resulted from the combination of pilot error and the Airbus problem, but my point is still valid.
Leaky angle of attack sensors letting in water which then freezes in flight and jams the sensor so it doesn't work? The software doesn't care about that. "The sensor says we're pointing straight towards the ground, so I'm pushing the nose straight up. (pause) What? What about the airspeed? (crash)" XL Airways Germany 888T, anyone?
So now we're going to put this government-grade bureaucratic stupidity in cars?! How many people are going to get killed because a bird flew in front of your car close enough or slowly enough to trigger an emergency stop? The car slams on its brakes, thinking it's avoiding a rear end collision, when in reality it's creating one. Doesn't anyone realize how dangerous it is to spontaneously apply maximum braking power on a crowded freeway? This is precisely how hundred car pileups happen. How many people will die because some teenager cuts them off, and that triggers an emergency stop on the freeway?
The real problem is legal liability. The drivers of these cars will be held legally liable for their cars' behaviors, even though those actions were uncomanded. Who does the victims sue? Who gets the traffic ticket? I can tell you right now the cops will never believe someone with a big dent in the back of her car who claims she never hit the brake pedal.
We cannot do this, people. The chain of responsibility must be clear. Every vehicle must have a captain, someone who is held responsible for the behavior of the vehicle. It doesn't matter if the vehicle is an ocean liner, passenger jet, school bus, or privately owned vehicle. Someone must be responsible. This is why driver-less cars will never happen.
And finally I must reiterate what everyone with a computer science degree already knows: WE CANNOT TRUST OUR LIVES TO COMPUTERS! We can use them to help us out, but they cannot be left in charge of life or death decisions, especially if they're running proprietary software.
Finally so glad this is happening, they had this exact thing in Children of Men and I knew it would only be a matter of time before they made it
First thought, I can fly up at maximum rate to a toll booth line, or line of traffic at a red traffic light, and the car will stop me without collision in dry conditions? That'll be TERRIFYING to the car in line. That'll mean MORE accidents for those accustomed to such systems in the wet or snow.
(It's like antilock brakes, they increase the stopping distance for those who properly apply brakes, but reduce it for those that don't, but nowadays everyone has to adapt to a different technique that is a greater stopping distance.)
Second thought, I can push a button to keep the guy next to me from going anywhere because his brakes are now activated? I can get the guy on the highway who is a jerk to suddenly be stopped by using an app on my phone? The hacking potential is awesome!
Third thought, now if you drive over the speed limit, your car will brake wherever people decide you shouldn't be going faster than some amount, regardless of reasons for doing so, or your brakes will be worn down and overheated. Great.
Rush's "Red Barchetta" song is no longer the future, it's hear.
PS: Just like it has come time to stop updating Windows to prevent MS from installing malware via updates, it might be time to stop buying new cars.
Ralph Nader spearheaded auto safety reform and I'm truly curious what his position is on this.
I hope there will be a switch to turn off this feature permanently. I for one enjoy the process of driving a car myself and being in control. I don't need nannies telling me how to maintain speed, stay in lane or when to brake.
Why a car carrying one old man needs 500 horsepowers and a speed of 300 km/h in the first place? This is an aviation speed already.
Soo on a bank job all i gotta do to evade police is have a RF emitter of appropriate frequency fire off a blast to glitch all the cars behind me into a convenient road block. nice!
Mod the parent up - the grandparent is frankly delusional in ranking Tesla among the "Big Three". A quick Google search shows there's over three dozen dealer groups who sell more cars per year than Tesla has built in the last decade. (The largest dealer group alone sold 318,000 cars in 2014 - versus 78,000 Model S sedans over the last three years.)
