We allow companies like Tesla to jeopardize people's lives while the company beta tests "full self driving" technology, but are scared of allowing proven safe technology like adaptive headlights.
This is because the only place for progress in America seemingly is within yet-nonexistent unregulated areas. As soon as something gets regulated in the US it mostly is doomed to lag decades behind the rest of the developed world (because American policymakers apparently are not fond of updating existing laws/rules and the bureaucracy is not flexible enough, often prioritizing the letter of the law). Of course there are exceptions (let alone particular regulations which do much more good than harm) but this seems to be the rule.
Metamizol (Novalgin) is probably one of the biggest examples of this I know. It's a non-NSAID, non-addictive painkiller that was discovered over 100 years ago and banned in the USA in the 60s. It has a similar danger profile to Diclofenac (Voltaren), which is now prescribed like candy. And it is still widely used in Germany and Switzerland, so there is lots of data on 'modern' populations. But since nobody can patent it, there's no motivation to get it reapproved in the US, so everyone get opioids instead.
To be fair, the Netherlands has very tight controls on metamizol as well, and for no clear reason except small-c conservatism, and also a tremendous reluctance for doctors here to give out painkillers.
No, I have never asked for painkillers myself, so it isn't personal! However, if God–forbid I came down with pain issues that were treatable by painkillers, you better believe I would be on the dark markets PDQ.
(My RSI is no fun, but I deal, and it isn't amenable to painkillers except in mind-numbing doses.)
Myself and everyone I knew took metamizol countless times, for every minor sickness (the way people use Tylenol in the US) when I was a child. And side effects were unheard of. So I don't understand why does anybody care to control it more strictly than paracetamol (which is really deadly by the way) or ibuprofen. People should just be taught to consider their unprescribed meds conservatively and avoid taking NSAID like candies.
When addressing the root cause of pain is lobbied against by billion dollar corporation (for instance, Big Food -> inflammation and obesity), the current system is the outcome.
In addition, any GP that might normally have a chance of breaking people out of the disease-food feedback loop is bought out by the healthcare cartels (maybe getting a part of the symptomatic treatment profits).
Here is a link of videos made by a non-profit, with a plethora of references for each video.
> My RSI is no fun, but I deal, and it isn't amenable to painkillers except in mind-numbing doses.
Just a warning - trying to ignore the pain (by bearing it or hiding it with painkillers) is what is likely making your RSI worse. Please try and address the actual cause of the pain, than just taking pain killers.
While it's widely prescribed in Germany, it is actually pretty restricted, too, but there seems to be a lot of off-label use. It's only supposed to be prescribed for strong pain, or for fever only if other medications don't work. There is a risk of agranulocytosis, which is low, but the reason for the restriction in various countries.
Yes, it's not a paracetamol replacement, more like an option as a combination with paracetamol and ibuprofen to treat pain that would otherwise require opioids.
I expected this to be a rant about bureaucracy and it turned out to be a nuanced and rational discussion of the failure of American government. Good stuff.
For a large company, draconian regulations can be to their distinct advantage, as them very size allows them to handle the cost and complexity, while smaller companies cannot - or they can simply cheat, and if caught, swallow penalties that would destroy a small company.
Nah. A lot of it is is protectionism. For example, european cars came with significantly better headlights in the US but they put less light above the road, which didn't meet a standard designed for non-reflective road signs.
The manufacturers tried to get the standard updated, but the US auto industry blocked it, which resulted in car companies having to make US-specific, shittier, headlights - at significant expense - because GM and Ford didn't wanted more competitive advantage.
A big part of the problem is our ongoing and increasing legislative gridlock. When one of the two major political parties has as their stated goal preventing the other from getting anything done, and undoing anything they do (leaving aside their open efforts to replace democracy with autocratic fascism), it's very, very difficult to make any meaningful progress.
The funny thing is I actually can't tell which party you're referring to. All of those accusations can and have been leveled against each party by the other. I think that actually says a lot about the real cause of the legislative gridlock you're referring to: when each side insists the other is a bunch of fascists that they simply can't work with, well... they won't work with them, and this is the result.
The Democratic Party has advanced actual legislative agendas, tried to govern, and supports democracy.
The Republican Party has openly stated their goal to "make Obama a one-term president", frustrate Democratic legislation simply because it is Democratic legislation, and is actively working to subvert democracy and both prevent and overthrow the results of free and fair elections.
If you genuinely can't tell the difference between these things in 2022, either you have been living under a rock, or you are refusing to see what's objectively clear because it upsets your worldview.
> The Republican Party has openly stated their goal to "make Obama a one-term president"
That’s a very trashy hot take. Doing everything possible to demonize and replace a POTUS is American tradition dating to the Peggy Eaton affair and has contributed to a United States civil war. In recent times, Democrats objected to the Trump presidency, elected though he was, and sought to block his every move. In fact, when Trump announced the COVID vaccine initiative, the Democratic Party held congressional hearings decrying it as a dangerous waste.
Yeah, no; you can't "everyone does it, it's always been like this" your way out of this.
There's a big difference between "we need to be able to defeat the other side in order to enact our goals, which are X, Y, and Z" and "our only stated goals are to defeat the other side and hold power". Also see 2020, when the Republican Party released no official platform aside from, effectively "we support Trump, whatever he says goes".
There's a big difference between every (modern*) Democratic president and Trump, who has, since even before he was elected, derided and eroded our democracy, actively promoted racism and white supremacy, and relied upon Big Lies[0] as fundamental parts of his campaign and governance strategy.
* To differentiate from the era prior to the Dixiecrats flipping to the Republican Party, in response to the Democratic Party officially supporting civil rights.
I was just thinking about this. At some point, it seems like companies that want to innovate will just have to break laws and hope public support for a new, better product gets them off the hook somehow. Sounds crazy, but the thought arrived in the context of "how do we do health insurance better?"
I was picturing something like what we've seen with marijuana, where laws change at the state level while DC looks the other way.
You're not wrong, the NHTSA should be more proactive on this stuff.
But to be fair, drunk drivers kill 28 people a day in this country, or about 10k people per year. 3k people die at signalled intersections every year, or around 8ish per day.
While Tesla shouldn't be beta testing their self driving cars on public roads, it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse.
Yes drunk driving is a terrible problem but beta testing software on the open road is not the only option available. It's nothing but irresponsible.
Here's one of many: use sensors and AI in the car to detect a drunk person behind the wheel. This is HN so I'm sure readers could spend 10 seconds and think of numerous ways this could be accomplished and many otherideas about what could be done when a drunk driver is detected.
I also think the NHTSA should have prevented companies like Tesla from behind allowed to put every single control behind a touchscreen. It's extremely dangerous to have to look away for 2 seconds when you're driving. Imagine if (when?) every car in the world adopted this and all drivers are having to look at a screen to turn on windshield wipers.
You may find it interesting the NHTSA is pushing for breathalizers in cars starting in 2026.
