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

Translated

[flipper9]

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

Re:Translated

[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.

Re:Translated

[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: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

[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.