Originally posted by Expert308:
quote:
Originally posted by Aeteocles:
It's an annoyance now,but the emergency braking might save you from severe injury one day.
Yes, times were simpler. But also, people died and permanently injured themselves way more before head restraints, airbags, seatbelts, collapsing steering wheels, crumple zones, ABS brakes, stability control, emergency assist braking etc.
Getting behind the wheel of a car is the single biggest risk to my lifestyle--both from the risk of injuring myself or my passengers and from the risk of financial ruin by gravely injuring someone else. I, for one, will always a) option a vehicle with every available safety feature, and b) all other things equal, opt for the bigger/heavier vehicle. (Provided that the driver aids are implemented in a manner that doesn't make the driver want to defeat them every time they get in the vehicle).
Additional cost and inconvenience of recalibrating the cameras for emergency braking is a price I will gladly pay to lessen the severity of an impending impact.
I'll take the opposing side on this one. My 2018 Challenger had all the whizbang safety features. So I'm driving down the road and the thing decides that my distance and closing speed on the car in front are "not good" and suddenly I've got lights flashing and beepers beeping telling me I need to brake NOW. I knew exactly what I was doing, and those flashing lights and noises were, IMO, enough of a distraction to become a greater hazard than the proximity to the other car. After that happened a couple times I turned most of those "features" off.
On a more general note, whenever I see car ads on TV touting the lane departure warnings and all the other "safety features", I feel like people are becoming way too dependent on technology and less on common sense, and it's going to get people killed. I'm reminded of an old joke about a guy being pulled from the wreckage of his expensive motor home by the fire dept. They ask him "What happened?" and he says "Damned if I know. I just turned on the cruise control and came back to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich, and the next thing I know the damn thing ran off the road!"
