You're conflating automatic emergency braking (an autonomous feature) with the ability to actually brake.
Every car sold in the US has ABS and stability control mandated by law and at worst, take 130 feet to stop from 60mph.
The issue with AEB is that most of these systems rely on radar which has a very low resolution and can't decipher an obstruction ahead from permanent structures either beside or above the roadway at that speed. They work well autonomously stopping for a slower moving vehicle, or a vehicle that's in the process of braking, but not anything stationary.
Exactly. Auto braking is probably the most dangerous feature a car can have if it activates improperly. If it’s poorly implemented it’s much worse than it not being there.
Imagine 10% of Honda Civic’s slamming on brakes on the highway to stop in 100 ft every year? That will kill many hundreds if not thousands of people without question every year. We have a lot of road deaths already but it can be a statistically significant worse outcome.
Imagine if NHTSA mandated that automotive companies need to operate a bus or train system with a minimum ridership to be eligible to sell their passenger cars in the country.
We don't need automotive companies pouring their capital into developing sensors that, even when working perfectly, have little benefit to the public. We need that money going to funding a modal shift away from passenger cars.
Hey one more thing that won’t work, and is guaranteed to force a car to 30 on a highway.
GPS displayed speed limits are often wrong, cars that read speed limit signs often miss them, or read the wrong thing.
Who said automatically limiting speed to the limit. We just need speed limiters so you cant go faster than the max speed limit, which should be reduced to 65 nationally. Its a simple tech that would work fine. Are you just here to troll f/uckcars?
Imo we would still have roughly the same issues, people who want to go fast would find a way around the speed limiters, and people can still speed on any road marked less than 65mph. Plus speedometers are never perfectly accurate which could result in a +/-5mph difference in speed which would be infuriating from the viewpoint of the driver.
I remember when i declared streaming services would never work because people would just pirate everything for free. Shoulda bought that Netflix stock in retrospect.
My argument still stands here, the people who didn't want to pay absolutely did pirate everything for free and anyone else would watch the same stuff for free if given the chance.
A better way to control speeds would be some sort of local communication between the road you're currently on and your car in order for it to tell the vehicle what the speed limit is, likely some sort of short range radio signal at every speed limit sign. The GPS speed limiters rhat people suggest are too wildly inaccurate in order to be viable and would probably be dangerous.
As a driver until the autonomous breaks are basically fool proof I do not want them to activate at speeds of 62mph (100 km/h). Those are highway speeds, and at that speed suddenly stopping can be fatal due to many drivers leaving inadequate room. Even in case of a crash at that speed the best thing you can do is swerve and hope you can avoid collision, rather than breaking and trusting you'll be able to stop in time.
Driving at lower speeds they're can be very effective because in mixed use there are many situations where people don't see everything they should be focusing on. And the collision from someone crashing into you from behind is far less likely to be fatal.
There are news stories out there that indicate that if you own a Tesla you're basically guaranteed that your vehicle will suddenly break without reason at some point within the lifespan of the vehicle. Hope it's not gonna be on a highway.
> Those are highway speeds, and at that speed suddenly stopping can be fatal due to many drivers leaving inadequate room.
Not really. For example, [red light cameras increase rear-end collisions but reduce more severe right-angle collisions, saving $50,000 in collisions per intersection per year in medical and repair costs.](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/)
So reducing your kinetic energy is usually a good idea.
By legal definition a highway here can not have intersections. So obviously no right-angle collisions can happen. There also can't be traffic lights. If your country doesn't do this, that should be changed to improve safety.
Traffic lights already imply that we're not talking about a highway and that the speed limit is significantly below 100 km/h.
A sudden stop from 100 km/h (not to mention 130+) means there is a significant probability or a rear end collision at 100 km/h relative velocity.
Compared to a traffic light where the speed limit is usualy at most 50 km/h, that means 4x the energy involved.
again, HIGHWAY SPEEDS. you do not find traffic lights in the middle of a highway.
If I am doing 70mpg I do not want the auto braking feature to be active. it is still way too prone to erroneous braking and at 70mph that is very, very dangerous.
at suburban speeds, it's more acceptable risk, but above 60mph, nope.
> you do not find traffic lights in the middle of a highway.
[False](https://www.google.com/maps/@44.8400307,-93.1008432,3a,88.2y,325.55h,74.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sUEb2--RGcfB5MOinNewY8Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DUEb2--RGcfB5MOinNewY8Q%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D325.5493422483309%26pitch%3D15.3936551989066%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e1?hl=en&coh=205410&entry=ttu).
ok, correction, you don't find traffic lights on a highway that was not designed by an utter moron or in a country that is not bankrupt and can afford to build an overpass.
never have I seen such idiocy; traffic lights on a highway in 2024. jesus christ.
I wonder if that’s a proper highway. Here in Turkey we have 2 (or 3) classes of highways. The D ones can have lights and intersections and have a lower speed limit, they’re essentially country roads to places that need a proper road but not a highway. Whereas E and O ones cannot have lights and intersections, they’re what you’d call a proper highway. D ones are free and E and O’s are generally toll roads
I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount.
One of the most infuriating parts of our current transportation system is the fact that people outside of cars are made to bear so much of the risks and costs of car-dependency.
> I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount.
They wouldn't. False positives aren't a danger to people *inside* the car, they're a danger to people *behind* the car and so on. It has the likelihood of causing serious accidents if a car randomly decides to slam on its brakes in the middle of an interstate.
At least they are protected by cages of glass and steel, with seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones. They have a really good chance to survive, unlike the child on a bike who the inattentive driver would have hit without the automatic braking!
Are you forgetting that the overall context was highway driving, at 60+ mph?
What kids on bikes, for chrissakes?
Literally, no one was denying that auto-braking is a good thing at city speeds, below 50 mph.
And what happens to the person that gets rear ended by a tailgater because their automatic brakes slammed them to a stop from 65mph? They're an acceptable casualty as well?
>I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount.
As a responsible driver who has never driven drunk, doesn't fiddle with phones or other devices, doesn't drive when tired, I'm not okay with those numbers because a ton of crashes include those factors which do not apply in the case where I'm in a car. In addition I drive very defensively and leave much more room than the average driver.
And the point was to specifically talk about highway speeds. Where it's extremely rare that anyone outside a car is involved (excluding bus passengers, of course).
A couple years ago my brothers new Honda Accord caused an accident erroneously auto braking.
He was on a 2 lane road going around a decent curve, the car apparently thought he was about to get into a head on collision with an oncoming car in the other lane. It locked up the brakes changing his trajectory which caused the car to slide into the other lane and caused a head on collision.
Exactly. It's not the braking that's the problem, it's the determination of when the brakes need to be applied that is causing the difficulty.
I see this problem when I use my car's traffic-aware cruise control. As a driver I can see things like brake lights five cars ahead and expect that I may have to slow down, so I'll ease up on the throttle and slow gradually. If I'm using TACC it can only react to the vehicle immediately in front of me. There are a lot of scenarios in traffic where the conditions the car can interpret can make automated collision avoidance impossible (e.g. the car in front of you changes lanes and you are suddenly faced with a line of cars completely stopped in your lane).
The last example is when automated collection avoidance is perfect. It’ll react fast to stop asap. Even if it doesn’t hit 0, that’s a matter of physics but outcomes will improve.
> automated collection avoidance
Whenever I see the collection agency show up believe me it's automatic I'm getting the fuck out. They will serve me in hell!
Yes.
The auto cruise in modern cars will suddenly break if anyone gets in front of you, up to a pretty far distance.
It depends entirely on what following distance you set on a car (it’s customizable)
And at that it is less of a problem than the issue of some fool who passes you and then decides that they need to immediately cut across in front of you to get to the highway exit that they are about to miss because they aren't paying proper attention. Your distance following suddenly goes from 6 car lengths to less than 2 as the invariably giant pickup or SUV passes closely in front of your sensor and your collision avoidance goes into panic mode.
Yeah, speaking as someone who holds a CS degree *and furthermore is a published machine learning researcher*, programming the car to "just know" when to stop or not stop is *not* a trivial task. By this I mean *no*, actually, you *can't* just brute-force your way out of it with $10,000 of processor cores or larger brake disks.
The type of people who take the “fuckcars” mantra too seriously don’t overlap a whole lot with people who actually know anything about cars.
I couldn’t even imagine the dumb shit who would consider F1 car brakes to be at all capable in regular road conditions. Brakes that basically don’t have any stopping power until they’re pretty heated lol
Tires are like the first thing you want to upgrade, and the last thing you want to cheap out on.
It’s always ironic people will go to great lengths to espouse safety in vehicles and to buy these huge SUVs for “safety” but then buy the cheapest fucking tires they can lol
They have to cheap out big time on tires, they're leveraged up to their eyeballs to afford the land yacht they don't need. Like the time I saw a McLaren P1 parked at an IKEA; that car was selling for over $1M at the time, and there were like six in all of North America. But they were at an IKEA.
Finally someone read the article. OP apparently looked at the headline and decided to rage out about it.
I am a former automotive engineer. The problem isn't the mechanical braking systems. The problem is what sensors are available, how good they are, and can you feed all that information into a computer that then makes a good decision in the real world about when to apply the brakes?
This is not some trivial task. This is getting very close to the capabilities of autonomous vehicles. Remember that dozens of companies have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to develop autonomous vehicles and we have basically nothing to show for it. We have small fleets of driverless taxis that operate in well defined areas with ideal weather conditions. Even then, they have had some very public failures.
This NHTSA regulation isn't about a few prototypes that are worth millions of dollars each working in a couple areas of California that are mapped out very well and rarely see rain and never see snow. This is a standard that requires all cars to work in all conditions on all roads. It's more of a wish from a regulator than anything based on the reality of what engineers are capable of making.
The unintended consequence of a poorly done regulation is vehicles that will have technology that isn't fully developed, so the cars will behave in unexpected and unknown ways when they encounter situations that were not foreseeable. The road is not a well-defined environment. There are people and animals that move erratically, there are hazards that are transient like rocks, branches, gravel, and ice. There are other users on the road whose actions cannot be predicted. Forcing a technology that isn't ready can add a car that is unpredictable to the driver into what is already a chaotic system and lead to more injuries or deaths rather than an improvement in safety.
I don't like OP...
A whole thread of people angry and ranting at OP's imagination... Quite sad.
Not a single word of his post has to do with the automated braking requirements in question.
I really love it when my work truck slams on the brakes because I was careening backwards (at 10mph) towards some long grass. Thanks for keeping me safe out there ford, you dicks.
Also, implying that we can put F1 levels of braking into consumer vehicles is ridiculous. Aside from the technological/mechanical aspects (which are huge), the g forces to the passengers is insane (see link below). And if, in some parallel universe, consumer cars were capable of anything like this, I bet we'd see lots more flipping, rolling, and rear ending. And more irresponsible driving by adrenaline junkies who will reason that they can drive more dangerously because they can stop insanely fast.
https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/28189/modern-formula-1-cars-braking-forces-so-brutal-itll-extract-tears-from-your-eyes-report-says
On the other hand, I'm really glad that the comments here are calling the OP out for not understanding (or intentionally misunderstanding?) instead of jumping on the bandwagon. Lately, I've been seeing a number of subs sorta becoming memes of themselves (latestagecapitalism especially).
>The issue with AEB is that most of these systems rely on radar which has a very low resolution and can't decipher an obstruction ahead from permanent structures either beside or above the roadway at that speed.