Personally I'm more in favor of smart road like technologies where a highway has a mechanical or physical properties to assist self-driving vehicles stay in line with the road. Mostly because a 100% software solution will likely not work, particularly in the midwest and great lakes states during the wintertime.
It need not be expensive either. Magnetic nails embedded in the road would maybe be the cheapest way, and would be easy for both city and rural populations to add, and be detectable with icy and snowy conditions.
Quality steel nails are expensive, roads are very plentiful, and sensors have noise. Also, staying in a lane is not the problem. Teslas and pretty much all other quality brands sold today do it already. The problem is complex behavior like merging and routing around obstacles (like a person changing their tire.)
Cheaper and easier would be surveying and improving road markings. As for snow, well, my Tesla maintains lane position in snow fairly well, and gets better all the time. No magic nails required.
What a surreal read... where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do? Also, 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives.
I am all up for people willingly do beta testing for Tesla they even have to pay for, but it should be clearly marked and explained as so in contracts. The thing is, most folks are not aware of this at all. As things are now, Tesla's and Musk's lies (this and auto drive) cast a pretty bad picture on morals of that company.
Bb8 proposes that we should install magnetic nails in our roads.
Bdamm counters that magnetic nails would help with lane keeping, but that is clearly not the part self driving cars have the most trouble with.
As you astutely observe “ hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't” is the problem. Which magnetic nails in the road would not help even a bit.
> 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives
Yes! And again. Maintaining position is the only thing magnetic nails in the road would help with. Bdamm was not arguing that the car keep lane position therefore it is good. Bdamm was arguing that magnetic nails would not help with the real problems.
> What a surreal read
That is exactly my opinion about your comment. Can you follow two sentences stringed together?
> where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do?
Real sane drivers hit stuff all the time. Miscalculated takeovers ending up in frontal collisions (these can be really REALLY fucking nasty, two 3-ton SUVs @ 100km/h have a lot of potential energy), trucks crashing into traffic jam rear ends and squashing together a dozen cars in front of them, people mistaking stairs to a train station as a car parking ramp (this is a common occurrence here in Munich [1])... the simple thing is, as long as an instance of an object is on a road, one of the instances will eventually get hit by a stupid mistake of someone.
Lane following isn't the hard part of self driving cars. I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it's a minor detail compared to everything else that also needs to work reliably 99.9999% of the time.
Such infrastructure might help make cheaper lane-keep assist as standard options I guess, but at the speeds where it matters for safety, you need significant look-ahead on the trajectory rather than just lateral position error.
I suppose you could go crazy and embed some sort of NFC into the road, so that it can communicate the lane geometry. It could probably even be done cleverly, perhaps by embedding multiple nails and encoding curvature in their spacing, or maybe in the orientation of the magnetic flux itself. All that to avoid some front facing cameras and image processing, though, that can also be used to detect other cars and pedestrians.
Given that road departments often have a hard time keeping paint fresh I have low hopes of nails faring much better. Some roads get their next resurfacing in timespans measuring decades.
I've found the folks forget just how HUGE the USA is. It might be possible to do this in a few core urban areas, but out in the hinterlands where there's nothing but cropland that feeds the core many roads are maintained only when they condition of the road causes serious damage.
Urban areas are not hot either. Roads are pretty consistently underfunded in most of them, and are in disrepair due to heavy usage, frost issues, etc. none of which is very kept up with due to the sheer size of urban road networks.
Depnds on how you count. If you consider every ~5 seconds you could have an accident, and a minor or worse accident happens once every 2,000 to 20,000 hours of driving that’s 99.99993% to 99.999993% reliability.
On the other hand if you start talking per trio then we aren’t even close to that.
Five seconds seems roughly how long it would take for really bad choices to cause an accident. In heavy traffic you can cause an accident by steering into a car in under a second. I am sure someone has had two independent accidents in under a minute.
An hour on the other hand is completely arbitrary, why not a day or a minute?
Any fixed timespan chosen to analyze risk is arbitrary, and you can convert between timespans using probability math. I'd say it's typical to choose the average "mission" length, because that's the most relevant to the purpose. For a self driving car, an hour would make sense. For the first stage of a rocket, 5 minutes. You don't ride in a car appreciating every 5 seconds that you haven't crashed yet, do you? Maybe if it's a taxi ride in Los Angeles!
For a system that isn't "mission" oriented, you would probably think more in terms of mean time between failure.
The average American only drives ~35 miles per day. 1 hour may represent the average time driven per day but it’s much longer than the average trip length. Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad point of comparison but distance seems like the more common metric.
Failure intervals generally use multiple different metrics depending on context. You see statistics for fatalities per year or per passenger mile as both being relevant depending on the context. A life insurance company and a car insurance company would focus on different statistics.
The natural comparison for AI seems to be each individual situation. With City and Highway driving being different enough to be considered separately. In that context ~5 second intervals seem fairly natural because the car who accurately identified everything 0.001 seconds ago is probably going to avoid maying a major mistake for a few seconds. In much the same way a human driver can blink or look at a reed view mirror without significant risk.
Decision events probably correlate better with distance than time.
Like your self driving car shouldn't be meaningfully more reliable if it slows down by 5 mph (because if it is the operating parameters are poorly chosen!).
5MPH makes a dramatic difference in stopping distance so that alone is going to make a car noticeably safer.
However, safety isn’t the only thing people care about or it would be illegal to sell cars with the downright ludicrous top speeds currently available.
You're trying to talk about system reliability as a whole, while the others are talking about reliability of individual decisions or event handling.
It's like the difference between talking about all-causes mortality versus the reliability of a bullet proof vest. Some don't buy that the vest is more reliable when we are not being shot.
A single person might die, go to the hospital, or even go to jail depending on the accident.
But if it's the car's software fault... Who gets blamed? Bear in mind we are trying to make this economically sustainable.
Even assuming one "event" per mile that needs to be handled satisfactorily (pothole, pedestrian, inconsistent embedded reflectors, chipped or graffitied sign, ....), 99.9999% is about the same reliability as the rate that human drivers crash in the US, and fatal crashes are around 100x less common. If, as in this comment thread, self-driving cars are being proposed as a solution to the deaths caused by human ineptitude then 99.9999% seems like an absolute bare minimum for reliability.
- Another 60m miles will be suggestive, but you need at least 2x-3x the ordinary fatality mile count to even have a 90% confidence that the results weren't a fluke.
- Tesla's FSD might operate in less-than-ideal conditions more often than competitors, but I'd posit that the typical human driver operates in much less ideal conditions than FSD. Humans are explicitly instructed to not enable it in sketchy scenarios and to be fully attentive when it's in control, and performance in that environment is at best an upper bound on what you might expect if deployed more widely.
- I skimmed the stats from https://www.tesladeaths.com and was hoping Cunningham's law would kick in if that was too far off base.
Volvo wanted to do that, in Sweden. They pointed out that it would also be useful for snowplow guidance. That's often done by putting up poles at the side of the road.
Volvo are just trying to get someone else to provide the infrastructure for self driving.
