New cars have many features that seek to prevent you from causing an accident due to a momentary lapse in concentration. Many of the most recent ones I do not have since my car is 12 years old and even then was not a top-of-the-line model. But it does have one feature that I really like and that is the rear view camera, which is of great help especially when parallel parking into tight spaces. There are other features that I have seen on other cars, such as giving an alert when you seem to be drifting into the next lane and another that alerts you when you are getting too close to a stationary obstacle or the moving car ahead and even triggers the brakes to slow you down.
But what these things cannot take into account is other idiot drivers on the road. Someone was telling me the other days that she was stuck on the highway where traffic was crawling along at about two miles per hour when the man behind her started honking. Puzzled, she looked in the mirror and he was angrily gesturing to her to close the small gap between her and the car in front. But the sufficiency of the size of the gap between her car and the one in front for the speed at which they were traveling had been determined by her car’s computer and sensors and it had determined that her car was close enough. To get closer would have made the alarm system keep beeping.
Anyone with an ounce of sense would know that closing the already short gap further would not save any time. But some people do not have even that amount of sense, as well as having zero courtesy for other users of the road. Being stuck in traffic is tedious enough without having other drivers add to the hassle.
I have another friend who related how he had been annoyed by something another driver did and he drove up next to that person to give him a piece of his mind and the other driver picked up a gun and showed it to him. We should never forget that in America, pretty much anyone might be armed.
My friend with the honker behind her, being a mature adult, decided that she did not want to deal with this nonsense and so changed lanes when she got the chance to let the idiot move ahead by the few feet he so desperately desired. But if she had also been an easily angered hot-head and armed, this could well have turned into a road rage incident, though usually it is male drivers who view the roads so territorially.
My aunt’s new car has a feature where if you drift out of your lane, the car will automatically steer itself back into the lane. Shortly after she got it, she was driving on a two lane road going around a curve when an oncoming truck drifted across the center line into her path. She steered onto the shoulder to avoid it then the steering wheel was jerked out of her hands as the car put itself back on to the road and into the path of the truck.
She narrowly avoided get hit by the truck, but immediately pulled off the road, got out the car’s manual and permanently deactivated that feature.
@1 Trickster,
When I bought my current car, it would beep when you drifted out of the lane (not an uncommon thing to do on purpose on country roads around here as the shoulders can be vanishingly small with a deep ditch just feet away). It also felt as if the steering wheel was giving me a tug. In fact, it was. It didn’t force me to turn the wheel or take over, but it was disconcerting as anything. I had three options: leave it as is, turn off the tug, turn off the tug and the beep. I left the beep on because it just might be handy some day, but the tug, no way- especially in the winter with snow and ice on the roads.
I’ve also pulled right if a large truck is coming the other way, or pulled left if there is someone parked on the shoulder. It still beeps at me. Apparently, it cares more that I stay in the lane than me trying to get a little safety room. I assume it is blind to those sorts of obstacles.
Last week I was in a fast food drive thru late at night. When I made my order I was told it would take 6 minutes to cook and the staff asked if that was okay. Everything was fine until a couple minutes into that when another car pulled up behind me. After waiting about 3 or 4 minutes they decided to honk.
Fortunately they did nothing else and didn’t honk again because it confused the staff who thought I needed something and frankly it was loud enough to hurt my ears. I really don’t understand what they thought they would get out of doing that.
@1 and @2, I’ve had the same experience with my car and also had to disable the steering wheel jerk feature. That would be an utter nightmare if there’s any kind of road construction forcing cars to veer out of the lane to go around the workers, and the car decides to veer back into the lane.
I also had the experience of the car’s backup camera hallucinating no car behind me when I was parallel parking. I had a car full of people for a work event and was parallel parking on a tree-lined street under dappled shade. Good thing I use my eyes and my attention to park, because I glanced at the front screen that displays the camera…and it saw nothing, when there was clearly a light-colored car behind me. I would have plowed right into it had I not used my senses.
I’ve noticed that since the days of GPS and later infotainment systems on phones, fewer and fewer people have any kind of sense of where they’re going. They turned off that part of their brain and rely on tech--which we see doesn’t always work, or doesn’t understand new situations.
Follow up to my last post: what if the rash of really terrible drivers that everyone’s complaining about is just the logical endpoint of people turning off their brains and letting their infotainment system do their thinking for them as they barrel down the highway at 75 mph playing with their phones?
And much like AI hallucinating, the electronic brains are just not up to the task?
Re:#3
In my experience, when my order takes a longish time, I am directed to park in a certain area and my order is carried to my car when it is ready. That would have been a better solution under normal circumstances. However, you did say it was late at night. Often, that means only one person is on duty, and it wouldn’t be safe for them to leave the building.