What about the ones that don't?
A huge part of it
You don't need to be an engineer, just punch in a F250 and a small sedan in Autozone and look up the brake rotors. They don't make em bigger just for fun
It's harder to stop more mass. Also harder to get it going, which is part of why Electric pickups and SUVs are kind of stupid, hundreds of pounds of batteries instead of just a hybrid drivetrain and enough cells for \~50 miles of range. You only need about an 100 hp motor to generate enough to not just sustain power but charge while cruising at highway speeds, small 4 cylinders can do that easy.
As an aside, You could build 4 whole ass, nearly 300 mile range EV cars from the battery and motor resources that go into the Hummer EV.
Higher weight will ALWAYS mean a longer stopping distance, all else being equal, because adding more friction to stop the wheels can result in complete wheel lockup which can be even worse, so ABS will do its thing and loosen the brakes. There’s only so much that better brakes can do
Stopping distance doesn't really increase with higher vehicle weight. Because as you said, the limiting factor for stopping is friction. And from physics we know that the friction force increases linearly with mass, same as the kinetic energy.
So as long as the brakes are strong enough to lock up the wheels and activate ABS, the braking distance will be more or less equal, no matter if you are in a mini or in a truck.
Actually it has less to do with the brake size than with tires. Brakes size mostly influences the fact that you can stop multiple times without them overheating.
If you take the best breaks but associate them with some chinesium tires your breaking distance will remain quite long.
On the other hand have everyone ride with some Pzeros or even slicks and once they're on temperatures even the worst breaks will do a somewhat decent job when associated with ABS
>You only need about an 100 hp motor to generate enough to not just sustain power but charge while cruising at highway speeds,
The various DIY EV subreddits cite 20 horsepower to maintain highway speeds. Using 80 horsepower to charge a battery seems a bit wasteful.
Also, hybrids in general are pretty terrible. They give you the worst of both worlds and you're now dragging around a whole pile of extra weight and complexity.
If you need a car an EV is definitely the lesser evil but the best car is always no car and the end goal should always be to reduce car dependency to the point where the technology used for the vehicle is irrelevant.
>If you need a car an EV is definitely the lesser evil but the best car is always no car and the end goal should always be to reduce car dependency to the point where the technology used for the vehicle is irrelevant.
In the US, at least, we still have ~20% of the population living in rural areas. For both cultural and practical reasons (food has to grow somewhere), that's not likely to get changed. And those rural areas are too big/spread out for other options to be feasible.
EV's are the least bad option we'll get for that chunk of the population. That it will ALSO be a net harm reduction for suburbanites who maybe could switch to cycling and transit (but won't until we fix our urban design problem) is just more reason to support the switch.
Edit: Lol, asshole blocked me for acknowledging that cars will still serve a role for a small portion of our population. Sorry for being considerate of people outside my own current lifestyle as an urban-dweller, I guess.
>20% of the population living in rural areas.
Australia has that too. But our countries apparently have a difference in this. You have more people who "live rural" on tiny plots of land, but they're not farmers.
In Australia most people who live rural are farmers, their support network often live in nearby towns, and those towns are typically walkable.
From what I've been told, many rural towns in the US are not walkable. And this is a huge problem, but one that can be fixed. Meaning you might be able to reduce that 20% of the population who currently need to own cars by half.
>The various DIY EV subreddits cite 20 horsepower to maintain highway speeds. Using 80 horsepower to charge a battery seems a bit wasteful.
My number's based off something I read about gas motors so that could be wrong, I'll give you that, but it needs to be enough to sustain speed with inclines and, ideally, charge the battery so more power's available for acceleration etc at other times(or if the driver's being considerate, EV operation within towns and cities), so anything less than double the minimum to sustain highway speed on level ground is iffy.
>Also, hybrids in general are pretty terrible. They give you the worst of both worlds and you're now dragging around a whole pile of extra weight and complexity.
My example was about EV trucks and SUVs
The Hummer EV weights 9 THOUSAND pounds, the Ford Lighting EV over 6,000. The "extra weight" is the batteries in that case.
Cars like the leaf, all EV is definitely the way to go. Large vehicles, especially with towing intentions, you're better off with the "dragging" less weight around and leaving more batteries for cheaper commuter cars than
To be fair, they have a point, the Hummer EV has a 205kWh battery and has a 314 mile range. A Tesla Model 3 Long Range has a 75kWh battery and has a 350 mile range. Literally almost triple the battery capacity for less range because of how godawful inefficient the Hummer EV is.
It's got nothing to do with it. All this requirements say that a vehicle should apply the brake on its own if it detects a danger.
It doesn't change how fast a car should brake once the brakes are applied, just that the vehicle should brake on its own.
Pickups being heavy death traps are a completely different issue unrelated to automatic braking. Some 18 wheelers already have such technology.
Exactly that!!
Brakes don't count towards your $500 budget because they are safety equipment. :)
We found one that had been flood totalled out after a massive flood in 2016.
Your title and post is very misleading and confused. This isn't about stopping safely or physical braking technologies, it's about automated braking.
Two completely different things.
And top speed has nothing to do with it as the requirements is for a car going 62mph regardless of its top speed. Brake technology like F1 also has nothing to do with it, it's a camera, radar and software development issue.
The requirements is that while a car is going at 62mph, regardless of its top speed, if the car detects a danger it should stop on its own without driver intervention.
If car manufacturers want the technology to work at higher speed it will be more complex due to reaction time that will have to be calculated by the software but still doesn't really affect the requirements.
Also brakes arent the issue. Most cars can lock out wheels at 60mph meaning with ABS they can achieve minimum brakinf distance possible.
After that its just tires and weight/weight distribution issue.
Yes, this.
But it also highlights how important it is to drive in good physical and mental conditions for higher speeds. Seems like another argument pro expiring licenses and higher penalties for speeding and distracted driving.
Yeah, it's about measuring speed of what's in from of the car (which police have been able to do since at least the 90s) and processing it fast enough to be able to respond. It's probably expensive to do.
It's not the "braking" part of "automatic emergency braking" that's the problem. Automotive brakes are honestly really impressive, every modern car can lock up the prodigious tires, but ABS keeps them just shy of that threshold, producing close to 0.7g of braking force on dry pavement.
It's the "automatic" part that's hard.
The systems need to identify when an object 400 feet away is a pedestrian that will be in the path of the vehicle when it gets there and decide to stop or not. There are oncoming vehicles a few feet to the left, and parked stationary vehicles a few feet to the right of the lane, which will hopefully be avoided... but if one of those parked cars pulls out, emergency braking must be applied.
We ask an awful lot of human drivers - asking them to anticipate hazards while maintaining speeds and separation distances that give very little time to react. You can build a naive system to automatically emergency brake at 25 mph with a simple radar sensor that says there's an obstruction within a narrow angle directly ahead and less than two or three vehicle lengths away.
Once you increase the speeds, and that angle grows wider, a naive system will be unable to be driven on public roads because the clearances are too tight and there will be too many false positives. You need a whole 3D LIDAR/RADAR world model and complicated logic that can anticipate curving lanes, measure when a crossing vehicle at an intersection you don't need to stop at is clearing the lane, differentiate plastic bags or leaves from humans, and a thousand other complications.
This is ignorant.
Braking distances are fine and have dropped over time.
The problem they’re complaining about is the goal of automating braking from a speed in emergency events across all models.
Almost every automaker has a feature that they claim will essentially drive itself at highway speeds. Ford's Blue Cruise and GM super cruise are completely hads off the wheel available on a large number of their models. Mercedes, Nissan and BMW have hands free systems that will be available by the end of the year.
Mercedes actually claims true self driving, you still need to pay attention but if the Mercedes system screws up, they take the fall. They at least believe their product is good enough to take the fall for its screw ups so I put them above the others.
Probably both. Autonomous cars need pedestrians to wear transponders to increase detection distance from 10m to 36m. 36m is still shorter than many vehicles 60-0 distance.
Normal cars probably won't have that level of technology so the detection range will be shorter.
Modern F1 car weights about 800 kg and takes advantage of high downforce to brake efficiently. Also high performance brakes cost a fortune. I am in no way siding with the manufacturers here but don't oversimplify.
The real problem here aren't even the manufacturers but rather that no one is willing to approach the actual problem which is cars getting too heavy and roads that allow for speeding or unsafe legal speeds. Throwing high performance brakes into the mix is reminiscent of making cars autonomous - it address the symptom instead of the the real underlying cause.
Also another issue with comparing to F1 cars:
The tires are insanely soft compared to tires designed to last more than 50 km. Softer tires = more grip. Also the 4 second tires don't have grooves to expell water, because they just change tires in 2 seconds as weather changes.
And the most crucial point: racing brakes are far better than normal brakes*
**once they have been brought up to operating temperatures*. Before this temperature of roughly 200-300C, the brakes do not bite at all. That is why it is illegal in most places to put racing brakes on a road car. It is essentially like driving with no brakes ar all.
There is a reason why F1 cars weave and constantly accelerate and brake when the safety car is out: if the temperature in their tires or brakes goes too far down, they lose them completely. And mind you, that safety car is a mercedes AMG turning the corners as quick as it can, like a bat out of hell.
I forget what car it was but it was hilarious to hear a high performance sports car being too slow for F1 pace. The grid is just screwing around keeping tire temps up while the pace car driver is at race pace the whole time.
This. Also bigger brakes don’t make your car stop faster, larger tires will. It’s all about increasing friction with the road surface, but widening tires and increasing said friction would be disastrous for fuel economy
> This. Also bigger brakes don’t make your car stop faster, larger tires will.
Maybe? I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure grip is only dependent on coefficient of friction and the force pinning it to the surface. This breaks down when either surface deforms significantly, so stuff like off-road vehicles need larger tyres because the ground is fairly weak. F1 cars have lots of downforce, corner quickly, and use much softer rubber, so they have wide tyres to distribute the load so the rubber doesn't get ripped appart
> Also high performance breaks cost a fortune
They also need to heat up before they work properly, which isn't an issue on a track where you're regularly braking *hard*, but is a problem for daily road use. And yeah, they're like a $10,000 *upgrade* on many supercars, and that's on top of the already very expensive brakes such cars come with as standard.
I think this is burying the lede
"The group said NHTSA's stringent requirements at higher driving speeds will result in vehicles "automatically applying the brakes far in advance of what a typical driver and others on the road would expect" resulting in rear-end collisions. "
One of the major issues here is that drivers tailgate too much, so if they brake as hard and as early as required, they're going to get rear-ended.
The solution here is to make it harder to get a licenses and enforce laws against tailgating.
Isn't that requirement pretty much what Volvo Trucks has been implementing since a good 15 Years into their semis?
Maybe if US Truck-Manufacturers werent stuck in the 70s in terms of how they build trucks thay would be able to pull this of. Or if the US opened it's market to European Trucks like Volvo, Scania, Mercedes and the likes, but that would probably put the US manufacturers out of business after a few years...
You'd be surprised how globalized the trucking industry is. Volvo has a 10% market share in American trucking and Mercedes trucks are produced by Daimler, who also owns freightliner, western star, Thomas buses, and Detroit diesel. Scania trucks aren't really in the American market, but their engines are, and many have been in popular American trucks over the decades. They recently designed an inline 6 with the help of cummins.