I live in Norway, the poles at the side of the road are not just for the snowploughs, they are very helpful for human beings too. Magnetic nails embedded in the road are not at all useful to humans and are just more stuff to maintain, especially in an environment where simply maintaining centre and edge markings is a difficult and time consuming job.
Of course they're doing something dystopian instead of something sensible.
But yes, I bet even better standardized road markings would be a huge help for self driving cars. I wonder if there's something stupid simple like a paint additive that would make it easy for machines to track. Magnetic beads?
Then any asshole could mix up their own magnetic bead paint and cause havoc.
Probably no more than someone painting their own road lines or putting up fake signage does now [1], but if you want something that's better than what we currently have it would need to not only be both machine and human readable, but also authenticated.
I always thought it would be quite neat to have those portable roadside displays you see for roadworks and so on also communicate map and driving data (cryptographically signed by your local council or dept of transport). So you might get a sign that says "roadworks ahead, please slow down" for human drivers, and the radio beacon would communicate a change of speed limits inside a certain geo-bounded area that would cause self-driving vehicles to slow down. Or similar stuff for "bridge out ahead, turn around now" causing navigation to reroute.
Just have the human readable signs be reasonably standardized, and the self driving car computer can then read them too.
It's a lot easier and more future proof to side-channel map updates to cars through a cell network, and allows for some curation. Also, improved cell network coverage seems like a more worthwhile capital expenditure for a local government than a bunch of smart signs that only help 0.001% of drivers. Cynically, I'm sure some politician's spouse's cousin would be happy to win the contract to slap a BLE beacon into a box and bolt it onto a sign for $150k a unit, though...
There is an ongoing effort to introduce infrastructure free direct communication for vehicles, using 5.9ghz spectrum. The spectrum was previously allocated to DSRC radio technology the automotive industry pushed for, but it's been 15 years and it hasn't gone anywhere. The FCC is now letting the cell network folk take a crack at solving the problem instead.
Are there self-driving car tests in Europe, and are they doing any differently? Seems like a potential way to test the hypothesis. OTOH I bet they could still have a lot more signs that would help. The Europe/America difference might be pretty marginal...
Caltrans had pilot program in the mid-1990's running self driving cars that used magnets embedded in the road. They would run "caravans" of five-ish vehicles driving almost bumper to bumper. This was tested on the car pool lanes on sections of a highway between los angeles and san diego.
This was a partnership between caltrans, the college of engineering at uc berkeley amongst others.
Unfortunately I can find any readily available links, but all of the data should be public. I'm only aware of this because I worked w/ some of the technical groups on the project (very tangentially involved).
I know the magnets were always considered a problem (cost/effort), but there weren't other options at the time, as computer vision was too computationally expensive at the time.
Any solution to self-driving cars (that purports to be a universal solution) that requires specific modifications to the roads is doomed to failure.
Even leaving aside all the gravel and dirt roads, and the many places where, at any given time, there's construction moving a lane 5 to 15 feet to one side temporarily, do you know how many miles of road there are in the US alone? I sure don't, but I know it's a staggering amount, a hell of a lot of it is rural (and some seasonal), and getting all of it retrofitted with even the most simple and low-tech self-driving guidance assist tech like your magnetic nails would cost vast amounts of money and either take a decade or three or cost about ten times as much.
People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car.
If we want to lower drunk driving incidence rates we need people walking to the bar or taking public transit. It requires us to fix our outdated and asinine transit culture.
All of the technical solutions in the world can’t solve this problem because they’re solving for the wrong thing (safer cars) when we should be solving for reduction in driving.
>People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car.
List of choices:
1. Not drink alcohol
2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving.
3. Pay for a driver
4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol
5. Rent a hotel room nearby
And so on and so forth. Drunk driving is certainly a choice, one made because the perceived or true cost of drunk driving is less than the cost of not driving drunk.
Well yea but we're talking about people who do drink alcohol
2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving.
I think this is a good solution, though of course different factors can and do easily disrupt this.
3./5. Pay for a driver/hotel
Hmm, I've only had a few and I feel pretty good. And an Uber is $50 just one way and I still have to pick my car up in the morning (if it doesn't get towed). Vast majority of people (hence why we have DUI and drunk driving problems) will choose to risk it.
4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol
This is tautological w.r.t the OP. If you could walk to an establishment that serves alcohol you'd live in an area where you could walk, which would mean you didn't really need a car. But that's not how we build in America which is what precipitated my comment.
Related to #6 from the poster below - you can get a DUI for sleeping in your car while intoxicated, you can get woken up because you aren't allowed to sleep where you are parked, you can get towed, etc.
I think it's important to add this one because it's free and doesn't even require previous planning, so it's very hard to argue that you couldn't do it instead of driving drunk.
(Although keeping a blanket in your trunk makes it a much better experience.)
You definitely will run into legal issues depending on the state.
Some states like California you can only get a DUI if there’s evidence you moved your car, but in other states it’s a lot less clear - and you can be charged with any appearance of intent to drive, like sleeping in the driver’s seat.
Not to mention the possibility of getting a trespassing charge in a private lot overnight.
From an individual's perspective, this is strictly worse than driving drunk. Not only can you not sleep in your car legally, you also can be charged with drunk driving while sleeping in your car unless you go out of your way to dispossess the keys. You also certainly can't sleep in your car with the engine running, which is pretty important in the winter time.
There are better alternatives than drunk driving, but sleeping in your car isnt one of them.
Well, even so, getting a DUI while sleeping is strictly better than getting a DUI after a car crash.
Plus, I don't know how American cops work, but hopefully they're less likely to stop and breathalyze a dude sleeping in a parking lot than a guy on the road at 4 AM.
Also, now that I think about it, American cars are huge, if you put the seat all the way back is your body you going to be even visible from the road?
> body you going to be even visible from the road?
No but your car will be, which will probably be investigated. If you are on the side of the road you'll definitely be investigated and for sure get a DUI because they'll say you drove there and parked. (Also definitely a no-go on highways/freeways).
If you are in a parking lot cops will usually scope out a car, especially if you are parked away from other cars and then they'll wake up and tell you to move. Then you'll say "I'm drunk I can't drive" and then that's where all of the problems start. If you park near other cars (perhaps late night workers) they'll probably call the cops or call a towing company because you aren't allowed to park there and sleep overnight (another reason all these gigantic stupid surface parking lots are so useless).
There's just way too many problems with this strategy.
Stopping on the side of the road should get you a DUI, for the reason you listed. I didn't suggest that - although I guess stopping too late is still better than staying on the road!
I've slept in my car in night clubs' parking lots several times and have never been bothered, either by the owners or by the police. I've also had friends follow my recommendation (well, more like pleading/pushing, since they were insisting 'noo I'm fine to drive') without trouble. Likely a difference between laws/customs in different countries.
If the drunk driver ends up in a collision with a motorist, then the damage to the other party would be minimal. The drunk person also still has personal transportation as well.
Against the law and you can get a DUI for this too. It’s actually pretty dangerous. This includes other things too like scooters. E-Bikes can go pretty fast and cause serious injury too.
