Safer Cars

'The most significant development since the safety belt'

When it comes to anything as complex as automobiles, it can frequently require a century just to get all the basics down, including how to design cars that don't kill people. No doubt, if money were not an object, they could have made cars idiot proof long ago, but this is the first production car with a zero fatality rate. Traffic fatalities have been going down in recent years and by studying cars that have zero or near zero fatality rates they can figure out cheaper ways to make them all safer and, along with autonomous vehicles, should be able to bring fatalities down to practically zero.

Now, if they can only do something about bathrooms...

 

Nice safety features but more and more the human element is removed from driving. Fine for normal people bad for car nuts like me.

 

It just means your insurance rates go up for insisting on taking risks.

 

I'll drive my own car... Thank you very much.

 

Only if you can afford the insurance, or don't get caught driving without it.

 

I afford my insurance just fine...


By the way, insurance would be much higher on a new car with all these useless bells and whistles.


Why is it that people can't just learn how to drive and pay attention while doing it?

 

Advancements aren't really fair to car enthusiasts. Me, I think we take death far too seriously. It's like everything is geared towards some compulsion where nobody ever dies. Does it just make death scarier and scarier? I don't know. But I hope they can be reasonable. People who really like cars should still be able to drive them. If somebody dies, well, that's life.

 

You know how it is, fancy new bells and whistles like air conditioning and AM radio eventually become standard. Personally, I really like the fact you don't have to manually crank the engine anymore.

 

I always hated getting out to squeegee off my windows in the rain. And, having to wear a huge winter jacket and a raincoat. Good thing windshield wipers and heaters became standard.

The thing is, 100 years from now, we will seem like we live in a technological dark age.

I'm not really for self driving cars, but I know for the general population it will be a good thing.

I am a mechanic, I love driving, and I love my cars. Some people see a car as just a device for transportation.

 

Some of them are crazy. Last week, a display on my dashboard started flashing "STOP.....GARAGE". When I got home and connected the car to the diagnostics program, it told me that the electrical pulses to trigger the brake light solenoid were 0.01 of a second out of sync with those being received by the cruise control processor.
I have been driving since the late 60s and never taken a car to a garage, maintaining one vehicle to 285,000 miles. It was cost effective and I have never broken down, but with the amount of diagnostic equipment needed today, it is sometimes hard to justify the costs. It also means that I will always have to own Audi VW vehicles to justify the investment on their diagnostic equipment, but having driven a new E class Mercedes last week, I am not sorry about that.

 

so? a motorcycle? jk

 

Our daughters work friend who is a traffic officer has suggested an electronically controlled guillotine in cars to amputate the drivers right foot if he drives like an idiot.

 

Another safety measure that is sure to make it into future cars as a new standard is all wheel steering. You can literally be driving on ice and rock the steering wheel from side to side as hard as you want, and the car will ignore you and keep going straight. It applies power and breaking to each wheel independently, and you just can't get better traction than that. The next generation electric vehicles can theoretically be produced cheaper using this method, with the manufacturers already combining their efforts in building the first prototype graphene plants on the assumption they can make a car lighter than steel, stronger than steel, and that uses the body as a battery and regenerative breaking. Theoretically, you could charge up such a car for a thousand miles in the same time it now takes to fill up a car with gas, and the cost of the motors has just dropped down to dirt cheap.

Like the original model T, the first models will come in any color you want, so long as its black.

 

@wooleeheron That's really impressive!

I really like the idea of having a motor/generator at each wheel. Great weight distribution, less components, and so much more.

 

The floor can also be used as the battery, keeping the weight as low as you can go, removing any drive shaft, and leaving the entire interior of the vehicle open and flat, to be arranged however you want. You could put a self-driving car on automatic, and fold out a king sized bed if you want.

 

LOL, the base model for the XC90 retails for a mere 50,000 pounds, $US70,000

Do I have to be the one to point out 98% of the worlds population will never be able to afford that?

And the more crap you put in cars the fewer people can afford them - it will just widen the gap between the haves and have nots

You will never see autonomous cars anyway, but even if the miriad of logical problems with them could be solved, every road user would have to have the same tech talking to each other

Then of course what happens when an owner of a car with AEB drives some friends car without it and they have forgotten how to brake?

I live in eastern Sydney, the amount of soccer moms with high earning husbands here that whizz around in landrovers or range rovers, they are protected, because they are in something the size of a tank, they all cant drive for shit, because they dont have to care

This is no solution, even if no one driving a $70,000 car ever dies

 

I often come very close to completely falling asleep while driving.

 

Safer drivers.


Car Makers Test Technology to Make You Pay Attention to the Road
GM, Toyota, VW and others test systems that nudge or alert drivers who aren’t paying attention
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Mike Ramsey
March 11, 2016

Car Makers Test Technology to Make You Pay Attention to the Road

excerpt"

"Soon your car may be able to give you a lifesaving nudge before you fall asleep at the wheel.

Major auto makers are testing driver-monitoring systems that determine if a driver is too tired or distracted to drive safely, and the first such systems could be available next year.

Such artificial intelligence systems that watch drivers and evaluate their fitness behind the wheel are designed in part to compensate for the auto industry’s embrace of Internet-connected entertainment automation technologies that researchers say contribute to distracted driving.

Car makers experimenting with these monitoring systems include General Motors Co. GM -0.42% , Toyota Motor Corp. , Volkswagen AG and a handful of startups. Auto-parts supplier Delphi Automotive DLPH -0.89% PLC’s driver-monitoring system is to be installed in two vehicles that will be sold next year."

 

$5,00 for a few windshield in a new Subaru because of a camera attached to it. Insurance loves it but they hate it. A good crack is expensive. I learned to drive by knowing how to do everything myself in a car. A computer parallel parks for you now too on some Fords. It's convenient but the new generation is not going to know how to drive in the same way.