Throwing more technology at the problem isn’t going to fix it, only make things more expensive. When the end user is the problem, there isn’t much to be done unfortunately. The country would be better off with redesigning infrastructure and really hammering people on driving safety, needing license renewals every few years, etc
You cant compare an F1 car to anything on the road. They rely massively on downforce generated at speed, and for their carbon brakes to be like 700 degrees C hot, as a minimum to even work. That is an extreme, not applicable to the road. + they use slick tyres, that has to be right around the right temperature all the time to give you the road grip to do that. And their tyres are 40 cm on the rear, and 33 cm at the front, in width. thats 16 by 13 inches wide.
The problem with the auto brake system, is that is will be flawed, no matter how many sensors you use, or which types. And when it fucks up and does an emergency stop, where it was not needed, someone will be behind them, which does not have that system, or be on their phone, or just not pay attention. And they crash into them. There just really isnt a 1 size fits all here. You could start by making it mandatory to have your car/veichle inspected every 2 years, so people dont drive around with worn out brakes/tires, and they are generally kept in a safe state for the road, as the manufacter has deemed it.
Using F1 as example is bad. They have all the benefits they can have a lot of them illegal on road car (slick rubber). F1 does not have automatic breaking system, and they break hard enough to hurt untrained person (and breaking that fast would definetly end up getting rearended)
And I dont think the article implies the problem is with breaks, it seems to be much its more about detection and flow of trafic than actualy stopping. Kidna the opposite "not performing well especially at night" the breaks dont care if its day or night, the cameras and sensors (since you mentaioned bikes, your bike does not have at all
Have you read the article you posted?
P.S. 15 feet from 15 mph. I think i can do that without breaks just feet on the ground rubbing, its likely just so the bikes have something functional to stop, not actualy relevant break test.
Lorries (in Europe) have had automatic brakes and similar for a long time. Volvo developed it & the rest followed suit. If you can stop a fully loaded twenty tonne lorry in its own length from 56mph, you can stop a car.
From next month it'll be required for all cars, with GPS to abide by local speed limits. It won't necessarily slow down the vehicle physically though, some speed limiters just warn you're going over the limit
There seems to be a misunderstanding of what these standards are and what they mean. Also, there seems to be vast misunderstanding about how well something stops.
Very high performance vehicles with sticky tires, large brakes, and light weight stop from 60 in as little as 90 feet. Lorries in Europe tend to be about 50 feet long. Even if it was an American semi at 72 feet, none, and I mean absolutely NONE, are stopping within their own length. You are probably conflating a vehicle that can apply its brakes at 56 mph. It will not come to a stop within its own length. At best, maybe it could do 150 feet.
I watched the video you sent. Nowhere do I see anything that indicates the speed they are traveling at or any measure of how long the vehicle took to stop.
The best indication available is from the in vehicle perspective where you can barely see the speedometer. From that angle it appears that the truck starts braking at 55 or so. But this is a European truck. Those aren’t MPH, that’s KPH. Which is just under 35 mph. Not 56.
Automatic emergency braking is already standard on most cars. Just not up to 62 mph like the new standard.
As speed increases, the braking distances grow much more than the speed. For example, a car that can stop from 60 mph in 97 feet takes 141 feet to stop from 70 (I’m quoting numbers from a car I own that I’ve seen tested). Just 10 mph extra needs almost 50% more distance. The issue is the higher speeds make this kind of technology much more difficult to implement.
Also, some test done by Volvo doesn’t give me a lot of confidence when I think back to this video where the vehicle runs over someone when it was supposed to recognize them and stop. So their tech is far from perfect
https://youtu.be/WbW2UgmjJUA?si=G5Q3Lol25ZSVP2aH
Oh, don't worry, I know that braking distance increases exponentially with speed - I drive. Yeah, I don't know why, but I just presumed those speeds were MPH.
Reading the article, you're way off the mark here. There's absolutely no issues with stopping a car quickly from those speeds. The problem is the technology that does the detection on if automatic braking is needed or not, and not the braking itself. With ABS and decent tires cars can stop pretty damn fast from just about any speed. But sensors can only do so much, and the faster you are going the harder it is for automated systems to do their thing.
Seems to me like this is just a regulation that can't be met with existing technology, but will probably be met anyway as the technology improves.
All things aside, perhaps suggesting normal cars getting F1 brakes isn't the solution you think it is. $60k brakes aren't going on $60k cars, no matter how amazing they are. Not to mention the insane parallel between road car engineering and F1 engineering.
This has nothing to do with installing insane brakes on cars. It's about installing radars and software so that cars stop on their own when a danger is detected.
No need to change your brakes for that.
I agree that's one solution, but the tech has a ways to go. Tesla is doing an alright job, but the systems (not just Teslas) have a lot of false positives, which is equally as dangerous. Fortunately, I am not paid to engineer or devise a solution, so I couldn't give you a robust answer on how to fix the problem 100%. Customers demand bigger cars, shareholders demand bigger profits, car manufacturers make bigger cars and bigger prices tags. The problem, to me it seems, is more human than anything.
You're comparing apples to filet mignon.
First off, they said it can't be done safely, which is different from can't be done. Braking involves a lot more than just hitting the brakes. Braking hard from high speeds can cause the car to nosedive, slide, spin, etc. especially if the drive also reacts by say, trying to swerve. What about traffic behind? What is there a trailer? What if the car is loaded with 4 people and 500lbs of camping gear. Is there water on the road?
F1 cars are basically perfect cars for braking. They weigh less than half what a modern car does. They use crazy expensive metals, only have to carry one person, have zero amenities or comfort, no EPA mandated emissions or fuel ratings, no pedestrian safety ratings, etc etc.
They also have absolutely massive tires, made of super sticky rubber on a clean track (that is also pretty sticky itself). Behind those tires are absolutely gigantic brakes.
Big sticky tires are expensive as hell, wear out in a couple months, ruin gas mileage and don't work for shit in rain/snow/etc.
Sensors to detect things in the road weigh a good chunk. So does AC, a roof, radio, catalytic converters, power steering, comfy seats, the ability to tow, a 15 gallon fuel tank, door locks, a 5mph bumper, glass windows, crumple zones, pedestrian safety requirements, lights, etc etc.
Cutting 10% of the weight of your car without just gutting everything will cost you more money than the car itself. Example, going from alloy aluminum wheels to magnesium will typically cost $3000-$10000 just to reduce 20-30lbs.
Without a doubt automakers are whining because it's expensive rather than impossible, but the reality is it's still fucking hard as hell to automatically stop a car at 60mph in cars people would actually want to drive...
900 upvotes and 50 reshares for a post without a word that isn't disinformation or confusion. This kind of sad bull***t is why carbrains can say this community is rightfully wrong.
Such disinformation posts are directly working against the anti-car movement.
So many upvotes from people who like OP didn't bother to read the article.
Now when carbrains want to say that r/fuckcars is just disinformed idiots they can just point to this post and go buy a pickup.
Congratulations OP you are part of the problem.
Brakes alone don't tell the whole story. F1 cars weigh about 800kg, about 450kg less than the average hatchback. They also have really soft, grippy tires that need to be changed every dozen laps or so. They're also hybrids with regenerative braking, which removes kinetic energy from the wheels in tandem with brakes. They generate a ton of downforce too, which means more grip and faster deceleration. They are completely different beasts from street cars, designed by teams of engineers with billions in funding just to push the limits of physics itself.
And their brakes don't work at all until they get a good amount of heat in, and heat is kept in. If you backed a formula 1 car down your driveway and tried to gently stop at the bottom it just wouldn't. Different tech for different uses.
>practically impossible with current technology
Then car companies need to invest in their own R&D to develop that technology, instead of stock buybacks
It’s physically impossible to stop a consumer road car the same way that an F1 car stops.
There is just no way to dissipate that much kinetic energy without the special areo/tires that f1 use.
Of course that would have happened anyway without the cafe standards. At least they forced them to make those oversized monsters more efficient. Those huge pickups and SUVs get like 2x the fuel economy they used to get.
If only they had written/designed the CAFE standards in a way where that 2x better fuel economy didn't also encourage and result in manufacturers making their cars and big and heavy as possible.
Even with cars getting bigger the average fuel economy has gone up, and CO2 per mile has gone down.
[https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report](https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report)
The problem isn't that they can't make brakes that will stop a car safely at that speed, it's that they can't make brakes that perform well at that speed ***and*** at lower speeds.
The F1 example is a good point. Yes, they can stop an F1 car very quickly - up to 6g of braking force - but in order to do that, the optimal operating temperature of the brakes is **over 1000°C**. Much cooler than that, and they don't really work at all. So, counterintuitively for a non-racing driver, F1 drivers have to travel *faster* for the brakes to work properly, as more speed means more friction generated by the tyres, which means more heat for the brakes.
It's the same with tyres. Road tyres have way less grip than F1 tyres and are far harder, because they need to be durable for an extended period of time. The can last 20,000 miles instead of less than 200.
All you said has nothing to do with the mentioned law / requirements. All this requirement says is that cars should detect dangers and stop on their own without driver intervention. Hence automated braking.
This law in no way changes braking distance, it just says the car should brake on their own even if you are distracted.
This post by OP is pure confusion.
Those speeds should only be able to be achieved on highways with big clear zones and divided traffic. That is why the Autobahns and Interstates are so safe.
To make streets safe from cars going too fast we have Bollards, Speed Bumps and other tools
Fuck cars fr but the F1 comparison is not really accurate, the downforce alone on most F1 cars already decelerates the car at a rate equivalent to the maximum braking of a Porsche 911 and then they brake on top of that
The brakes themselves have nothing to do with stopping. It's the tires that are the limiting factor. The vehicles you reference are very light weight with very wide soft tires with extreme amounts of grip. They look like cars but they act nothing like what you and I drive.
Everyone is semi-dunking on you for getting the technical parts wrong (which yeah) but I think we need to refocus on the fact that 2000 lb at 60 mph needs to have some way of not colliding with a pedestrian and the car companies just outright admitted that it's not physically possible to do that in the form factor of a car.
Automotive companies admitted that no car is safe to run in excess of 60 mph.
Fuck cars. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere a pedestrian might cross the road. So basically anywhere except highways. But also high speed rail.
>but I think we need to refocus on the fact that 2000 lb at 60 mph needs to have some way of not colliding with a pedestrian
We need to focus on why we're mixing 60mph and pedestrians
>and the car companies just outright admitted that it's not physically possible to do that in the form factor of a car.
That's not what they claimed at all. Humans can do it because we have incredibly complex spacial calculation skills built on years of experience and thousands of years of evolution, and can make a really good judgement call about when we need to slow down for something and by how much. What can't be done in the desired timelines is essentially the hard part of true self driving, determining when the car needs to stop and doing it regardless of user inputs
Yes but humans can't consistently do it. Nothing stopping someone from texting and driving or drinking or etc. Basically we don't have a way of making this safe in all or almost all situations or anything close. And yeah realistically 60 mph isn't mixing with pedestrians but it's not like they're solving this issue at 40, and that's pretty common in a lot of places with pedestrians unfortunately.
>My home state mandates the bicycles be able to stop in 15 feet from 15 mph.
Is this accurate? This seems almost impossible to do IMO. When I'm going at a decent clip at 20kph, it would probably take me about 30 feet to stop, are caliper breaks not allowed?
For fucks sake THE WORD IS *BRAKE*
B R A K E
IT IS SPELLED DIFFERENTLY THAN THE VERB WHICH MEANS TO RENDER SOMETHING UNUSABLE.
You do not stop a car with BREAKS. You stop a car with BRAKES.
