Volvo is working on a car that detects obstacles and automatically slams on the brakes if the driver doesn't do something about it.
Um, what if I want to ram something/one? And this will kill chase scenes in the movies!
More seriously: this feature would remove a significant amount of power from a half-decent driver. While the need to ram something is not particularly likely to occur in real life, it's easy to imagine a situation that you would prefer to take a front impact over the alternative. I suppose that side and rear radar could identify most of those situations?
OK, what about the fact it will make it possible for "opponents" to effectively trap your car by doing nothing more than putting their squishy bodies in the way? A car is normally quite the equalizer - you can use it to escape most violent situations. Not anymore.
Definitely borderline.
Seatbelts I'm all for (not necessarily legally mandated). They are pure win. And you can take them off if you have a compelling reason to.
Airbags are quite a bit more questionable. They reduce your ability to carry a full carload of children by making the front passenger seat unsafe. Similarly, they make it unsafe to "teach" a small child to drive while sitting on the driver's lap. (Not on normal roads! Sheesh.)
Via Slashdot.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Safety Features that Reduce Utility
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3 comments:
"it's easy to imagine a situation that you would prefer to take a front impact over the alternative"
Right. I depends on the nature of the mechanism. To give an example of your scenario, it is easily often safer to run into a smaller wild animal than slam on the breaks (or swerve as many people do).
On the other hand, I could see this becoming a standard once fine-tuned, with an emergency override (and if everyone has such a feature, the way it would affect your interactions with other cars becomes a little different) ...
I wonder what kind of regular training would be required to allow users to seamlessly control an override in addition to whatever crazy driving situation is going on... maybe this will be good once we all have direct mind links with our cars.
Seatbelts and airbags are just there - you would almost never want to modify your driving based on their presence.
Actually, this tech seems better suited to the fully automated cars of the future. If cars are ever going to drive themselves this feature will obviously be needed.
My first gut instinct after reading the article was that I would want to try to run over some people or ram into a wall to see if the mechanism worked. Not exactly the safest way of testing the feature.
Cars are about as safe as they are going to get without changing the structure of the vehicles (i.e. use stronger than steel materials for the cabin).
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