If you were riding a bike drunk and drove into or were hit by a car you would probably be hurt pretty badly. If you ran into something else, or another person, same deal.
I was thinking more along the lines of a conventional bicycle, not an e-bike. The primary problem with DUI is the injury and property damage that others suffer as a result of a crash. This is because of the mass of the vehicle that the DUI uses. If they were on a bicycle, the danger would be minimized for others, and they would be the ones who are injured or killed in the crash.
Based on the remark about individuals making a choice to operate a vehicle while under the influence, having them use a bicycle instead of a vehicle that's significantly heavier, the choice changes from do they drive under the influence and take the chance on injuring or killing people to do they drive under the influence and take a chance on injuring or killing themselves. Whether that change influences their choice remains to be seen.
I added the e-bike as an extra factor not focusing on it there. You can still get a DUI.
But the point of the bike comment largely doesn’t matter since people have to drive to the bar or wherever and there wouldn’t be a bike to get a DUI on.
I’m actually not even sure that if given equal consideration a bike causes more drunken damage (although probably less lethal) but we won’t know because so few people ride bikes since they have to drive a car so they just get DUIs and kill people and themselves that way since we force that on people.
I think we disagree because you're saying you can choose to drink or not, but the choice we're talking about is now that you have drunk, do you drive or not? Because that's the actual choice that Americans face.
If you're saying that "drive or not" is the choice, then sure we agree. But that's not really a choice because every incentive would be to drive and that's the structure we've built with car-only culture.
If everyone lives right by the train station that’s fine.
What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
> What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep?
The important thing is to build a system that works for wide masses - even replacing half of individual car transit by rail and bus works wonders for space consumption [1]. The more complex cases - rural people, mostly - can be dealt with later on, e.g. by providing something like a "phone bus" service. Here in Germany, we're experimenting with on-demand buses [3]: they serve the existing station network, but unlike the usual village buses that run every two hours or worse, you can order them like a taxi and use your existing public transport ticket.
Saying "no" by default because a system is not entirely perfect at the beginning is a destructive discussion tactic that only serves those in power.
> Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
Someone in an emergency situation should just be able to call an ambulance. That's what they exist for. Ideally, someone in an emergency situation should also not have to fear going bankrupt (to the tune that this scenario has become a meme in itself [2]).
> Saying "no" by default because a system is not entirely perfect at the beginning is a destructive discussion tactic that only serves those in power.
Who are these people in power, and what are their goals? I don’t see what this has to do with my comment—I’m not arguing against trains, merely in support of autonomous vehicles, in areas where they might be useful, like far away from cities.
Mining, auto, and energy stocks go vroom vroom. Put tax money in roads and stocks go up. Also when you have a multi trillion dollar military to steal oil for chevron it's a handy way of knowing when the stocks are going to change.
Then there's good old fashioned malice. Look at who used to live or run businesses where highways are now.
Times are a changing a bit these days. Weirdly a bunch of companies on that list are the ones that would love having a 24/7 video and lidar feed of everyone anywhere near a public space.
Trains are great. They’re safer, more efficient, and often more convenient than cars. But it’s not either-or.
My comment was emphasizing that smart road technologies would be useful to many people also. There are many places where it’s not possible or desirable to build train infrastructure—these are areas that can be served by autonomous vehicles.
Have you driven a tesla? I think they help with the driving.
That said, touchscreen controls (with tiny targets) instead of dedicated controls and the new square steering wheel with touch controls instead of stalks... gah!
No need for fancy sensors and ai - I used an electric scooter rental in Germany recently, and it made me do a reaction speed test on my phone before starting. Super easy.
It is inexplicable how e scooters are treated like death machines in comparison to 4000 pound SUVs which get no restrictions.
Scooters have regulated speed, zones that are banned from use, reaction tests, sidewalk restrictions and on and on. You would think there were thousands of e scooter deaths per year.
Yes, especially yourself if you aren't wearing a helmet. More commonly, though, the electric scooters cause injuries and accidents. Starting next year, Norway is requiring insurance for them and rental prices will surely increase in response.
That was introduced during the Oktoberfest here in Munich, as there had been dozens of injuries and hundreds of people so drunk they got their license revoked on the spot in 2019 [1].
Operators didn't want the hassle of the paperwork involved with drunk drivers, crashes and followup costs, so they agreed with the city on implementing a "latency test" or other scare-offs [2]. Some of the operators already had that voluntarily activated during night time in other cities, some had to implement it from scratch, but I think they will more-or-less keep it in place.
Additionally, the potential for severe injury is way higher with a scooter than it is with a bike. Scooters run faster and are way more sensitive to steering input.
If people can get on an escorted i wonder if they wall or uber. If they walk i could totally see the total number of fatalities being hire than escooting.
Similar to how drunken walking has a higher fatality raid than drunken driving/biking.
The problem is not drunk drivers but incapacitated drivers, whether due to alcohol, drugs, lack of sleep, distractions (mobile phones), etc.
The fix is not arbitrary alcohol blood levels, or extending the "War on Drugs", but with standardized, enforced, in-vehicle continuous testing that ensures that the driver is awake, responsive, and in control of the vehicle.
That is something where R&D in AI/ML/software to analyze and detect incapacity could/should be directed.
It can be entirely on/in-vehicle, with access to the data only available to law enforcement (and, perhaps, insurance companies), if and when it is needed to determine liability (not as a general "carte blanche" for the data), in the same way that aircraft black boxes are only analyzed for investigation after an incident.
I have a suspicion that most accidents involve the worst 10% of drivers.
I'd like to see research into ways to identify those drivers and encourage them to improve their driving skill.
For example, one way might be to make a register of driving skill public information, and then insurance companies can jack their prices up for those people unless they go on and pass (government funded) extra training courses.
Such a register could simply be an open database of insurance claims, or police crash records showing the names of people involved.
> At-fault crash-prone drivers are usually considered as the high risk group for possible future incidents or crashes. In Louisiana, 34% of crashes are repeatedly committed by the at-fault crash-prone drivers who represent only 5% of the total licensed drivers in the state. ... From the findings, it is recommended that crash-prone drivers should be targeted for special safety programs regularly through education and regulations.
Hi. I'm a wheelchair user. It's only reasonably recently that the buses here had a restraint system that can lock my chair in place added, before that I needed to hold on to a bar next to me, which destroyed my shoulders.
Uber decimated the taxi industry, the pandemic finished them off, and now taxis need to be sent from one town over, and those drivers don't accept my government subsidy card.
At my fittest, I could push my chair about 10km per day.
I live in London which has all-but banned cars in the city centre (they're not banned, but there is an expensive congestion charge which means that in practice most traffic in the centre is buses, taxis, or very wealthy people).
However, there is an exception for anyone with a "blue badge" holder (for those with disabilities which prevent easy mobility - wheelchair users and others). These people not only get free car access to the city centre (which now has a lot less traffic because nobody else is driving there), but also get to park in places that most people are not allowed to, etc.