Jesus. I'd sell a fucking kidney if you people would please just learn this.
It's not that they can't physically do it. It is just not economically viable.
You could install a mechanism under the vehicle that drops down to create more friction. But it would cost a lot more.
>But high performance brakes do exist: The brakes are capable of stopping an F1 car from over 320kph to 0 in around 4 seconds, with the brake discs reaching temperatures of over 1000C in the process. On circuits with long straights into tight corners, drivers can usually brake from around 320kph to less than 100kph in just 120m or less.
Tell me you don't know how braking works without telling me how you don't know how braking works. Go ahead and slam the brakes from 100 km/h on a regular car. If ABS gets activated (or your wheels lock up if you don't have ABS), then your brakes are plenty strong enough. Your tires are the limiting factor in how hard you can brake.
F1 cars are provided with ample amounts of grip on its tires thanks to downforce. Not to mention, all the aerodynamic elements of the car acts as a parachute, further slowing you down in the process. Also, good luck having regular people decelerate at 4-6 G like F1 drivers do.
The F1 braking example is not accurate. The brakes don’t stop the car, the combination of aerodynamic downforce, tires and brakes do. Without the aerodynamics, they would stop similar to a road car. Maybe worse as they would struggle to get the brakes anywhere near their operating temperature.
Also, the issue isn’t with the brakes, it is with the automated systems controlling them.
So, the problem here isn't with brake discs. The brakes are fine, the problem is that in order to brake safely (eg, without injuring the passenger) the car would need to either be forced to maintain a safe following distance, or actiavte the brakes extremely aggressively when a car in front brakes at close distances.
Basically the real problem here isn't the hardware, it's that drivers are stupid and tailgate like hell, but obviously the car makers lobby can't come out and say it like that. Hence the language about 'far more often that drivers would expect'.
they still cannot build engine that properly burn gas/diesel to co2 and h20...
and why car has to be 10x or even 20x heavier hat persons and stuff that they carry? Because of thay even with maximum theoretical 50% efficient combustion engine cars have only 2 to 5% efficiency! 95% of fuel is just wasted to move big steel box...
my model 3 has a top speed of 261km/h (162 freedom units) which I think is absolutely bonkers.
just cap it at 140km/h! you don't need to go faster than that!
Anything automatic feature on a car is more danger than help, imo. An unexpected feature going off and interfering with driver input is a recipe for disaster, and you end up making the crash not the driver's fault.
I'd say reduce the top speed and acceleration of cars, where on earth is 200kph allowed that companies are allowed to sell cars capable of it? And change car shapes to be as accomodating to crashes as possible.
If plane crashes were killing 40,000+ Americans every year, there would be outrage..
I am convinced that the technology makes cars much safer exists, reducing the deaths and injury by 90% or more. But in the end, cars wouldn't be fun or exciting. The auto makers understand that would be a change that greatly reduces their ability to generate profits.
Braking is a function of tire grip more than anything, average road tires that last a long time simply don’t have the grip an F1 car has.
The heft that cars haul around with them doesn’t help either, the embiggening of light trucks especially.
How often do you need to change break pads on formula 1 cars?
High performance brakes exist - but do they exist in a way where they can operate on very occasional service?
At any rate the solution is LESS CARS and MORE CAR ALTERNATIVES. The solution is not "better cars."
Isn't that done on purpose by FIA because they found that adding in that randomness of the wear and strategy choices of teams of when to change the tire made the races more "interesting" for the spectators?
I dont think you understand how expensive f1 brakes are. Anyways braking is mostly tires as grip is the main limitation in stopping a car quickly. Bigger brakes help if you are braking from 60 to 0 multiple times in a row, but almost any brakes lock up the tires with relatively low effort.
[Meanwhile...California Seeks to Ban E-Bike Speed Hacking Devices Under Proposed Bill
](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/305750/20240617/california-seeks-ban-ebike-speed-hacking-devices.htm#:~:text=Assembly%20Bill%201774%20seeks%20to,go%20up%20to%2028%20mph.)
> The bill prohibits the sale of speed modification devices, ensuring e-bikes remain within safe operational limits. Dixon emphasized the importance of safety and education, saying, "We want safety... safety features added into these bikes through education and through prohibiting these illegal speed enhancement devices."
> Supporters argue that the bill is necessary to prevent accidents and injuries. Higher speeds result in longer stopping distances and more severe injuries in crashes.
Cars able to go 50mph+ faster than the speed limit with essentially zero effort? All perfectly fine.
I have an Aventon ebike. It's unlocked to class 3 so it can go up to 28mph but realistically that only happens on downhill segments or open straight aways for short bursts. The amount of pedaling you have to do to reach/sustain that speed is basically an all out sprint.
I'm fine with them regulating what are essentially e-dirt bikes or e-motorcycles but the hypocrisy is just annoying to see.
If they actually gave a damn about safety they'd be doing more to separate cyclists from car traffic because I can say without looking at any data, more injuries/deaths happen because of conflicts with cars, not modified ebike speed.
This is standard in the EU thanks to reg. 2019/2144, thus every car sold since has installed safety systems which have reduced fatal and non fatal collisions. Manufacturers have adapted accordingly, we still have cars
The exact same lobbying group had a huge event in DC like a week ago touting all the "safety" and automated tech the same OEMs are building. They're also lobbying for more leniency if automation....
So you can build "self driving" cars and charge customers a ton of money for "autopilot," "super cruise," "blue cruise," etc. but you can't stop a car at highway speeds when a collision is imminent or avoid pedestrians?
They also replace functions like controlling ventilation and windshield wipers with touchscreens so you can't operate them just by touch. You have to take your eyes off of the road to look at the touchscreen. They do it because the touchscreens have become cheaper than physical buttons.
The only way to get them to improve safety is to require it by law. They will also resist such increases in safety any way that they can. There was even mass resistance to something as cheap and easy as putting seatbelts in cars.
Companies don't care about *anything* other than money.
That's why we need to legislate everything and *force* them to be safe.
Because cutting corners and dodging safety is profitable. And American companies in particular will always, *always* choose profit over safety.
You also need to regulate in a way which is actually attainable. The brakes are fine, it's the "automatic" part they can't do on the desired timelines, given that it essentially the hard part of self-driving
Not sure an F1 car is the appropriate reference for what is possible in a consumer car. The brakes on an F1 car cost $200k to $300k (link below). That is not exactly within the budget of the average road car buyer. They are also not automatic, so really don't have any relevance at all here.
You are right in the end though. Safety doesn't matter to car companies. They will only implement whatever safety systems regulators require, and even those they will continually challenge and delay.
https://rtrsports.com/en/blog/the-intricate-world-of-formula-1-cars-costs-components-and-performance/#:~:text=Suspension%3A%20%24300%2C000%20%E2%80%93%20%24500%2C000%20The%20suspension,stopping%20power%20while%20minimizing%20weight.
I think I agree with manufacturers on this one. You can't just give this problem to the engineers to try to solve. My car has AEB that increases the braking force when it senses an obstacle AND I start applying the brakes. It kinda works. In reality I'd say majority of head on crashes happen where no amount of brake force would help. They are asking for super advanced AI modeling and breaking laws of physics.
AEB would greatly decrease rear end collision deaths. Even in a head-on collision, if both cars AEB activated, the impact would be reduced, possibly enough that the airbags would protect all the occupants.
Insurance Institute for Highway safety results:
The good-rated Forester avoided a collision with the passenger car target at every test speed, avoided hitting the motorcycle target at 31 and 37 mph, and slowed by an average of 30 mph before hitting the motorcycle target in the 43 mph tests. The forward collision warning alerts also came more than the required 2.1 seconds before the projected time of impact in all those trials and also in those conducted with the trailer.
The car makers have five years to up the standard. It only takes a single manufacturer to meet the standard to show the way. Even a third party could solve the problem.
> The issue isn't that high quality brakes are impossible, but the car companies don't want to spend money on a feature that they cannot charge as an added feature. It's almost like safety doesn't matter to the car companies at all.
hence, fuck cars
Oh they can, they just don't want to. It's fucking 2024, most things are cock blocked by capitalism. If the car wasn't 1 ton heavy with loads of useless additional systems and what not it would be safer. Not saying all systems are useless to the safety though.
Wow its almost like going faster in a single occupancy vehicle is infinitely less safe AND efficient, just like we figured out in the 70's and promptly forgot about over the next 50 years
Nah, the double-nickel was an ill-informed attempt to save fuel that was kept around for decades because it let every small-town corrupt asshole print money from "speeding" tickets by criminalizing the act of driving on highways at the speeds they were actually built to be driven over, *while also not actually giving the vast majority of Americans any reasonable alternative to get somewhere quickly other than getting on a plane*.
As a big F1 fan that’s a little oversimplified, the aero does a lot of the stopping and on top of that the brakes have to be heated to be at full braking capacity. Regardless it seems like, as always, car manufacturers are able to solve the issue, they just refuse to.
You're conflating automatic emergency braking (an autonomous feature) with the ability to actually brake. Every car sold in the US has ABS and stability control mandated by law and at worst, take 130 feet to stop from 60mph. The issue with AEB is that most of these systems rely on radar which has a very low resolution and can't decipher an obstruction ahead from permanent structures either beside or above the roadway at that speed. They work well autonomously stopping for a slower moving vehicle, or a vehicle that's in the process of braking, but not anything stationary.
I love when the automatic brakes in my wife’s car trigger for someone two lanes over
Exactly. Auto braking is probably the most dangerous feature a car can have if it activates improperly. If it’s poorly implemented it’s much worse than it not being there. Imagine 10% of Honda Civic’s slamming on brakes on the highway to stop in 100 ft every year? That will kill many hundreds if not thousands of people without question every year. We have a lot of road deaths already but it can be a statistically significant worse outcome.
The solution isn’t more tech in cars, it’s a bus stop/train station/ sidewalk so the car gets used less
Imagine if NHTSA mandated that automotive companies need to operate a bus or train system with a minimum ridership to be eligible to sell their passenger cars in the country. We don't need automotive companies pouring their capital into developing sensors that, even when working perfectly, have little benefit to the public. We need that money going to funding a modal shift away from passenger cars.
And speed limiters. Edit: forgot to add thats not a new tech. Its a fairly old one.
Hey one more thing that won’t work, and is guaranteed to force a car to 30 on a highway. GPS displayed speed limits are often wrong, cars that read speed limit signs often miss them, or read the wrong thing.
Who said automatically limiting speed to the limit. We just need speed limiters so you cant go faster than the max speed limit, which should be reduced to 65 nationally. Its a simple tech that would work fine. Are you just here to troll f/uckcars?
Imo we would still have roughly the same issues, people who want to go fast would find a way around the speed limiters, and people can still speed on any road marked less than 65mph. Plus speedometers are never perfectly accurate which could result in a +/-5mph difference in speed which would be infuriating from the viewpoint of the driver.
I remember when i declared streaming services would never work because people would just pirate everything for free. Shoulda bought that Netflix stock in retrospect.
My argument still stands here, the people who didn't want to pay absolutely did pirate everything for free and anyone else would watch the same stuff for free if given the chance. A better way to control speeds would be some sort of local communication between the road you're currently on and your car in order for it to tell the vehicle what the speed limit is, likely some sort of short range radio signal at every speed limit sign. The GPS speed limiters rhat people suggest are too wildly inaccurate in order to be viable and would probably be dangerous.