The honking fool, however, was accomplishing nothing by his rude action, except to expose themselves as a thoughtless (in both senses of the word) jerk.
Cars these days have become like cable TV -- loaded with things touted by manufacturers, of which you wind up actively using a small percentage.
But what these things cannot take into account is other idiot drivers on the road.
As a long-term cycle commuter and utility cyclist my working assumption is that any driver of a private motor vehicle is to be considered as a mentally and perceptually challenged psychopath.
Assuming that a driver has the slightest level of rationality, or even the ability to see anything other than a motor vehicle on a road is extremely dangerous.
As a long-term pedestrian my working assumption is that any cyclist is to be considered as a mentally and perceptually challenged psychopath.
People driving cars know what a “pedestrian cross-walk” is and who has the “right-of-way” therein.
@9 chigau
People driving cars know what a “pedestrian cross-walk” is and who has the “right-of-way” therein.
Well, maybe where you live, but the opposite happened to me just this past weekend.
I’ve nearly been run over twice by car drivers who simply didn’t stop at red lights at pedestrian crossings, and another two times by drivers completely ignoring both “no right / left turn” signs and the existence of their own turn indicators. I now pretty much assume anybody driving a car is actively trying to kill me until they demonstrate otherwise.
I’ve had a few close calls with cyclists (although never quite so obviously egregious), but those are at least much less likely to result in serious injury or death.
#6: I suggested parking in one of their reserved waiting spots when I paid at the window but the staff told me not to do that. There were two staff but I think both were women and I think it was around 2am or 3am.
#9 & #10: I know who has the right of way generally. But a loose grasp of physics made me decide to avoid arguments with anything that outweighs me by a quarter ton or more when walking or biking. Later I met a very large person and revised it to an eighth of a ton. I didn’t want to get in any arguments with them, either.
I ended up needing treatment for a head wound (in the days before cycle helmets were common) when a solidly built pedestrian tried to nip between cars turning the same way I was on a green light. There were cars turning to one side of me, a set of metal railings to the other, and her straight in front of me, in the split second I had I decided the pedestrian was the softest option. Hit her with one side of my handlebar, front wheel spun though ninety degrees, bike stopped I landed on my back hitting my head in the process. Pedestrians can be dangerous to other road users too.
“Pedestrians can be dangerous to other road users too.”
That’s some classic cyclist responsibility shirking, right there. And they wonder why they’re hated by drivers and pedestrians alike. You said it yourself -- YOU HIT HER. Did you follow up with “now look what you made me do”?
@14 via 13
If that pedestrian was jaywalking or going against the light, you can’t blame the cyclist. Many years ago I was approaching an intersection where someone in the oncoming lane was waiting to make a left in front of me. For some odd reason, they decided to turn when I was mere feet away. Technically, I HIT HIM, because there was no way I could’ve avoided it, but THEY received a citation for failure to the yield the right of way, not me.
I drive, walk, run, and bike regularly. I have had issues with people in every one of those categories. It’s not the category, it’s the people who are either discourteous or oblivious to those around them. There is a paved trail nearby that I use often. No motor vehicles allowed. I’ve been running and have had cyclists whiz by within inches of me, never announcing that they are overtaking. Conversely, I’ve been biking and have come up behind walkers who insist on walking two or three abreast and will not move over in spite of the rings from my bell and shouts of “On your left”. And then there are the lone walkers who wear isolating around-the-ear headphones who would scarcely notice a bomb going off behind them, but always seem to manage to walk in the center of the path, if not meandering side-to-side.
But cars, SUVs, and monster trucks can be the worst, mostly because that’s a couple of tons of steel that can crush you like a fly on a windshield.
sonofrojblake @14
She was crossing a carriageway when the pedestrian light was on red, and the vehicular left turn light was on green (we drive on the left here), with rush hour levels of cars turning. Pedestrians have an obligation to follow the Highway Code in the UK, she should not have tried to cross in that situation. Had I had more time I might have chosen differently, but with the choice of fixed metal, tons of moving metal, and the small chance there was enough room to get passed her, with no possibility of stopping in time (and I did brake as hard as I could) I chose the small chance. I seriously doubt that many people would have chosen differently, it’s the kind of situation where, because there is so little time, your amygdala makes the decision for you, and it isn’t interested in anything but keeping you alive. All I am saying is that every kind of road user has choices about how they use the road, whether they are mainly on the carriageway or on the footway or a cycleway; they should all always take particular care when crossing any of the other ways, and if they don’t, then they are at fault.
jimf @15
Exactly.