This is going after the wrong problem. The real problem is bad drivers and you really have to think at some point a government will outlaw humans from driving. Its really going that direction and we might as well do that because otherwise we will outlaw vehicles because we can't stop bad drivers. Or maybe outlaw alcohol because we can't stop drunk drivers. Trouble is we allow bad drivers to rack up a lot of potential disaster before doing anything significant to them. How about creating a wrist band that disables a vehicle from starting if they are in the drivers seat? This would help prevent the DUI accidents, the same could be done for habitual offenders of traffic violations. The driver who cant parallel park is also probably not a very good driver in general. They probably make other mistakes. We need to focus on better training and re training especially as our highways will remain crowded and controlled mostly by humans not machines.
Three short blasts of the horn when its doing this...
Gets everyone around you alerted to the fact your car thinks an accident is likely.
I drive cars that are 15 to 20 years old. Mainly because I'm cheap and poor. They have issues with components failing every now and then, so farm mostly mechanical. I'm yet to have car with ABS or ESC. I dread the day when these cars with fancy electronics become old enough for me to drive and all the sensors start failing and causing emergency braking etc. in the middle of a highway.
> who is going to answer for accidents that happen when emergency break activate by accident?
Easy. The system is designed in such a way that it doesn't prevent any accident, per se. It only activates when collision is already unavoidable according to the on-board computer's calculations and then tries its best to turn the impending wrecking crash into a minimal speed fender-bender. The method was concocted expressly to avoid any legal problems due to the auto-braking logic causing accidents. The downside is that pedestrians and velocipede riders can be badly hurt in what appears to be a minimal speed contact from automobiles's point of view.
Automatic emergency braking includes a range of systems designed to address the large number of crashes, especially rear-end crashes, in which drivers do not apply the brakes or fail to apply sufficient braking power to avoid or mitigate a crash.
From my experience on german highways most dangerous situations arise because drivers don't keep enough distance between vehicles. Emergency brakes will certainly help with that, but what's really needed is proper training of drivers, and more careful driving.
Joey checking his facebook and driving so close to me at 80 that I can't see his headlights - even when he could pass me - needs reined in.
If people feel they need to ride my backside that hard, they should at least buy me dinner and a movie first.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's a song. You can't see, smell, feel or taste it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
next should be a system that ignores the input from the steering wheel if the direction turned to is not 'free'. there are already systems that warn you that you can't change lanes, so should be easy to do, in modern cars the steering wheel is not directly connected to the wheels anyway.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It's a shame people can't identify a joke without a smiley face.
One thing to point out is that the same hardware that supports emergency braking is also what is used for adaptive (or "traffic aware") cruise control. I find this to be an incredibly useful feature. It takes most of the stress out of traffic jams. And if everyone had it (and chose to use it), it would eliminate many traffic jams.
It even works in city traffic. With cruise control on, if a car in front of me stops for a red light, my car automatically stops behind it. All I do is steer. It works really well.
And all those carjackers refrain from this now, because they know that human drivers will just plow into them instead of hitting the brakes. But as soon as they know that they won't cause an accident, all those millions of carjackers will come out of the woodwork, and the average driver will get carjacked several times over the course of their lifetime instead of getting rear-ended several times.
My, you're stupid.
Nissan is going to have a definite price advantage by not making auto-stop standard.
Traffic deaths are a leading cause of death for the young. If this can help reduce it then it be a good thing. But as part of the system there should be a black box recording since it will take a while to optimize it and the black box can provide important data.
It's a shame that idiots don't know how to use emoticons then blame other people for their own fuckups.
Speaking as someone who lives in WI, USA and, until recently, drove a car _without_ antilock brakes, you're nuts if you think that ABS is doing more harm than good. It takes very little to lock non-antilock brakes on a sowy road. ABS aren't part of some conspiracy. They're life savers. (FWIW I speak as an defacto American automotive Luddite with my manual transmission.)
The driving we're talking about is done on public roads, so the public (and by extension the government) are entitled to require safety devices that reduce the risks to others on public roads. There is no "right" to drive on public roads without working brakes, lights, etc. The only slippery slopes here are the ones you'll spin out your unsafe car on -- and maybe hurt an innocent bystander. (That said, I think you should be allowed to drive without a seatbelt -- as idiotic as the idea is.)