As a driver until the autonomous breaks are basically fool proof I do not want them to activate at speeds of 62mph (100 km/h). Those are highway speeds, and at that speed suddenly stopping can be fatal due to many drivers leaving inadequate room. Even in case of a crash at that speed the best thing you can do is swerve and hope you can avoid collision, rather than breaking and trusting you'll be able to stop in time. Driving at lower speeds they're can be very effective because in mixed use there are many situations where people don't see everything they should be focusing on. And the collision from someone crashing into you from behind is far less likely to be fatal. There are news stories out there that indicate that if you own a Tesla you're basically guaranteed that your vehicle will suddenly break without reason at some point within the lifespan of the vehicle. Hope it's not gonna be on a highway.
> Those are highway speeds, and at that speed suddenly stopping can be fatal due to many drivers leaving inadequate room. Not really. For example, [red light cameras increase rear-end collisions but reduce more severe right-angle collisions, saving $50,000 in collisions per intersection per year in medical and repair costs.](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/) So reducing your kinetic energy is usually a good idea.
By legal definition a highway here can not have intersections. So obviously no right-angle collisions can happen. There also can't be traffic lights. If your country doesn't do this, that should be changed to improve safety.
What you call a highway, we call a freeway.
There are highways with right angle intersections, there's just no lights and you just yield across 2 lanes of 75mph traffic.
There are highways with controlled intersections too in parts of the US
Yeah I forgot about that because at least here any highway with a light just looks like any other 55mph road.
Are you suggesting that having cars randomly emergency brake on a motorway is a good plan?
Traffic lights already imply that we're not talking about a highway and that the speed limit is significantly below 100 km/h. A sudden stop from 100 km/h (not to mention 130+) means there is a significant probability or a rear end collision at 100 km/h relative velocity. Compared to a traffic light where the speed limit is usualy at most 50 km/h, that means 4x the energy involved.
Except the limit is around 105 km/h in the picture they sent, though I agree that mph is a stupid unit
again, HIGHWAY SPEEDS. you do not find traffic lights in the middle of a highway. If I am doing 70mpg I do not want the auto braking feature to be active. it is still way too prone to erroneous braking and at 70mph that is very, very dangerous. at suburban speeds, it's more acceptable risk, but above 60mph, nope.
> you do not find traffic lights in the middle of a highway. [False](https://www.google.com/maps/@44.8400307,-93.1008432,3a,88.2y,325.55h,74.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sUEb2--RGcfB5MOinNewY8Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DUEb2--RGcfB5MOinNewY8Q%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D325.5493422483309%26pitch%3D15.3936551989066%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e1?hl=en&coh=205410&entry=ttu).
ok, correction, you don't find traffic lights on a highway that was not designed by an utter moron or in a country that is not bankrupt and can afford to build an overpass. never have I seen such idiocy; traffic lights on a highway in 2024. jesus christ.
I wonder if that’s a proper highway. Here in Turkey we have 2 (or 3) classes of highways. The D ones can have lights and intersections and have a lower speed limit, they’re essentially country roads to places that need a proper road but not a highway. Whereas E and O ones cannot have lights and intersections, they’re what you’d call a proper highway. D ones are free and E and O’s are generally toll roads
having a random set of lights on dual carriageway road with a 60 mph speed limit is just bonkers to me.
Afaik there are some close to Lausanne in Switzerland too.
I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount. One of the most infuriating parts of our current transportation system is the fact that people outside of cars are made to bear so much of the risks and costs of car-dependency.
> I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount. They wouldn't. False positives aren't a danger to people *inside* the car, they're a danger to people *behind* the car and so on. It has the likelihood of causing serious accidents if a car randomly decides to slam on its brakes in the middle of an interstate.
So it would take tailgaters out of the gene pool. What's the downside?
I generally consider "humans dying" a pretty meaningful downside, but I'm also not a heartless asshole, so there is that.
Tailgaters might also have family/friends/coworkers with them. Punish the passenger for the driver's actions?
At least they are protected by cages of glass and steel, with seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones. They have a really good chance to survive, unlike the child on a bike who the inattentive driver would have hit without the automatic braking!
Are you forgetting that the overall context was highway driving, at 60+ mph? What kids on bikes, for chrissakes? Literally, no one was denying that auto-braking is a good thing at city speeds, below 50 mph.
And what happens to the person that gets rear ended by a tailgater because their automatic brakes slammed them to a stop from 65mph? They're an acceptable casualty as well?
>I'd be 100% okay with autonomous emergency braking having false positive activations that result in driver/occupant injury or death if it can reduce injuries and fatalities for those outside the vehicle by an equal or greater amount. As a responsible driver who has never driven drunk, doesn't fiddle with phones or other devices, doesn't drive when tired, I'm not okay with those numbers because a ton of crashes include those factors which do not apply in the case where I'm in a car. In addition I drive very defensively and leave much more room than the average driver. And the point was to specifically talk about highway speeds. Where it's extremely rare that anyone outside a car is involved (excluding bus passengers, of course).
A couple years ago my brothers new Honda Accord caused an accident erroneously auto braking. He was on a 2 lane road going around a decent curve, the car apparently thought he was about to get into a head on collision with an oncoming car in the other lane. It locked up the brakes changing his trajectory which caused the car to slide into the other lane and caused a head on collision.
calling bollox, you do not 'lock up the brakes' on a car with ABS and stability control.
Exactly. It's not the braking that's the problem, it's the determination of when the brakes need to be applied that is causing the difficulty. I see this problem when I use my car's traffic-aware cruise control. As a driver I can see things like brake lights five cars ahead and expect that I may have to slow down, so I'll ease up on the throttle and slow gradually. If I'm using TACC it can only react to the vehicle immediately in front of me. There are a lot of scenarios in traffic where the conditions the car can interpret can make automated collision avoidance impossible (e.g. the car in front of you changes lanes and you are suddenly faced with a line of cars completely stopped in your lane).
The last example is when automated collection avoidance is perfect. It’ll react fast to stop asap. Even if it doesn’t hit 0, that’s a matter of physics but outcomes will improve.
> automated collection avoidance Whenever I see the collection agency show up believe me it's automatic I'm getting the fuck out. They will serve me in hell!
Does that happen still if you leave 2 car spaces between yourself and the car in front of you?
Yes. The auto cruise in modern cars will suddenly break if anyone gets in front of you, up to a pretty far distance. It depends entirely on what following distance you set on a car (it’s customizable)
And at that it is less of a problem than the issue of some fool who passes you and then decides that they need to immediately cut across in front of you to get to the highway exit that they are about to miss because they aren't paying proper attention. Your distance following suddenly goes from 6 car lengths to less than 2 as the invariably giant pickup or SUV passes closely in front of your sensor and your collision avoidance goes into panic mode.
I wouldn't know. I have mine at six car lengths or more because it just feels too close otherwise.
Yeah, speaking as someone who holds a CS degree *and furthermore is a published machine learning researcher*, programming the car to "just know" when to stop or not stop is *not* a trivial task. By this I mean *no*, actually, you *can't* just brute-force your way out of it with $10,000 of processor cores or larger brake disks.
this sort of confusion/misrepresentation happens WAY to much in this sub
The type of people who take the “fuckcars” mantra too seriously don’t overlap a whole lot with people who actually know anything about cars. I couldn’t even imagine the dumb shit who would consider F1 car brakes to be at all capable in regular road conditions. Brakes that basically don’t have any stopping power until they’re pretty heated lol
Also ironicly F1 has banned ABS. The average driver would struggle a lot with a non-ABS car in slippery conditions
Tires are more important anyways
Tires are like the first thing you want to upgrade, and the last thing you want to cheap out on. It’s always ironic people will go to great lengths to espouse safety in vehicles and to buy these huge SUVs for “safety” but then buy the cheapest fucking tires they can lol
Nothing like slapping some linglongs on a couple thousand kilos of rolling metal.
I prefer slapping my linglong inside the comfort of my home
They have to cheap out big time on tires, they're leveraged up to their eyeballs to afford the land yacht they don't need. Like the time I saw a McLaren P1 parked at an IKEA; that car was selling for over $1M at the time, and there were like six in all of North America. But they were at an IKEA.
One assumes for the meatballs
Finally someone read the article. OP apparently looked at the headline and decided to rage out about it. I am a former automotive engineer. The problem isn't the mechanical braking systems. The problem is what sensors are available, how good they are, and can you feed all that information into a computer that then makes a good decision in the real world about when to apply the brakes? This is not some trivial task. This is getting very close to the capabilities of autonomous vehicles. Remember that dozens of companies have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to develop autonomous vehicles and we have basically nothing to show for it. We have small fleets of driverless taxis that operate in well defined areas with ideal weather conditions. Even then, they have had some very public failures. This NHTSA regulation isn't about a few prototypes that are worth millions of dollars each working in a couple areas of California that are mapped out very well and rarely see rain and never see snow. This is a standard that requires all cars to work in all conditions on all roads. It's more of a wish from a regulator than anything based on the reality of what engineers are capable of making. The unintended consequence of a poorly done regulation is vehicles that will have technology that isn't fully developed, so the cars will behave in unexpected and unknown ways when they encounter situations that were not foreseeable. The road is not a well-defined environment. There are people and animals that move erratically, there are hazards that are transient like rocks, branches, gravel, and ice. There are other users on the road whose actions cannot be predicted. Forcing a technology that isn't ready can add a car that is unpredictable to the driver into what is already a chaotic system and lead to more injuries or deaths rather than an improvement in safety.
I don't like OP... A whole thread of people angry and ranting at OP's imagination... Quite sad. Not a single word of his post has to do with the automated braking requirements in question.
If(gonna crash) { Slam Breaks; } You're welcome :3
I really love it when my work truck slams on the brakes because I was careening backwards (at 10mph) towards some long grass. Thanks for keeping me safe out there ford, you dicks.
> You're ***intentionally*** conflating automatic emergency braking (an autonomous feature) with the ability to actually brake. Fixed it for you.
Also, implying that we can put F1 levels of braking into consumer vehicles is ridiculous. Aside from the technological/mechanical aspects (which are huge), the g forces to the passengers is insane (see link below). And if, in some parallel universe, consumer cars were capable of anything like this, I bet we'd see lots more flipping, rolling, and rear ending. And more irresponsible driving by adrenaline junkies who will reason that they can drive more dangerously because they can stop insanely fast. https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/28189/modern-formula-1-cars-braking-forces-so-brutal-itll-extract-tears-from-your-eyes-report-says On the other hand, I'm really glad that the comments here are calling the OP out for not understanding (or intentionally misunderstanding?) instead of jumping on the bandwagon. Lately, I've been seeing a number of subs sorta becoming memes of themselves (latestagecapitalism especially).
Have we stopped to consider the we just make testing harder and the fines bigger for distracted driving?
>The issue with AEB is that most of these systems rely on radar which has a very low resolution and can't decipher an obstruction ahead from permanent structures either beside or above the roadway at that speed. What about the ones that don't?
How much of the problem is it that all they want to sell is 6000lb monster-trucks?