You are a wheelchair user, yes, but you don't really address the parent. The parent is saying that we should make society more accomodating, which you acknowledge with mention of restraint systems on public transport. I take it that's what they're asking, so you don't "need" a car, but have viable options everywhere.
10k is a respectfull number on an ordinary wheel chair. I know two wheel chair users who use an armbicycle, like an extra motor assisted handcrank that is attached on their wheelchair. They easily do about 15km per day (considering they have no car and live 8km from work).
That you need a car is not a given but as you say a result from stupid decisions you can't control.
Sounds like well designed transit and taxis would serve you to some extent. As would microcars or an electric third wheel.
None of these things prevent you from having a car, and driving in areas that prioritise them is safer, faster, and more pleasant for the people that need cars.
Car dependency does eliminate transport for all of the people with disabities that prevent them from driving though.
And this should make you angry. No one should be reliant on a car. Everyone should have access to a robust public transportation system. Even if that means you personally get a subsidized van to take you where you need to go. Subsidized so it costs the same as a bus ride.
The problem is neither incapacitated drivers, drunk drivers, drivers without seat belts, cars with bad breaks, car without headlights or any other contributing sources to car crashes. The problem is the car crash. Everything else is just contributing risk that a car crash might occur or that people will get serious injured if there is a car crash. In-vehicle continuous testing will not remove all risks to car crashes, and with drugs as an example, amphetamine makes people both awake and responsive but it also carries a risk of delusions and paranoia which is linked to high risks.
AI/ML/software is know for its high false positive rates, so if it was enforced it would lead to many drivers unable to use the car because of a false positive hit. If it was enforced, then the high risk reduction wouldn't occur before the crash and society in general will want to impose laws to fix that. Car crashes effects more than just the driver, and it not reasonable that so many people die from car crashes each year.
> it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse
Is that true? Those human statistics take every human car and driver into account, not just Teslas. I have never seen data that shows self-driving cars anywhere close to human driving capability. If we replaced every car on the road with "self-driving" Teslas, it would be mayhem.
Most of the "teslas are safer than other cars!" stats are severely biased because:
1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example.
2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything.
If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists"
...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.
One more big one related to your first point: the demographic driving Teslas is hardly a random sampling of the population, which probably impacts driving behavior _but also_ implies the driving done (e.g., where) is probably quite different from the population as a whole.
I guess it depends how you classify crashes when the automated car goes "Meh, I've got no idea, you take over" and then crashes 2 seconds later.
But America isn't too concerned with road deaths (equivelant of one 9/11 per month, or 240 9/11s in the period of time the US occupied Afghanistan in response.
Financially the response to 9/11 cost about $950b - $300m per death. By that reckoning the US government should be spending about $12.8 Trillion dollars a year on reducing road deaths, about half of the US GDP.
Or... Just make public transportation work? Is this just that difficult to get on the anglosphere or something?
I still cannot grasp what people are trying to do with this, really. Why are they trying to do public transports... With cars?
You guys do realize most of accidents come from urban/chaotic areas, right? You don't have to use a car to solve this.
The percentage of people in the US that live in an area dense enough where even an ideally designed public transport system would match the convenience of a car is in the low single digits. When I go to European cities with these great public transportation systems everybody loves to talk about, what to I see on the road? Lots of cars. Cars aren't going anywhere.
the National Transportation Safety Board conducted
an investigation finding that the government should
not be actively restricting headlamp systems that
have been shown to have a safety benefit.
So I can imagine this sort of thinking coming down on
telsa's side of the argument.
Personally, although tesla does "market" their technology,
I think it is good technology that has probably not only
saved a fair number of lives, but also bumpers and fenders.
Looking at the storied history of the airbag, I think telsa
did a good job assisting the driver (and customer) when the status quo for other car manufacturers was to innovate at a snail's pace and implement safety features mostly when required.
Some judges have taken the opinion that the infrastructure is so car dependent that you can't have a license revoked lest you lose the entire ability to be a self-sufficient member of society. And in parts of the US, that's true.
As a general example, how many nightlife areas have decent public transportation at bar closing to avoid committing a DUI?
I'm obviously not defending drunk driving, but for many people, remember to double that cost.
You either have to take an uber both ways, or get an uber home, then back to your car in the morning.
I used to just Uber if I thought I'd be drinking at -all-, but hell that costed me about 60 to 70 bucks which definitely isn't realistic for most young people looking to just have a few beers out.
What on earth does drunk driving have to do with Tesla's self driving software? You could argue for Waymo, which is actually capable of going without human assistance, not Tesla which is clearly not going to deliver on that.
At what point does a "life jeopardize" become a "safety feature" for you? Since 160k FSD beta testers have cost 0 lives, and _human_ drivers in my state kill 16 people per 100k.
The fact is, the vast majority of lives are jeopardized by reckless, unaware, distracted, or impaired... Things which don't apply to FSD.
Are you referring to the fact that everyday joe's can use this tech? Otherwise testing self-driving is also legal in the EU (of course with a big process attached and people behind the wheel).
Let’s be even more clear: the regulations are so overly specific that they don’t even provide any guidance let alone recourse for things they don’t cover. I’m less concerned about the slow movement on proven technology, and more concerned that any amount of novel privately automated technology is just free to let loose on society with no restriction.
I'd be happy if local and state police just started issuing citations in earnest for misaligned headlights on pickup trucks. 99% of the pickups I come across at night have their low beams pointing straight instead of down at the road. It's so common that it can't be a coincidence that nearly every pickup truck has an illegal headlight configuration. And it isn't due to higher ground clearance, that's just their lame excuse.
That's something that should be caught in mandatory periodic vehicle safety inspections. I always thought it was weird that in large parts of the US that is simply not a thing (compared to places I'm used to in the rest of the world where it seems totally normal)
We don't have the resources deployed for this. They are too busy wasting thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition each week, practicing for thier next shout-out.
I plainly remember mechanics using an optical headlight alignment tool during inspections in Texas back in the 80's. I haven't seen one in a shop in decades though. All these requirements still exist, they are just completely ignored by everybody.
It's a serious safety issue. When I replaced my car's headlights with a popular aftermarket model they pointed way too low, to a unsafe degree on unlit roads. Unlike the OEM lights, the angle could not be adjusted. The product is unsafe and should not be sold in the first place. This should absolutely be caught during a safety inspection.
American police don't like to really to do pull overs with minor road behavior in general unless they are pulling over for a more serious non-driving thing and they're looking for an excuse to do so.
Like in california, nobody is ever, ever ticketed or pulled over for not using turn signals.
They love to pull people over for minor road behavior depending on who they expect you might be. Like in California, they definitely don’t pull everyone over for failure to signal. But they sure do pull some people over for just that.
Never had a problem with pickups but I've had several dozen experiences where the headlights behind me were "blinding" and in most cases the vehicle in question ended up being an Audi, Mercedes or BMW. In later years, this "headlight disease" spread to other mainstream brands - can't say I've ever been blinding by "big pickup guy".
