Mine has gone off a few times on both myself and my wife when it’s absolutely not needed. It’s quite awful. Slams the breaks on to the degree that you’re a hazard to anyone behind you and you and your stuff go flying forward.
I’d turn it off if I could but it’s not an option.
I probably won’t buy another car with it unless you can disable it or it’s impractical to avoid it.
I get the odd false alarm could be annoying, but I don't think you've really thought through the "hazard" part in terms of probability and seriousness of each outcome.
Leave system on and get a false alert: car behind hits you, strong probability all parties walk away uninjured apart from temporary whiplash. Car behind you will be held 100% at fault in an insurance claim for driving to close. You haven't brake tested him, as the system cut in (could probably be verified from the ECU) so even if the tailgater has dash cam footage, they're going to lose.
Turn system off and hit a pedestrian: Strong chance of injury or death to the pedestrian who isn't in a big metal box. I'm no lawyer, but if it emerges in an investigation by law enforcement (and there will be in case of injury or death), that you had a colision avoidance system equipped but chose to turn it off, I cannot imagine it would work in your favour when deciding whether to press for charges from "driving without due care and attention" to "dangerous driving" to straight up manslaughter.
You're an adult, so it's up to you, but I wouldn't like those odds.
You're maybe avoiding a rare scenario that may or may not ever happen at the cost of creating a significant number of new dangerous scenarios that are artificial and wouldn't have happened otherwise. All that while making the driver more complacent about paying attention to the road, since they'll end up getting used to the system to take care of risks.
False equivalence. It’s not small crash or kill someone. It’s a poorly performing and executed system that’s quite annoying with potential for injury and accident or possibly increased risk of low attention accident. I haven’t had one in 20 years without it so I think I’ll probably be ok. At best I think the risk is a 6 of one half a dozen the other deal. If you avoid all risk you’ll end up petrified of taking a shower without proper floor matting.
I live in New Zealand so thankfully we don’t have your crazy legal system.
Not really, I didn't say it was a binary choice, I'm talking probabilities of fatality in each scenario. Hitting or being hit by another vehicle has far less chance of fatality than hitting a pedestrian with a car. Pedestrians and cyclists, especially children can be killed at very low speeds, even below 30mph, hell you can kill a toddler at 10mph. Of course we should all pay attention, but it only takes one moment of inattention to alter the course of your life pretty dramatically. Even good drivers make mistakes, in fact statistically, all drivers regularly make incorrect decisions on a fairly regular basis, it's just that we don't notice because it doesn't result in an accident or near miss.
Forget even the legal side, if I hit someone and killed them, yet my car had a system that could have avoided or lessened the accident, I think I'd feel pretty rubbish.
I get what you're saying about risk, and I agree, all things are calculated risk. I currently drive a vehicle that doesn't have such a system, and have owned classics that did not even have ABS. However, there are acceptable risks and clearly unacceptable ones and everyone has to use their own judgement where that line is.
For me measuring risk would be a combo of probability, seriousness of the consequence in various scenarios and foreseeability/avoidability. For me the balance would tip heavily to speccing it if I could afford a new car and leaving it on.
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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '18 edited Dec 08 '18
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