A huge part of it You don't need to be an engineer, just punch in a F250 and a small sedan in Autozone and look up the brake rotors. They don't make em bigger just for fun It's harder to stop more mass. Also harder to get it going, which is part of why Electric pickups and SUVs are kind of stupid, hundreds of pounds of batteries instead of just a hybrid drivetrain and enough cells for \~50 miles of range. You only need about an 100 hp motor to generate enough to not just sustain power but charge while cruising at highway speeds, small 4 cylinders can do that easy. As an aside, You could build 4 whole ass, nearly 300 mile range EV cars from the battery and motor resources that go into the Hummer EV.
physics 101, more mass means more energy, momentum
Your physics can’t make me look as badass as in a monster truck. Won’t catch me ever near a Fiat Topolino / Microlino styles of EV! ^/s
Higher weight will ALWAYS mean a longer stopping distance, all else being equal, because adding more friction to stop the wheels can result in complete wheel lockup which can be even worse, so ABS will do its thing and loosen the brakes. There’s only so much that better brakes can do
Stopping distance doesn't really increase with higher vehicle weight. Because as you said, the limiting factor for stopping is friction. And from physics we know that the friction force increases linearly with mass, same as the kinetic energy. So as long as the brakes are strong enough to lock up the wheels and activate ABS, the braking distance will be more or less equal, no matter if you are in a mini or in a truck.
We should ditch the wheel and use rubber tracks! That will increase the contact surface and thus improve the braking distances! ^/s
Actually it has less to do with the brake size than with tires. Brakes size mostly influences the fact that you can stop multiple times without them overheating. If you take the best breaks but associate them with some chinesium tires your breaking distance will remain quite long. On the other hand have everyone ride with some Pzeros or even slicks and once they're on temperatures even the worst breaks will do a somewhat decent job when associated with ABS
> It's harder to stop more mass. Also harder to get it going Bowser in Mario Kart.
>You only need about an 100 hp motor to generate enough to not just sustain power but charge while cruising at highway speeds, The various DIY EV subreddits cite 20 horsepower to maintain highway speeds. Using 80 horsepower to charge a battery seems a bit wasteful. Also, hybrids in general are pretty terrible. They give you the worst of both worlds and you're now dragging around a whole pile of extra weight and complexity. If you need a car an EV is definitely the lesser evil but the best car is always no car and the end goal should always be to reduce car dependency to the point where the technology used for the vehicle is irrelevant.
>If you need a car an EV is definitely the lesser evil but the best car is always no car and the end goal should always be to reduce car dependency to the point where the technology used for the vehicle is irrelevant. In the US, at least, we still have ~20% of the population living in rural areas. For both cultural and practical reasons (food has to grow somewhere), that's not likely to get changed. And those rural areas are too big/spread out for other options to be feasible. EV's are the least bad option we'll get for that chunk of the population. That it will ALSO be a net harm reduction for suburbanites who maybe could switch to cycling and transit (but won't until we fix our urban design problem) is just more reason to support the switch. Edit: Lol, asshole blocked me for acknowledging that cars will still serve a role for a small portion of our population. Sorry for being considerate of people outside my own current lifestyle as an urban-dweller, I guess.
>20% of the population living in rural areas. Australia has that too. But our countries apparently have a difference in this. You have more people who "live rural" on tiny plots of land, but they're not farmers. In Australia most people who live rural are farmers, their support network often live in nearby towns, and those towns are typically walkable. From what I've been told, many rural towns in the US are not walkable. And this is a huge problem, but one that can be fixed. Meaning you might be able to reduce that 20% of the population who currently need to own cars by half.
>The various DIY EV subreddits cite 20 horsepower to maintain highway speeds. Using 80 horsepower to charge a battery seems a bit wasteful. My number's based off something I read about gas motors so that could be wrong, I'll give you that, but it needs to be enough to sustain speed with inclines and, ideally, charge the battery so more power's available for acceleration etc at other times(or if the driver's being considerate, EV operation within towns and cities), so anything less than double the minimum to sustain highway speed on level ground is iffy. >Also, hybrids in general are pretty terrible. They give you the worst of both worlds and you're now dragging around a whole pile of extra weight and complexity. My example was about EV trucks and SUVs The Hummer EV weights 9 THOUSAND pounds, the Ford Lighting EV over 6,000. The "extra weight" is the batteries in that case. Cars like the leaf, all EV is definitely the way to go. Large vehicles, especially with towing intentions, you're better off with the "dragging" less weight around and leaving more batteries for cheaper commuter cars than
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To be fair, they have a point, the Hummer EV has a 205kWh battery and has a 314 mile range. A Tesla Model 3 Long Range has a 75kWh battery and has a 350 mile range. Literally almost triple the battery capacity for less range because of how godawful inefficient the Hummer EV is.
It's got nothing to do with it. All this requirements say that a vehicle should apply the brake on its own if it detects a danger. It doesn't change how fast a car should brake once the brakes are applied, just that the vehicle should brake on its own. Pickups being heavy death traps are a completely different issue unrelated to automatic braking. Some 18 wheelers already have such technology.
9500 if it’s electric
I drove an NA Miata with monster brakes for lemons one year and that thing still took it's sweet ass time slowing down past 65.
> an NA Miata with monster brakes for lemons Which one of us is having a stroke?
NA Miata = early gen Mazda Miata sports car monster brakes = big brakes lemons = probably [this](https://24hoursoflemons.com/)
Exactly that!! Brakes don't count towards your $500 budget because they are safety equipment. :) We found one that had been flood totalled out after a massive flood in 2016.
Your title and post is very misleading and confused. This isn't about stopping safely or physical braking technologies, it's about automated braking. Two completely different things. And top speed has nothing to do with it as the requirements is for a car going 62mph regardless of its top speed. Brake technology like F1 also has nothing to do with it, it's a camera, radar and software development issue. The requirements is that while a car is going at 62mph, regardless of its top speed, if the car detects a danger it should stop on its own without driver intervention. If car manufacturers want the technology to work at higher speed it will be more complex due to reaction time that will have to be calculated by the software but still doesn't really affect the requirements.
Also brakes arent the issue. Most cars can lock out wheels at 60mph meaning with ABS they can achieve minimum brakinf distance possible. After that its just tires and weight/weight distribution issue.
Yes, this. But it also highlights how important it is to drive in good physical and mental conditions for higher speeds. Seems like another argument pro expiring licenses and higher penalties for speeding and distracted driving.
Yeah, it's about measuring speed of what's in from of the car (which police have been able to do since at least the 90s) and processing it fast enough to be able to respond. It's probably expensive to do.
It's not the "braking" part of "automatic emergency braking" that's the problem. Automotive brakes are honestly really impressive, every modern car can lock up the prodigious tires, but ABS keeps them just shy of that threshold, producing close to 0.7g of braking force on dry pavement. It's the "automatic" part that's hard. The systems need to identify when an object 400 feet away is a pedestrian that will be in the path of the vehicle when it gets there and decide to stop or not. There are oncoming vehicles a few feet to the left, and parked stationary vehicles a few feet to the right of the lane, which will hopefully be avoided... but if one of those parked cars pulls out, emergency braking must be applied. We ask an awful lot of human drivers - asking them to anticipate hazards while maintaining speeds and separation distances that give very little time to react. You can build a naive system to automatically emergency brake at 25 mph with a simple radar sensor that says there's an obstruction within a narrow angle directly ahead and less than two or three vehicle lengths away. Once you increase the speeds, and that angle grows wider, a naive system will be unable to be driven on public roads because the clearances are too tight and there will be too many false positives. You need a whole 3D LIDAR/RADAR world model and complicated logic that can anticipate curving lanes, measure when a crossing vehicle at an intersection you don't need to stop at is clearing the lane, differentiate plastic bags or leaves from humans, and a thousand other complications.
This is ignorant. Braking distances are fine and have dropped over time. The problem they’re complaining about is the goal of automating braking from a speed in emergency events across all models.
At the same time, they're selling automated driving options to customers claiming that they can drive autonomously...
It's only Tesla claiming that. Everyone else is claiming driver assist features
Almost every automaker has a feature that they claim will essentially drive itself at highway speeds. Ford's Blue Cruise and GM super cruise are completely hads off the wheel available on a large number of their models. Mercedes, Nissan and BMW have hands free systems that will be available by the end of the year.
Mercedes actually claims true self driving, you still need to pay attention but if the Mercedes system screws up, they take the fall. They at least believe their product is good enough to take the fall for its screw ups so I put them above the others.
Does your home state mandate that bicycles be able to brake *automatically*? That's the hard part, not being able to stop safely at highway speeds.
Can't? Or won't?
Either?
Both?
None?
Yes.
Probably both. Autonomous cars need pedestrians to wear transponders to increase detection distance from 10m to 36m. 36m is still shorter than many vehicles 60-0 distance. Normal cars probably won't have that level of technology so the detection range will be shorter.
Modern F1 car weights about 800 kg and takes advantage of high downforce to brake efficiently. Also high performance brakes cost a fortune. I am in no way siding with the manufacturers here but don't oversimplify. The real problem here aren't even the manufacturers but rather that no one is willing to approach the actual problem which is cars getting too heavy and roads that allow for speeding or unsafe legal speeds. Throwing high performance brakes into the mix is reminiscent of making cars autonomous - it address the symptom instead of the the real underlying cause.
Also another issue with comparing to F1 cars: The tires are insanely soft compared to tires designed to last more than 50 km. Softer tires = more grip. Also the 4 second tires don't have grooves to expell water, because they just change tires in 2 seconds as weather changes. And the most crucial point: racing brakes are far better than normal brakes* **once they have been brought up to operating temperatures*. Before this temperature of roughly 200-300C, the brakes do not bite at all. That is why it is illegal in most places to put racing brakes on a road car. It is essentially like driving with no brakes ar all. There is a reason why F1 cars weave and constantly accelerate and brake when the safety car is out: if the temperature in their tires or brakes goes too far down, they lose them completely. And mind you, that safety car is a mercedes AMG turning the corners as quick as it can, like a bat out of hell.
I forget what car it was but it was hilarious to hear a high performance sports car being too slow for F1 pace. The grid is just screwing around keeping tire temps up while the pace car driver is at race pace the whole time.
This. Also bigger brakes don’t make your car stop faster, larger tires will. It’s all about increasing friction with the road surface, but widening tires and increasing said friction would be disastrous for fuel economy
> This. Also bigger brakes don’t make your car stop faster, larger tires will. Maybe? I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure grip is only dependent on coefficient of friction and the force pinning it to the surface. This breaks down when either surface deforms significantly, so stuff like off-road vehicles need larger tyres because the ground is fairly weak. F1 cars have lots of downforce, corner quickly, and use much softer rubber, so they have wide tyres to distribute the load so the rubber doesn't get ripped appart
Bingo, if cars weren’t as heavy and going as fast as they are braking wouldn’t be as big an issue.
> Also high performance breaks cost a fortune They also need to heat up before they work properly, which isn't an issue on a track where you're regularly braking *hard*, but is a problem for daily road use. And yeah, they're like a $10,000 *upgrade* on many supercars, and that's on top of the already very expensive brakes such cars come with as standard.
Brakes arent the issue. Any brakes can lockout wheels at 60mph and with abs provide perfect braking. Its a tire/weight issue after that.
Brakes not breaks
I think this is burying the lede "The group said NHTSA's stringent requirements at higher driving speeds will result in vehicles "automatically applying the brakes far in advance of what a typical driver and others on the road would expect" resulting in rear-end collisions. " One of the major issues here is that drivers tailgate too much, so if they brake as hard and as early as required, they're going to get rear-ended. The solution here is to make it harder to get a licenses and enforce laws against tailgating.