Quite a claim with no source. Are you claiming that the manufacturers are making trucks with illegal headlights? Because that seems pretty far fetched. Or that drivers are modifying them? Because that is very rare.
I am the source. Anyone that gets blinded at night by oncoming traffic is the source, because this should not happen with properly aligned headlights. Regardless of ground clearance, low beam headlights should angle down towards the road to focus on the road approximately 125ft from the front tires. The higher the ground clearance, the steeper the angle.
> Are you claiming that the manufacturers are making trucks with illegal headlights? Because that seems pretty far fetched. Or that drivers are modifying them? Because that is very rare.
I don't believe that you can determine which headlights are illegal by looking at oncoming traffic. I don't believe that dealers or or drivers are modifying them in illegal configurations at more than a minimal rate. This would be quite the conspiracy.
> I don't believe that you can determine which headlights are illegal by looking at oncoming traffic.
Anyone can. Headlights are collimated by reflectors. If the lights of oncoming traffic are in your eyes at a distance of half a mile or more, then it is obvious they are misaligned, as proper alignment necessarily requires they be at an angle pointed at the road no more than 150' in front of the front tires.
> I don't believe that dealers or or drivers are modifying them in illegal configurations at more than a minimal rate. This would be quite the conspiracy.
Conspiracy is not required. All that is required here is ignorance and/or entitlement.
when I was a kid in France I remember one some car parks at the beginning of the winter there were people tuning headlights with a machine. I don't know the specifics because I was too young (was it the police? a road safety non-profit?)
That may still exist, but I think no one bothers to do that around these parts. Basically, every other car has at least one headlamp pointing up. And I say this as a motorcycle rider, so my eyes are somewhat higher than in a regular car (I can see over the top of cars if they're not vans/SUVs).
On the subject of motorcycle riders. In Europe it’s so common for them to ride on main beam during the day. They always blind everybody around. I guess they do it to be better visible? Guess what, if you are riding on the high beam, be sure I am not looking in your direction.
I agree with this. Maybe they think they're more visible, but they don't understand that when they're blinding you, it's much harder to judge the distance...
This should maybe happen during a vehicle inspection. The last thing I want is another subjective reason for cops to be able to pull you over on the road.
Can anybody tell me why all my US cars have enormous side-mirror blind spot? And my European cars have none? Are European cars using curved mirrors to prevent this?
Edit: I just googled it. That’s exactly what’s happening - EU side mirrors are curved to prevent blind spots.
American drivers are simply too stupid to be able to comprehend curved mirrors, so the US government bans them on US-spec cars, and instead you get flat mirrors with a warning message.
The passenger side is curved, the driver’s side isn’t. But the passenger side curved mirror isn’t the same type of curve as Euro cars so there are still bigger blind spots, and the driver’s side blind spots are huge.
Exactly; I should have been more specific: EU mirrors are aspherical, so the curvature isn't consistent. The US government believes, rightly or wrongly, that American drivers are simply too stupid to properly comprehend the view from an aspherical mirror, so therefore they are banned in the US.
Definitely not, but it's not something you'd ever be caught for. While some states have safety inspections, mirrors aren't something they check for (other than to make sure they aren't broken), or would even think to check for. But it would technically be against the regulations for allowed equipment. I suppose it could get you in trouble if you were involved in a crash and the other side's attorney found out you had a non-approved mirror installed and this somehow might have affected the crash.
That’s a ridiculous hot take. What’s so hard to understand about curved mirrors? The mirrors already have a warning on them that objects are closer than they appear.
The EU mirrors aren't curved consistently; they curve more towards the outer end (IIRC), to eliminate the blind spot and show more. Apparently this is too much for the brain of an American driver to comprehend. If you disagree with this, you'll have to take it up with the federal government, because this is their opinion.
Because drivers are setting their mirrors incorrectly.
So many people set them so that they can see the side of their own car - that's incorrect! They need to angle it out to the point where they cannot see the side of their car, that way traffic should seemlessly be visible from the rearview mirror to the sideview mirror to the driver or passenger window.
Luckily most new cars from the last 5-10 years should have blind spot warnings (even as standard on premium cars) so should be a problem that's at least slowly being solved.
A US manual or hazard sticker would tell you not to forget your head outside the car when slamming the door shut too. I don't think manuals directed towards US customers are in any way related to safety, just legal fear. I mean it's the place where a coffee cup can have the text "caution, hot!".
They tell that about every single safety feature in cars. Reversing cameras usually always have a warning to not rely on the image, even though basically the only way to actually get a proper view what's behind you in a modern car is to get out of the car and go behind it. I imagine it's all about liability.
Looking over your shoulder isn't part of driver's ed in the US? In Germany you'd literally fail your exam if you forget to do that even once before turning. You don't even need to move your upper body, just turn your head to the side and look in that direction and you'll cover most blind spots. They also teach you how to adjust your mirrors and how to tell they're adjusted correctly. They also do a blind spot demonstration.
Any technique you learned in driver's ed is going to be less effective on a modern car than it was on an older car because modern cars have more blind spots and expect you to use the backup camera to compensate.
I think this has less to do with "modern cars" and more to do with American preferences for SUVs. Most "modern cars" in the rest of the world haven't changed much when it comes to visibility (in fact, in some cases windscreen sizes have actually increased) but because of the trend in the US over the past decades for personal cars to get bigger and sit higher on the road, I can imagine that visibility has decreased significantly.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly though. I'm aware of "parking cameras" for driving in reverse. Are you saying American cars typically have cameras covering their blind spots that are meant to be used when switching lanes or turning? Because those are the situations for which you're supposed to do a quick blind spot check by looking over your shoulder and I can't imagine Americans who don't look over their shoulders checking cameras for those.
I just meant driving in reverse. I switched from a 1998 Nissan Maxima to a 2019 Toyota Camry. With the Nissan Maxima it was easier to look out the rear view mirror or turn around and see what was going on behind the car. With the Camry it seems that you really need to use the backup camera.
I can't find anything authoritative on this so it could be I was mistaken but it was my understanding modern cars have more blind spots in order to increase crash safety performance and the backup camera is supposed to compensate.
Here's a reddit post by someone saying they are a former automotive engineer who discusses this but obviously using a reddit post as a source is not ideal:
> They tell that about every single safety feature in cars.
> I imagine it's all about liability.
'Just ignore warnings in the manual' doesn't seem like smart strategy. Dust and snow disable those sensors frequently. Those warning are not just there for some legal reasons.
That's a crap comment, define where and how it's "too much", considering that the vehicle design rules and regulations have literally saved millions of lives?
People forget the Edsel and "unsafe at any speed" from the 1950s/60s.
Because every SUV looks identical now as a result. There isn't a car enthusiast alive today who could identify and differentiate the top 10 SUV manufacturers in a lineup with their logos removed.
Available in Europe since 2006? Why did it take so long for the US? LED lightbeams are so bright that high beams is almost unbearable for opposing cars.