I have a friend who tailgates because he knows that his car will auto brake if he gets too close to the lead car or if the lead car puts on its brakes suddenly.
Only thing is he is betting his, his passengers and the lives of those in the lead car on an electronic device that can fail, or fail to react properly in some situations. I have already heard that some of these systems can be fooled into detecting objects and cause the car to brake suddenly, which would also endanger anyone behind them.
Another factor is that when he drives a car that does not have the auto braking he gets right up on the lead car's bumper because he is in the habit of keeping his foot on the accelerator and not paying attention to the distance to the next car.
I don't ride in any car he is driving if I can avoid it
I have this now, and thought it would be cool, until you factor in that the vehicle doesn't know when the vehicle in front of it is pulling into the next lane, or off into a driveway. This feature came coupled with the Adaptive Cruise Control feature, too, and very often my vehicle slows down harsh to stay behind a vehicle that has just moved out of my lane into a turning lane. The one time that it did slam on the brakes for me, it was to avoid hitting a car that pulled into a convenience store driveway and I was no risk of hitting. Since turning off the auto-brake, I left the alarm on, and it goes off quite frequently for a variety of reasons, only a couple times being a real vehicle in front of me coming at me at a high rate of speed. I like the technology, but I don't think it's anywhere good enough to make it mandatory.
I spent most or my life driving on snow and ice every winter and have been in a lot of tricky situations until about 10 years ago when I moved to CA. My winter driving experience ends with cars built between 1981 to 1996 without all the tricky traction control bullshit modern cars come with. In fact all these cars were manual transmission and thank your lucky stars you got that when youre stuck in snow and ice. Nowadays I would hate to take a modern 2015 model car onto an icy road if my fucking 2009 toyota almost gets me killed everytime it rains here thanks to traction control I cant turn off on that fucking loser vehicle.
... I get caught up in a situation where I HAVE to create a collision to minimize overall damage? Like, I'm caught up in traffic and a truck ignores a red light heading towards me and my only way to survive is to "push" the car ahead of me? Or I'm stuck in the mud and have to drive up a steep slope that emergency break recognizes as an obstacle? Or a riot breaks out and my car becomes a weapon of self defense. Or my garage burns down and I have to break through the door to save my vehicle.
Can emergency breaking be overriden voluntarily?
Do they really warn the driver first? What's the point in that? I thought they just braked if you didn't (computers react faster, so if you miss it, it's still got time to).
I have a 2013 Ford with this system installed. There have been a few times where it helped and a couple times where it nearly scared me to death. First it has helped a few times... Once when I was in slow moving bumper to bumper traffic and was looking at the signs for my exit. The car in front braked suddenly from about 25kms/hr. The blinking lights and beeping got my attention before the car had to apply the brakes. The other time a car in front of me braked hard and the system in this case applied the brakes a second before I could. However there have been a couple experiences where it hasn't been as useful. The system obviously can't read minds so in some common cases it reacts when it shouldn't. When passing on rural roads and you start to accelerate before pulling out the car freaks out and starts the collision warning. This is the same as trying to get to speed to change lanes on the highway when it is moderately busy. You see the break in the traffic on the left and start to speed up to match traffic... The system sees a speed differential and closing with the car ahead and starts the warning. Of course the issues may be due to the terrible turbo lag in the Ford Ecoboost and the fact I needed to really plan ahead to get over into that left lane.
My opinions are completely my own and do not reflect those of any entity I may be associated with - including the voices
It has some other benefits too, like being able to momentarily reduce throttle when the transmission shifts gears; with a cable-driven throttle you need a mechanical linkage to do that, but with TbW you just do it in software.
You use a nice cheap air bypass valve to control air without diddling the throttle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"