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."

Comments

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[flipper9]

You mean that automakers are allowing the police to stop people's vehicles at any time for any reason, remotely.

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[SydShamino]

This safety feature mostly helps the person being hit, not the one doing the hitting.

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[Jeremi]

i think people should be able to decide for themselves how much safety equipment they want to have

That would be fine if the only people who suffered were the people who made the bad decisions. In this case, however, it's not only the inattentive-and-cheap car owner who suffers, but also whatever (or whomever) he runs into.

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[icebike]

You mean that automakers are allowing the police to stop people's vehicles at any time for any reason, remotely.

Oh come off it.

This technology is already in lots and lots of cars, its being advertised heavily by at least a half dozen car companies, from Subaru all the way up to Mercedes.
When have you ever seen police stop anybody electronically?

The technology has been proven for years in options packages or standard equipment on higher priced cars, and these days on mid priced cars.
I've had it since 2012, and it has never once false alarmed and applied brakes inappropriately. It can detect and warn me of slower traffic AHEAD of the car in front of me, even when the car ahead has not yet realized it is approaching a crash.

I'm embarrassed to admit It has braked the car at least a couple times for me when I was distracted.

Re: Translated

[dunkelfalke]

The thing is, you are assuming that the car that is turning won't be there anymore. This is not given. The car might abort the turn for some reason, it might stall, it might take longer than you expect. Better to slow down.

Re: Translated

[Anonymous Coward]

"figure out that by the time I get there, the car won't be there anymore"

YOU IDIOT!

Please stop driving like this. I bet you also assume that a pedestrian crossing the road a 100 yards ahead of you is going to get out of the way in time?

What happens if the pedestrian trips and stumbles in the road? What if that turning car sees an obstruction to the turn and stops? They are focussing on the road/drive they are turning into and you aren't, so there's every chance you won't see the obstruction.

You MUST treat all obstructions as potential stoppages and slow down accordingly. Yes, on average you'll end up going a little slowly, but it's infinitely safer.

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[michelcolman]

No, when stopping on non-compacted snow, the snow will build up in front of the locked wheels and improve braking. With anti-lock brakes, you roll over the snow so it doesn't build up in front of the wheels and your stopping distance actually increases.

In most other conditions (dry, wet, ice,...) a good ABS system does indeed let you stop quicker. But not in snow.

And many cheaper ABS systems even give you longer stopping distances on dry roads too. Pretty much the only advantage of those is keeping steering control while braking hard.

Re:The first fuse I pull

[FranTaylor]

bullshit, no way I'm letting the car brake for me.

if you have ABS, the car is already deciding when you can brake and when you can't.

if you have an automatic transmission, the "gas" pedal is merely a "suggestion" to the system that actually controls the throttle.

if you are driving on public roadways you have already agreed to follow whatever regulations the government has decided to impose on you

Re: Glad to have it

[cosm]

It should, but what about externalities. People become more reliant on it and could end up paying even less attention rather than pay fucking attention to the car in front of them. Speculation is moot. Show me trials before it becomes federal law or some ilk like that.

Re: How dare they?

[FranTaylor]

And you also have the responsibility of paying for poor decisions. .

How precisely does one bring back the dead? Do you really think that perpetrators are actually capable of restoring the damage they've caused? huh?

Re:Here's an Idea...

[FranTaylor]

Why don't we put some effort into human factors and get people to put their hands on the wheel and pay attention?

Humans are proven to be terrible drivers, they kill tens of thousands of people every year. "Human factors" are not going to get rid of the screaming child in the back seat and they are not going to solve the argument you are having with your spouse. Humans can and will get distracted and kill people. It happens every day. Rearraging the controls on the dashboard is not going to solve any of these problems.

Tesla is not a Big Three company

[RobinEggs]

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.

Re: Glad to have it

[ShanghaiBill]

the whole point here is that humans are really poor drivers

I think you misspelt "Americans" there.

Nope. Americans are not particularly bad drivers. Here is a list of traffic fatalities by country, both per capita, and by distance driven. Americans are no where near the bottom.

Re: Glad to have it

[Kjella]

The same argument has been made about ABS, traction control, electronic stability programs and similar changes that mitigate or hide the forces at work until they overwhelm the system or that take away part of the work like cruise control and so on. At least so far the conclusion has been that even though people push the limits, overall it does good. Particularly if they limit the scope to hard/emergency braking or even just damage reduction, so you normally want to brake yourself. I mean, clearly if you do the math of distance and speed you at some point cross the threshold where a crash is inevitable, but there's still time to turn a high-speed impact into a low-speed impact. And that matters a lot, it's still an accident but they're not all equal.