This feature is available indeed but I don't feel like it's significant improvement - sensors are too slow to react, too imprecise and moreover drivers seem to rely on them too much, are lazy and don't care about others - for example high beams should be disabled before other car ahead is already visible on winding road , same goes for hills and multitude of other various scenarios where automatic sensors and software just doesn't work.
Tbh it seems that this is another "arms race" just like with car size/SUVs dominance and this arms race can make driving at night really painful experience
Yes they can be faster, but personally I don’t find them too bad. Half kilometre away the opposing beams are noticeable but not blinding you, yet some drivers blink theirs mostly just to warn you. Matrix headlights is whole next level.
People similarly freak out when you back up too quickly into them, because you have a reversing camera on.
> People similarly freak out when you back up too quickly into them, because you have a reversing camera on.
Much worse, your car freaks out nowadays. Twice I've had my car apply ABS while I was backing up, while I was fully aware of a car behind me but not in my planned path.
US auto regulations are extremely conservative on the lights/signals front, have been for a long time. Some European car designs in the late 20th century were compromised when brought to the US because the headlights had to be made worse (in an aesthetic sense) even though there was no safety reason to do so — Citroen DS was one of these.
And maybe they should be conservative, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it should take a decade to get something like this approved (or formally rejected).
Ford had to petition the government to switch from sealed beam headlights to composite lights by claiming they couldn't meet fuel economy standards without them. The truth was they just wanted to use them on the then new Taurus.
It was another 5 years before you could use a shape other than rectangular or round, even for composite lights. I believe the Dodge Viper was the first US car to get them.
I agree the NHTSA is way too slow, but damn am I glad they're doing the work! I love that they're checking everything carefully and doing the research before approving new designs.
They are not doing their work, their work is to allow highest available safety standards to be implemented, not to block progress. Their inability to allow curved rear mirrors killed god knows how many US people. You have decades of statistics form ie Europe to back it up, same as for this topic (OK decade and a half for lights).
I suspect its rather a typical lazy government bureaucratic hell case.
The NHTSA is regulating all the wrong things. How many people have been killed by wrong headlight shape? How would you even test that regulation? Meanwhile, people are free to go 100mph in cities, with the trivially demonstrable deaths that causes for no upside.
They could regulate cars to make sure they're incapable of going faster than a certain speed, but people seem to want faster and faster cars for some reason and I'm guessing most accidents aren't happening at > 100mph speeds
Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.
Instead of we adopted a position of everything being illegal until it is blessed by a regulator, it is in effect guilty until proven innocent.
Until we put government back into the proper context innovation will continue to be inhibited
> Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.
Uh, no. There should be a well defined standard of what light need (light area of this and that size or at least this or that brightness) and can't (low beams blinding oncoming traffic etc.) do, then let market work within those limits. The regulation should have actual research behind it. Pretty sure that's how it works in EU.
Then if for some reason behavior of lights on the market causes problem, the standard should be revised, not ban random products for breaking rules that haven't existed when they were created (aside from extreme cases I guess)
>Available in Europe since 2006? Why did it take so long for the US?
It probably wasn't invented in America, and therefore the US government refuses to believe that it exists.
This is why the US is happy to allow half-baked self-driving tech from Tesla, but won't allow automakers to adopt anything that became standard overseas first.
Did any European automakers ask for the rules to be reevaluated? Or did they simply sell cheaper headlights for the same price and pocket the difference?
It seems to have been approved only in 2018 in Canada, so we aren’t much better. It’s also merely an (apparently expensive) option, so we will have to live with careless high beam drivers for a while.
only rented cars in europe for 10+ years before moving to the US, so I did not have a reference point. But I had no clue the headlights were different in that aspect and just assumed all of those SUVs etc had theirs ill adjusted. Its a lot of fun being blinded constantly on a busy road while driving at night :|
The article is old...dates back to February of this year. Furthermore, I haven't done digging, but I'm still trying to figure out the difference between what my older vehicles do vs what European cars do. It seems to be related to beam detection. My vehicle already dynamically adjusts brights vs "low" beams: if a car comes over a hill, it "sees" the headlights and shifts to normal beams.
My car does a pretty decent job and turning off the brights when it detects oncoming traffic, is this February Ars article saying that is illegal? If so, why is it implemented in my Hyundai?
EDIT: Based on other replies it appears that the difference is beam forming, exactly. My headlights simply go from high to low. It is pretty odd that would be banned, but okay.
There are also lights that adjust to slopes, such as when cresting a hill. And lights that greatly widen at T and cross intersections so you can see where you are going to turn too.
There's an ancient history here which is both amusing and worth noting. For most of a century, starting way back, the US patent office would receive constant applications describing simple automatic dimmers from inventors who had never considered what would happen if two cars equipped with such dimmers approached each other at night. A whole lotta flickering is what would have happened. This literally became the paradigm for the patent office of what a trash invention that shouldn't be given a patent looked like.
There weren't high and low beams back when. If you can have the car detect the difference between low and high beams (even with a hilly road) that'd be a help, yup.
> A whole lotta flickering is what would have happened. This literally became the paradigm for the patent office of what a trash invention that shouldn't be given a patent looked like.
and they started issuing patents for dumb shit regardless of that
I wonder when this will begin to be implemented or “turned on“ with vehicles that already have compatible hardware. The article was written in February of this year and to my knowledge my car (2022 Tesla 3) has the hardware but the feature is not enabled. Are any production cars in the US fully using this tech?
Huh, very recent Model 3’s might indeed have the necessary technology. Too bad Tesla’s support sucks so bad you can’t email them to ask — maybe try Musk on Twitter?
Does anybody know if these lights detect and "un-bright" for pedestrians and bicyclists? I know many cars automatically turn the brights off at low speeds where you're more likely to see peds and bikes... but as someone who frequently walks and cycles on or along 40+ MPH roads, I worry what will happen to me when these vehicles start to show up.
Yes, Matrix-LED carves out a little hole in the high beam for you so you won't get blinded but the rest is still bright.
See this 8 year old video for explanation
https://youtu.be/F4-iwuzAey4
How do your headlights know the thing on the side of the road is a pedestrian or bike and not a deer (or as someone else mentioned, a kangaroo)? Animals on the road should be clearly illuminated but pedestrians shouldn't be blinded.
None of that even acknowledged the existence of non-car road users, let alone provided any confidence that they'd be reliable in a world where teslas regularly try to swerve into cyclists or onto railways.
Well guess what,
It's an technology that's available for 16 years in Europe.
Unlike Tesla we don't dump unsafe beta shit on the road...
Here from another article
"Audi's digital matrix LED headlight design can do that too. It recognizes vehicles and pedestrians in front of the car and adjusts the headlight beam as needed.
Yes, and even worse than my prediction that they'd completely ignore other road and footpath users and blind them indifferently the volkswagen one just flashes the high beams at them intentionally (at least when they aren't misidentified).
Can't wait for this one to start displaying ads when the driver's premium subscription runs out and when it's parked outside my bedroom (personalised by the cameras sending a live feed to audi).
