Quote:
Originally Posted by SHOFEAR
The more idiot proof you make cars the more retards drive.
|
Not quite—rather, it has a good chance of making existing drivers much stupider. It’s called
risk compensation—with more safety features, people feel comfortable taking more risks—and has been observed with anti-lock brakes, bike helmets, and even
children’s car seats. A rear-view camera particularly frightens me in this regard—if it becomes a substitute for road awareness, we’re all deeply screwed, especially if people use these screens outside of driveway and other such parking situations.
Addendum: I’m curious how much pushback this will get—I’d suspect little from domestic and foreign automakers with a large domestic presence, since this seems like the sort of tech that’s already filtering down and automakers seem okay catering the the needs of checked-out drivers (Chevrolet even advertised how you could use facebook from your car). Automakers who import models that are built for a global market are likely to be more upset with this measure, since it could require reconfiguring fairly standardized designs in order to cater to the American market, which can be a significant costs (an extreme example of how far automakers will go to avoid this is the old Toyota Echo, which had center-mounted displays so the car could be sold in left- and right-hand drive countries with as little modification as possible; obviously most automakers are able to make bigger changes to their models, but it illustrates that these changes aren’t always easy).