As you may have heard, the Texas Board of Education is busy rewriting history to better reflect the illusion that the Religious Right (TM) try to maintain. Did you also realize they've taken to rewriting math standards? Check out this example below!
To be fair, it did stop. But I think my car has this same feature.
GJ said about 10 hours later
You have to wonder about this kind of feature. Not so much that it can work or even that it can work reliably, but how it might change us as drivers. Am I going to take more chances in my car if I know that I have stability control, avoidance control, etc., to the point that I can do things like text my friends while driving and generally get away with it?
Wonder how such a system tries to deal with far faster closing speeds, like those you'd see in a head-on collision. I'm guessing this one is primarily for highway driving. That's kind of silly--there are almost no fatalities on highways, compared to local roads with intersections and two-way traffic.
Marc said about 13 hours later
I was thinking of this today again and wondered how well it would handle differing weather conditions as well. Combined with many other features of luxury cars, it's probably fine, but if the auto-brake determined it needed to break hard, but it's icy, you may end up flipping your car versus just rear ending the guy in front of you.
I give it a couple years before we see a lawsuit because features like this have made a bad decision and made an accident worse than it could have been if the human was in control.
GJ said about 14 hours later
While I think they'll take into account the status of the stability control system, I do think you're right about the lawsuit angle. It's not a question of if a problem like this will occur, but when. As an automaker, you have to assume that risk and be willing to eat the costs. It may not be a bad thing for them so long as the costs don't outstrip sales gains.
Steve said 1 day later
Hey, don't blame us. At first, customer's wanted stability control, now the government is mandating it (all 2012 cars will have it standard).
Adaptive cruise control, accident avoidance, stuff like that - I hate it all. In production it is all very overprotective, and does not work well in moderate to heavy traffic.
Stability control, when well executed, is helpful to 99.99999% of the drivers. Even yours truly has been saved from two spins in the Crossfire due to stability control.
You'll never win a lawsuit by saying that someone "could" have out performed the stability control. It would have to be the system causing an accident, not a system that did not prevent an accident.
GJ said 2 days later
I'm not blaming the automakers by any stretch. I'm blaming this culture that believes we need to protect ourselves from everything.
I don't have a probably with stability control. But this autopilot crap is downright scary.
Marc said 2 days later
I'm definitely not blaming the engineers. I know how it works; this comes down from the higher ups who think this will be cool! But I imagine many of these features are very hard to engineer and implement and probably don't function very well unless conditions are perfect, which makes them pretty useless in the end other than another sales point for people who would fall for it. So I guess those higher ups are getting what they want. They always do, don't they?
And I agree, nobody will win that lawsuit, but I'm sure we'll SEE one. :)
GJ said 2 days later
Actually, I think you definitely will see those kind of lawsuits, and it's even possible that a suit like that could succeed. Court laws vary wildly from state to state. Some are pretty open this kind of crappy lawsuit.
Steve said 2 days later
Stability control is not THAT difficult to implement. "Autopilot" is. What the industry is working on now is avoidance systems, not so much "drive it for you" systems. I mean, I'm sure there are a few guys working on a car that you can hop into and it will drive for you, but much more of our resources is going into developing nearer terms stuff - things that will interact if it sees you making a mistake - like hitting the brakes if a collision is imminent, or helping you maintain control of the car in an emergency maneuver.
A perfect stability control system is capable of doing things that humans just cannot. Stability control controls the brakes on each wheel individually, and applies the brakes on certain wheels to help turn the car one way or another. We cannot accomplish that - we have but one brake pedal. Not that any car has a perfect stability control system, but they are getting better and better.
Steve said 2 days later
oh, and some of the new controls systems are kinda cool - like controlling torque to each wheel when accellerating - it can put more torque to the outside tire to help turn the car better. Honda's SHAWD cars have that (super handling all wheel drive....).
Don't hit that play button if you know what is good for you. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Marc said about 2 hours later
While the song is unbelievably annoying, I think it contains one of the hardest set of letters for a ventriloquist to pronounce. Interesting find Abby. :)
Yup, there was but one brief pause in his delivery as he struggled to say horse as his brain wanted to say butterfly. That was priceless--but his delivery was awesome.