If you haven't yet seen the more advanced version of this where the cameras detect rain/snow and don't illuminate it's some god damn magic that makes "barely able to see in a snowstorm" to "there's a snowstorm?"
It's pixelated, so rapidly modulating which small angular sections of the illumination pattern are on or off. Imagine shining a bright light around the snowflakes but not on the snowflake, so there isn't much back-scatter.
Yes, it's tech that turns off individual pixels of the light beam that would illuminate the occluding snowflakes and raindrops while keeping most of the high beam turned on.
The bright-in-your-eyes headlights (oncoming or following you) are a problem, especially oncoming on curves. I learned early to follow the outside lane marker with my eyes, effectively taking my eyes off the road to avoid getting temporarily blinded.
My wife suggested a fun tech solution: night vision and making all lights less bright. Kind of a fun idea: a slight glow or dim lights so you can still see vehicles unaided, but a full night vision windshield or glasses and no more too-bright-to-see lights.
You don't even need night vision. Your eyes adjust to low light and can actually see better when the peak brightness is low. It's ironical that all the solutions we come up with to aid night driving involve increasing the brightness, whereas we should be doing exactly the opposite.
I once drove on a stretch of highway that used reflective paint for the lane markers. My feeble beam could light them up better than any HID could. It was very relaxing to drive in the dark and never once did you have to strain to make sure you can see the road. I think this is really the future of night driving.
Fix glare. Headlamp technology has driven to a point that harms other drivers. It's dangerous. I don't drive at night now if I can avoid it, because of night vision issues which high strength blue light headlamps exacerbate.
Part of me feels like we need to just make cars much much much more reflective (being careful to not have hard corners or flat surfaces that could create glare during the day). First of all, that would make them much more easily visible at night (which would be great, and is something everyone should want)... but it would also mean that if you are an asshole and use your high beams or otherwise shine a light at a car you will also get blinded and thereby there will be an actual incentive to not harm others with your lighting setups.
(I would personally award bonus points if this is implemented with some kind of inverse adaptive "matrix" mirror mechanism whereby reflective-ness is automatically concentrated at light sources that are directing light at you. This is again a win for good light citizens as it would make the car not overly bright during the day while managing to boost its visibility specifically to people who themselves have lights looking for obstacles, with the only side effect of blinding people with dangerous lightings setups who are blinding others already.)
I would personally award bonus points if this is implemented with some kind of inverse adaptive "matrix" mirror mechanism whereby reflective-ness is automatically concentrated at light sources that are directing light at you.
That's how reflective signs, vests, and auto reflectors work.[1]
There are quite a lot of lorries, trucks, and vans on the road right now with exactly this, with diagonal red and yellow stripes. Do a google image search for "rear reflective chevron" for examples. I think it's a great idea, and would love to see it on more vehicles.
The main disadvantage is that the road by contrast may become harder to see. But I'd argue that the road also needs to become way more reflective, on the painted lines. The paint itself has some amount of retroreflective material, but it rapidly gets dirty. Cats-eyes are fabulous, but they also need to be regularly maintained and replaced, and that has definitely been slipping in many places.
That matrix mirror won't work in ie dirty cars, and as something seemingly complex and expensive, no manufacturer would put it willingly and most buyers wouldn't pay up for it neither. You would have to enforce this via regulators. Good luck pushing such thing in nimby-ridden US (for lack of better expression).
How about other approach - trying to foster a culture amongst people of not being an a-hole to others, especially on the roads? Rather than playing whack-a-mole with all possible variants how assholism can be manifested. It generally works quite well in western Europe, I can't remember the last time somebody blinded me (if I don't count split-second situations of popping up suddenly from behind some tight curve).
You'd think, and yet people drive around with headlights that do this all the time. The argument seems to be "but it helps me see: you being blinded is merely an unfortunate side effect"... so here "but it helps me be more visible".
Side note - anyone know how to disable the annoying auto high beams on their vehicle? A recent software update appears to automatically toggle high beams (which do turn off when oncoming traffic is detected however it's still annoying). It appears that this is necessary for autopilot to function - so I can't just disable it entirely :/
> It appears that this is necessary for autopilot to function
Seems like the answer is here. Tesla evidently needs unquestioned access to your high beams for their research program in which you are voluntarily participating. You can regain control of your high beams by leaving the program.
You can turn it off by hitting the lever forwards (I think). Unfortunately, you need to do this each time you engage Autopilot, so it's not a complete solution.
> The technology has been around for nearly two decades in Europe and Japan.
That sounds a bit too long - in 2002 LEDs were just starting to be used in brake lights etc., but not in headlights. Of course, it depends what they mean by "nearly two decades" (I imagine it has to be at least 15 years?) and by "has been around" (in the lab? in prototypes? or in actual cars that you could buy?).
Wikipedia has citations for a system from 2010 that is mechanically controlled ("movable shadow masks shifted inside the headlamp") rather than using LEDs. Nothing from 2003 though
"Bixenon" means just that xenon lamps don't have extra bulbs for high beam and low beam, but regulate the beam via a mask. AFAIK the kind of adaptive lighting that dims only some sectors of the beam to avoid blinding oncoming drivers, pedestrians etc. can only be done with LEDs.
Ah fsck. I had been telling myself I might never get a new car because of the anti-features (owner-hostile features) which are being pushed for, such as ignition interlocks and bad driving detection. But this is one technology which really matters and is useful not only to the owner but also to everyone else - which is a much better paradigm no matter what you prioritize, surely!
I can't speak for all of them, but the adaptive lights I've used do keep the edges of the road lit up as if using old-style highbeams whilst dimming in the middle of the road to avoid blinding oncoming traffic. Weird at first, but super useful for country driving where there might be deer / kangaroos loitering.
European, have these on my Volvo - they are great. In fact, they illuminate more of the side of the road than regular headlights.
Basically, they split the beam into multiple sections and if it detects an oncoming car, it turns off the section that would shine towards the oncoming car, but keeps on the section that shines towards the side of the road.
Another thing - if you are driving behind another car, then the headlights don't shine into the rear-view mirror of the car in front, but rather around it.
>Not sure if it will actually help - you don't watch your screen when driving.
Some cars can actually use the headlights to highlight a detected person, so you can see it out of your window. Not sure if it works for animals though.
It shouldn't be any worse than normal high beams, and in fact should be better, since it can still illuminate the sides of the road when there's an oncoming car, or a car driving in front of you.
Are there windshields with automatic dimming? Surely they can put an LCD or something over it and gradually darken the part where the passengers are looking at the road, so that oncoming high beams are dimmed.
Will using adaptive beam headlights to project ads on the road be allowed? (Yes, that really exists. Toyota wants to project warning patterns. Others have talked about ads.)
The last time I encountered a vehicle without orange turn signals was on the autobahn, at night. It was an american military vehicle, and the blinking was so dim, that it looked like a malfunction tail light. I was furious at yet an other idiot who didn't look in his mirrors and just went left without using his indicators, until I realized that he was, in fact, using them. But they were simply of a piss-poor design, unexpected in Europe, and a true safety hazard.