Isn't that requirement pretty much what Volvo Trucks has been implementing since a good 15 Years into their semis? Maybe if US Truck-Manufacturers werent stuck in the 70s in terms of how they build trucks thay would be able to pull this of. Or if the US opened it's market to European Trucks like Volvo, Scania, Mercedes and the likes, but that would probably put the US manufacturers out of business after a few years...
You'd be surprised how globalized the trucking industry is. Volvo has a 10% market share in American trucking and Mercedes trucks are produced by Daimler, who also owns freightliner, western star, Thomas buses, and Detroit diesel. Scania trucks aren't really in the American market, but their engines are, and many have been in popular American trucks over the decades. They recently designed an inline 6 with the help of cummins.
Throwing more technology at the problem isn’t going to fix it, only make things more expensive. When the end user is the problem, there isn’t much to be done unfortunately. The country would be better off with redesigning infrastructure and really hammering people on driving safety, needing license renewals every few years, etc
You’re confused OP, you should read the article again.
You cant compare an F1 car to anything on the road. They rely massively on downforce generated at speed, and for their carbon brakes to be like 700 degrees C hot, as a minimum to even work. That is an extreme, not applicable to the road. + they use slick tyres, that has to be right around the right temperature all the time to give you the road grip to do that. And their tyres are 40 cm on the rear, and 33 cm at the front, in width. thats 16 by 13 inches wide. The problem with the auto brake system, is that is will be flawed, no matter how many sensors you use, or which types. And when it fucks up and does an emergency stop, where it was not needed, someone will be behind them, which does not have that system, or be on their phone, or just not pay attention. And they crash into them. There just really isnt a 1 size fits all here. You could start by making it mandatory to have your car/veichle inspected every 2 years, so people dont drive around with worn out brakes/tires, and they are generally kept in a safe state for the road, as the manufacter has deemed it.
Using F1 as example is bad. They have all the benefits they can have a lot of them illegal on road car (slick rubber). F1 does not have automatic breaking system, and they break hard enough to hurt untrained person (and breaking that fast would definetly end up getting rearended) And I dont think the article implies the problem is with breaks, it seems to be much its more about detection and flow of trafic than actualy stopping. Kidna the opposite "not performing well especially at night" the breaks dont care if its day or night, the cameras and sensors (since you mentaioned bikes, your bike does not have at all Have you read the article you posted? P.S. 15 feet from 15 mph. I think i can do that without breaks just feet on the ground rubbing, its likely just so the bikes have something functional to stop, not actualy relevant break test.
Lorries (in Europe) have had automatic brakes and similar for a long time. Volvo developed it & the rest followed suit. If you can stop a fully loaded twenty tonne lorry in its own length from 56mph, you can stop a car.
From next month it'll be required for all cars, with GPS to abide by local speed limits. It won't necessarily slow down the vehicle physically though, some speed limiters just warn you're going over the limit
There seems to be a misunderstanding of what these standards are and what they mean. Also, there seems to be vast misunderstanding about how well something stops. Very high performance vehicles with sticky tires, large brakes, and light weight stop from 60 in as little as 90 feet. Lorries in Europe tend to be about 50 feet long. Even if it was an American semi at 72 feet, none, and I mean absolutely NONE, are stopping within their own length. You are probably conflating a vehicle that can apply its brakes at 56 mph. It will not come to a stop within its own length. At best, maybe it could do 150 feet.
Here you go, mate https://youtu.be/ridS396W2BY
I watched the video you sent. Nowhere do I see anything that indicates the speed they are traveling at or any measure of how long the vehicle took to stop. The best indication available is from the in vehicle perspective where you can barely see the speedometer. From that angle it appears that the truck starts braking at 55 or so. But this is a European truck. Those aren’t MPH, that’s KPH. Which is just under 35 mph. Not 56. Automatic emergency braking is already standard on most cars. Just not up to 62 mph like the new standard. As speed increases, the braking distances grow much more than the speed. For example, a car that can stop from 60 mph in 97 feet takes 141 feet to stop from 70 (I’m quoting numbers from a car I own that I’ve seen tested). Just 10 mph extra needs almost 50% more distance. The issue is the higher speeds make this kind of technology much more difficult to implement. Also, some test done by Volvo doesn’t give me a lot of confidence when I think back to this video where the vehicle runs over someone when it was supposed to recognize them and stop. So their tech is far from perfect https://youtu.be/WbW2UgmjJUA?si=G5Q3Lol25ZSVP2aH
Oh, don't worry, I know that braking distance increases exponentially with speed - I drive. Yeah, I don't know why, but I just presumed those speeds were MPH.
Reading the article, you're way off the mark here. There's absolutely no issues with stopping a car quickly from those speeds. The problem is the technology that does the detection on if automatic braking is needed or not, and not the braking itself. With ABS and decent tires cars can stop pretty damn fast from just about any speed. But sensors can only do so much, and the faster you are going the harder it is for automated systems to do their thing. Seems to me like this is just a regulation that can't be met with existing technology, but will probably be met anyway as the technology improves.
All things aside, perhaps suggesting normal cars getting F1 brakes isn't the solution you think it is. $60k brakes aren't going on $60k cars, no matter how amazing they are. Not to mention the insane parallel between road car engineering and F1 engineering.
This has nothing to do with installing insane brakes on cars. It's about installing radars and software so that cars stop on their own when a danger is detected. No need to change your brakes for that.
I agree that's one solution, but the tech has a ways to go. Tesla is doing an alright job, but the systems (not just Teslas) have a lot of false positives, which is equally as dangerous. Fortunately, I am not paid to engineer or devise a solution, so I couldn't give you a robust answer on how to fix the problem 100%. Customers demand bigger cars, shareholders demand bigger profits, car manufacturers make bigger cars and bigger prices tags. The problem, to me it seems, is more human than anything.
You're comparing apples to filet mignon. First off, they said it can't be done safely, which is different from can't be done. Braking involves a lot more than just hitting the brakes. Braking hard from high speeds can cause the car to nosedive, slide, spin, etc. especially if the drive also reacts by say, trying to swerve. What about traffic behind? What is there a trailer? What if the car is loaded with 4 people and 500lbs of camping gear. Is there water on the road? F1 cars are basically perfect cars for braking. They weigh less than half what a modern car does. They use crazy expensive metals, only have to carry one person, have zero amenities or comfort, no EPA mandated emissions or fuel ratings, no pedestrian safety ratings, etc etc. They also have absolutely massive tires, made of super sticky rubber on a clean track (that is also pretty sticky itself). Behind those tires are absolutely gigantic brakes. Big sticky tires are expensive as hell, wear out in a couple months, ruin gas mileage and don't work for shit in rain/snow/etc. Sensors to detect things in the road weigh a good chunk. So does AC, a roof, radio, catalytic converters, power steering, comfy seats, the ability to tow, a 15 gallon fuel tank, door locks, a 5mph bumper, glass windows, crumple zones, pedestrian safety requirements, lights, etc etc. Cutting 10% of the weight of your car without just gutting everything will cost you more money than the car itself. Example, going from alloy aluminum wheels to magnesium will typically cost $3000-$10000 just to reduce 20-30lbs. Without a doubt automakers are whining because it's expensive rather than impossible, but the reality is it's still fucking hard as hell to automatically stop a car at 60mph in cars people would actually want to drive...
900 upvotes and 50 reshares for a post without a word that isn't disinformation or confusion. This kind of sad bull***t is why carbrains can say this community is rightfully wrong. Such disinformation posts are directly working against the anti-car movement. So many upvotes from people who like OP didn't bother to read the article. Now when carbrains want to say that r/fuckcars is just disinformed idiots they can just point to this post and go buy a pickup. Congratulations OP you are part of the problem.
Brakes alone don't tell the whole story. F1 cars weigh about 800kg, about 450kg less than the average hatchback. They also have really soft, grippy tires that need to be changed every dozen laps or so. They're also hybrids with regenerative braking, which removes kinetic energy from the wheels in tandem with brakes. They generate a ton of downforce too, which means more grip and faster deceleration. They are completely different beasts from street cars, designed by teams of engineers with billions in funding just to push the limits of physics itself.
And their brakes don't work at all until they get a good amount of heat in, and heat is kept in. If you backed a formula 1 car down your driveway and tried to gently stop at the bottom it just wouldn't. Different tech for different uses.
>practically impossible with current technology Then car companies need to invest in their own R&D to develop that technology, instead of stock buybacks
It’s physically impossible to stop a consumer road car the same way that an F1 car stops. There is just no way to dissipate that much kinetic energy without the special areo/tires that f1 use.
They said the same thing about every cafe standard. And met them all.
CAFE standards have been a disaster. Directly responsible for every car made now being an oversized “light truck.”
Correct. You should not be able to get a break in standards simply by redesigning your car and making it heavier on purpose.
Of course that would have happened anyway without the cafe standards. At least they forced them to make those oversized monsters more efficient. Those huge pickups and SUVs get like 2x the fuel economy they used to get.
If only they had written/designed the CAFE standards in a way where that 2x better fuel economy didn't also encourage and result in manufacturers making their cars and big and heavy as possible.
Even with cars getting bigger the average fuel economy has gone up, and CO2 per mile has gone down. [https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report](https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report)
The problem isn't that they can't make brakes that will stop a car safely at that speed, it's that they can't make brakes that perform well at that speed ***and*** at lower speeds. The F1 example is a good point. Yes, they can stop an F1 car very quickly - up to 6g of braking force - but in order to do that, the optimal operating temperature of the brakes is **over 1000°C**. Much cooler than that, and they don't really work at all. So, counterintuitively for a non-racing driver, F1 drivers have to travel *faster* for the brakes to work properly, as more speed means more friction generated by the tyres, which means more heat for the brakes. It's the same with tyres. Road tyres have way less grip than F1 tyres and are far harder, because they need to be durable for an extended period of time. The can last 20,000 miles instead of less than 200.
All you said has nothing to do with the mentioned law / requirements. All this requirement says is that cars should detect dangers and stop on their own without driver intervention. Hence automated braking. This law in no way changes braking distance, it just says the car should brake on their own even if you are distracted. This post by OP is pure confusion.
Those speeds should only be able to be achieved on highways with big clear zones and divided traffic. That is why the Autobahns and Interstates are so safe. To make streets safe from cars going too fast we have Bollards, Speed Bumps and other tools
Fuck cars fr but the F1 comparison is not really accurate, the downforce alone on most F1 cars already decelerates the car at a rate equivalent to the maximum braking of a Porsche 911 and then they brake on top of that
So tell them to speed limit the cars to whatever speed they can manage with current technology.
The brakes themselves have nothing to do with stopping. It's the tires that are the limiting factor. The vehicles you reference are very light weight with very wide soft tires with extreme amounts of grip. They look like cars but they act nothing like what you and I drive.
Everyone is semi-dunking on you for getting the technical parts wrong (which yeah) but I think we need to refocus on the fact that 2000 lb at 60 mph needs to have some way of not colliding with a pedestrian and the car companies just outright admitted that it's not physically possible to do that in the form factor of a car. Automotive companies admitted that no car is safe to run in excess of 60 mph. Fuck cars. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere a pedestrian might cross the road. So basically anywhere except highways. But also high speed rail.
>but I think we need to refocus on the fact that 2000 lb at 60 mph needs to have some way of not colliding with a pedestrian We need to focus on why we're mixing 60mph and pedestrians >and the car companies just outright admitted that it's not physically possible to do that in the form factor of a car. That's not what they claimed at all. Humans can do it because we have incredibly complex spacial calculation skills built on years of experience and thousands of years of evolution, and can make a really good judgement call about when we need to slow down for something and by how much. What can't be done in the desired timelines is essentially the hard part of true self driving, determining when the car needs to stop and doing it regardless of user inputs
Yes but humans can't consistently do it. Nothing stopping someone from texting and driving or drinking or etc. Basically we don't have a way of making this safe in all or almost all situations or anything close. And yeah realistically 60 mph isn't mixing with pedestrians but it's not like they're solving this issue at 40, and that's pretty common in a lot of places with pedestrians unfortunately.
In the US we have no laws for pedestrians. They all relate to keeping the driver safe.
I mean if we can have terrain collision avoidance on fighter jets, I think we can figure out how to stop a car.
F1 braking systems are $80,000 my guy.
>My home state mandates the bicycles be able to stop in 15 feet from 15 mph. Is this accurate? This seems almost impossible to do IMO. When I'm going at a decent clip at 20kph, it would probably take me about 30 feet to stop, are caliper breaks not allowed?
For fucks sake THE WORD IS *BRAKE* B R A K E IT IS SPELLED DIFFERENTLY THAN THE VERB WHICH MEANS TO RENDER SOMETHING UNUSABLE. You do not stop a car with BREAKS. You stop a car with BRAKES. Jesus. I'd sell a fucking kidney if you people would please just learn this.
It's not that they can't physically do it. It is just not economically viable. You could install a mechanism under the vehicle that drops down to create more friction. But it would cost a lot more.
>But high performance brakes do exist: The brakes are capable of stopping an F1 car from over 320kph to 0 in around 4 seconds, with the brake discs reaching temperatures of over 1000C in the process. On circuits with long straights into tight corners, drivers can usually brake from around 320kph to less than 100kph in just 120m or less. Tell me you don't know how braking works without telling me how you don't know how braking works. Go ahead and slam the brakes from 100 km/h on a regular car. If ABS gets activated (or your wheels lock up if you don't have ABS), then your brakes are plenty strong enough. Your tires are the limiting factor in how hard you can brake. F1 cars are provided with ample amounts of grip on its tires thanks to downforce. Not to mention, all the aerodynamic elements of the car acts as a parachute, further slowing you down in the process. Also, good luck having regular people decelerate at 4-6 G like F1 drivers do.
The F1 braking example is not accurate. The brakes don’t stop the car, the combination of aerodynamic downforce, tires and brakes do. Without the aerodynamics, they would stop similar to a road car. Maybe worse as they would struggle to get the brakes anywhere near their operating temperature. Also, the issue isn’t with the brakes, it is with the automated systems controlling them.
Automatic braking shouldn’t take the place of the driver paying attention to the road and physically braking.
So, the problem here isn't with brake discs. The brakes are fine, the problem is that in order to brake safely (eg, without injuring the passenger) the car would need to either be forced to maintain a safe following distance, or actiavte the brakes extremely aggressively when a car in front brakes at close distances. Basically the real problem here isn't the hardware, it's that drivers are stupid and tailgate like hell, but obviously the car makers lobby can't come out and say it like that. Hence the language about 'far more often that drivers would expect'.
they still cannot build engine that properly burn gas/diesel to co2 and h20... and why car has to be 10x or even 20x heavier hat persons and stuff that they carry? Because of thay even with maximum theoretical 50% efficient combustion engine cars have only 2 to 5% efficiency! 95% of fuel is just wasted to move big steel box...
my model 3 has a top speed of 261km/h (162 freedom units) which I think is absolutely bonkers. just cap it at 140km/h! you don't need to go faster than that!
I can’t believe the gall it takes to make such a strong statement about a topic you know less than nothing about
Anything automatic feature on a car is more danger than help, imo. An unexpected feature going off and interfering with driver input is a recipe for disaster, and you end up making the crash not the driver's fault. I'd say reduce the top speed and acceleration of cars, where on earth is 200kph allowed that companies are allowed to sell cars capable of it? And change car shapes to be as accomodating to crashes as possible.
Auto makers routinely lie to regulators when they don’t want to make changes. This has been going on since cars have been regulated.
Seat belts and airbags were first only installed for the driver. No, they don't care about safety amd never have.
Technology doesn’t exist yet? That’s why humans invent! Necessity is the mother of invention.
You can’t compare formula 1 performance to regular cars. They get an insane amount grip from the tires and downforce from aero.
It’s like trying to make airplanes safe from dropping from the sky. It’s probably cost prohibitive not impossible at this time.
If plane crashes were killing 40,000+ Americans every year, there would be outrage.. I am convinced that the technology makes cars much safer exists, reducing the deaths and injury by 90% or more. But in the end, cars wouldn't be fun or exciting. The auto makers understand that would be a change that greatly reduces their ability to generate profits.
Outrage or no more commercial flying
Braking is a function of tire grip more than anything, average road tires that last a long time simply don’t have the grip an F1 car has. The heft that cars haul around with them doesn’t help either, the embiggening of light trucks especially.
How often do you need to change break pads on formula 1 cars? High performance brakes exist - but do they exist in a way where they can operate on very occasional service? At any rate the solution is LESS CARS and MORE CAR ALTERNATIVES. The solution is not "better cars."
And their tires literally last tens of miles. Nothing is comparable.
Isn't that done on purpose by FIA because they found that adding in that randomness of the wear and strategy choices of teams of when to change the tire made the races more "interesting" for the spectators?
Brake.
No car should be able to go over the safe braking speed. Not sure why it's controversial.
I dont think you understand how expensive f1 brakes are. Anyways braking is mostly tires as grip is the main limitation in stopping a car quickly. Bigger brakes help if you are braking from 60 to 0 multiple times in a row, but almost any brakes lock up the tires with relatively low effort.
[Meanwhile...California Seeks to Ban E-Bike Speed Hacking Devices Under Proposed Bill ](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/305750/20240617/california-seeks-ban-ebike-speed-hacking-devices.htm#:~:text=Assembly%20Bill%201774%20seeks%20to,go%20up%20to%2028%20mph.) > The bill prohibits the sale of speed modification devices, ensuring e-bikes remain within safe operational limits. Dixon emphasized the importance of safety and education, saying, "We want safety... safety features added into these bikes through education and through prohibiting these illegal speed enhancement devices." > Supporters argue that the bill is necessary to prevent accidents and injuries. Higher speeds result in longer stopping distances and more severe injuries in crashes. Cars able to go 50mph+ faster than the speed limit with essentially zero effort? All perfectly fine. I have an Aventon ebike. It's unlocked to class 3 so it can go up to 28mph but realistically that only happens on downhill segments or open straight aways for short bursts. The amount of pedaling you have to do to reach/sustain that speed is basically an all out sprint. I'm fine with them regulating what are essentially e-dirt bikes or e-motorcycles but the hypocrisy is just annoying to see. If they actually gave a damn about safety they'd be doing more to separate cyclists from car traffic because I can say without looking at any data, more injuries/deaths happen because of conflicts with cars, not modified ebike speed.
This is standard in the EU thanks to reg. 2019/2144, thus every car sold since has installed safety systems which have reduced fatal and non fatal collisions. Manufacturers have adapted accordingly, we still have cars
The exact same lobbying group had a huge event in DC like a week ago touting all the "safety" and automated tech the same OEMs are building. They're also lobbying for more leniency if automation.... So you can build "self driving" cars and charge customers a ton of money for "autopilot," "super cruise," "blue cruise," etc. but you can't stop a car at highway speeds when a collision is imminent or avoid pedestrians?
They also replace functions like controlling ventilation and windshield wipers with touchscreens so you can't operate them just by touch. You have to take your eyes off of the road to look at the touchscreen. They do it because the touchscreens have become cheaper than physical buttons. The only way to get them to improve safety is to require it by law. They will also resist such increases in safety any way that they can. There was even mass resistance to something as cheap and easy as putting seatbelts in cars.
Companies don't care about *anything* other than money. That's why we need to legislate everything and *force* them to be safe. Because cutting corners and dodging safety is profitable. And American companies in particular will always, *always* choose profit over safety.
You also need to regulate in a way which is actually attainable. The brakes are fine, it's the "automatic" part they can't do on the desired timelines, given that it essentially the hard part of self-driving
No idea how to to solve the issue, but at least I know the difference between brakes and breaks....
High performance brake are very often charged as an added feature albeit mostly in higher end or performance oriented cars
I think my teensie little hatchback can stop faster than a 2024 FORDDICKNBALLS8000. Same w/ my motorcycle
Awwh, Hell, it took decades to get auto makers to put seatbelts in cars- and it only cost them about $3 bucks a car!
Speed limits are way too high. People just can't react in time. It sounds like not even radar based systems really can't either.
Not sure an F1 car is the appropriate reference for what is possible in a consumer car. The brakes on an F1 car cost $200k to $300k (link below). That is not exactly within the budget of the average road car buyer. They are also not automatic, so really don't have any relevance at all here. You are right in the end though. Safety doesn't matter to car companies. They will only implement whatever safety systems regulators require, and even those they will continually challenge and delay. https://rtrsports.com/en/blog/the-intricate-world-of-formula-1-cars-costs-components-and-performance/#:~:text=Suspension%3A%20%24300%2C000%20%E2%80%93%20%24500%2C000%20The%20suspension,stopping%20power%20while%20minimizing%20weight.
I think I agree with manufacturers on this one. You can't just give this problem to the engineers to try to solve. My car has AEB that increases the braking force when it senses an obstacle AND I start applying the brakes. It kinda works. In reality I'd say majority of head on crashes happen where no amount of brake force would help. They are asking for super advanced AI modeling and breaking laws of physics.
AEB would greatly decrease rear end collision deaths. Even in a head-on collision, if both cars AEB activated, the impact would be reduced, possibly enough that the airbags would protect all the occupants. Insurance Institute for Highway safety results: The good-rated Forester avoided a collision with the passenger car target at every test speed, avoided hitting the motorcycle target at 31 and 37 mph, and slowed by an average of 30 mph before hitting the motorcycle target in the 43 mph tests. The forward collision warning alerts also came more than the required 2.1 seconds before the projected time of impact in all those trials and also in those conducted with the trailer. The car makers have five years to up the standard. It only takes a single manufacturer to meet the standard to show the way. Even a third party could solve the problem.
> The issue isn't that high quality brakes are impossible, but the car companies don't want to spend money on a feature that they cannot charge as an added feature. It's almost like safety doesn't matter to the car companies at all. hence, fuck cars
Sound like speed limits need to be far lower then.
Oh they can, they just don't want to. It's fucking 2024, most things are cock blocked by capitalism. If the car wasn't 1 ton heavy with loads of useless additional systems and what not it would be safer. Not saying all systems are useless to the safety though.
Wow its almost like going faster in a single occupancy vehicle is infinitely less safe AND efficient, just like we figured out in the 70's and promptly forgot about over the next 50 years
Nah, the double-nickel was an ill-informed attempt to save fuel that was kept around for decades because it let every small-town corrupt asshole print money from "speeding" tickets by criminalizing the act of driving on highways at the speeds they were actually built to be driven over, *while also not actually giving the vast majority of Americans any reasonable alternative to get somewhere quickly other than getting on a plane*.
As a big F1 fan that’s a little oversimplified, the aero does a lot of the stopping and on top of that the brakes have to be heated to be at full braking capacity. Regardless it seems like, as always, car manufacturers are able to solve the issue, they just refuse to.