Right there what your talking about is the difference between passive and active safety in cars. Most cars nowadays use passive safety, or basically tons and tons of safety equipment that will keep you safe "if" a crash were to happen. Airbags, ABS, lane departure warning, seatbelts, ... all that stuff is examples of passive safety because its all just sitting there waiting for you to get into a bad situation or into a crash before it starts to help. Active safety on the other hand is the route that most sports cars or hot hatches (like you mentioned) used to take. Now yes, if you did end up wrecking one, more than likely you would be dead, but the car was so light and nimble that 9 times out of 10 you could avoid the accident by just maneuvering the car. Examples of active safety are things like good tires, fine handling suspension, quick steering, good visibility, ... that sort of thing. Basically, rather than being safe in a crash, these cars choose to try and avoid that crash all together. Thus why I will always buy a car with active safety rather than passive safety. I just feel safer because I know it is me that is in control of my own fait. That being said, I will always have seat belts though... I consider those rather important even if I am not a fan of everything else. Mostly just to hold me in my seat around corners or under really hard braking zones.
On the subject of nimble cars: In the late 80s, Auto Bild tried to check with a psychologist what are the effects of having small, nimble and quick cars. After some owner evaluation, it turned out that you were less safe in such vehicles, because not only the active safety sucked,,you were also more likely to take unnecesary risks. --- Post updated --- Wrong. https://www.carcomplaints.com/top_complaints/ Here is a list of 20 most common complaints received by Car Complaints. None are electronic, 2 are electrical.
True, but all of those cars are from before 2010. I'd argue that they don't exactly have that many electronics to begin with.
Wrong. https://www.carcomplaints.com/top_complaints/ Here is a list of 20 most common complaints received by Car Complaints. None are electro For starters, what do you think the "E" stands for in "EFI"?
I'm not saying they have no electronics atall, but they're not exactly making the difference from crashing or not. And when a EFI fails (Which they do. Just because it's not in a top 20 doesn't mean it's perfect) the worse that'll happen is the engine stops. Or maybe it'll make the car use too much, or too little fuel, and you'll have a stressful day, maybe have to phone the AA. When a autonomous driving system fails (Which it will) the worse that'll happen could literally cause the deaths of multiple people. Currently, atleast if this happens you can still use the steering wheel and control the car. The car even screams at you demanding your attention. But the whole idea of this is people not needing to pay attention to the car, so I doubt the 'driver' will be in any condition to actually react atall.
Although for passive vs active safety, i would say that passive safety is good too as what if someone crashes into you, like you are rear ended, an uncrashable (high active safety) paper mache will be destroyed (low passive safety).
What people are forgetting when they say "perfect solution fallacy" is that self-driving cars are still going to be vulnerable to mechanical failures, just now you have the added variable of software failures layered on top. As someone who just officially quit yesterday after almost 2 years as a fast food cashier, I can tell you that software is not always reliable. Credit card readers frequently reboot themselves for no reason. The POS software is littered with old coupons and deals that no longer exist. If new food/dessert items are not configured correctly (and many aren't), it's possible to get stuck in a situation requiring manager overrides or even in a reboot-requiring infinite loop with an honest and easy-to-make mistake. Oh, and if the car requires a connection to a central server, I hope there are backup plans for when the connection slows way down or blinks out entirely, whether because of signal interference or because the server just feels like being a butt. Granted, existing vehicle electronics tend to be be a lot more reliable than that, but they're also less critical. Not that stalling in the middle of a left turn across the road isn't a critical failure, but at least the causes are somewhat predictable and in any case it's a much safer failure than the software going haywire and opening the throttle all the way because of a short circuit or a bad sensor. And that's exactly the thing. Sensors get dirty and go bad, software glitches, and electronics can get damaged or shorted, but if that happens to a manual-drive car, the worst I've ever heard of happening is that it'll stop running. Granted, that can still be dangerous depending on when and where it happens, but for total damage it doesn't quite measure up to the potential of a glitchy, hacked, or otherwise malfunctioning autonomobile. An older, more robust car with less computer integration might even be able to run just fine (albeit with less power and more fuel consumption) with some or all electronics disabled, as long as the oily bits are still in good shape - that was where my Sunbird was before I broke it. If your brakes fail, you still have engine braking and the parking brake, and may be able to ride a guardrail as well, so if nothing else you can reduce your speed somewhat while finding an ethical and hopefully safe-ish place to crash. If your engine blows, you can put the clutch in and stop on the shoulder. If your autopilot goes haywire for some reason, well, I hope rebooting fixes it, and I hope you know how to do an emergency reboot while in motion. I have a somewhat different definition of passive vs. active safety. Passive safety is a safety device or design choice that simply works with a driver's inputs or attempts to reduce the loss of life after an accident has occurred. ABS is an example of the former, airbags are an example of the latter. Active safety is a safety device that overrides the driver's inputs in order to keep them safe, such as crash-avoidance auto braking, and those do go haywire occasionally. I remember reading in a car magazine that one of the editors was driving a car with such a feature and it once nailed the brakes for no reason on a (thankfully) empty road - there might have been a plastic bag blowing across the freeway or something, I don't remember, but in any case, that could have been catastrophic on an icy road or if there had been someone behind him. Needless to say, I'm much more a fan of passive safety from this perspective.
Yeah how does a computer tell the difference between erroneous sensor values or there just being an extreme surroundings/event. Like in airliners the AP just turns off if it goes out of range, but driver-less cars are going to be a bit of a disaster when it comes to that. Like what if the car hasn't got a driver in it and the AP goes off. What happens next?
I guess it just stops. I was never a good catastrophical scenario writer. --- Post updated --- And according to Car Complaints, the biggest issues are door handles not popping out and gearbox failures. So,,electrical and mechanical. No computer.
Want to know what happens when your cars are connected to a server? Get Need for Speed (2015) and play it a good distance from your finicky wi-fi router. See the AI cars glitch and stutter as they fly all around everywhere before everything goes black and you are booted to the menu screen? Have fun when the LA traffic servers go down. Alright, that may have been a bit fanciful.
As I can see here, these cars are from US market. US market are not the only one in the world. In Europe there are tons of cars that are known for faulty elrctrics.
I think the best compromise between passive and active safety was reached sometime in the early-mid 2000s. The best example I can think of is the second gen clio. It's small, light (990kg), nimble, has better visibility than the 1st generation model, and still manages to be quite safe, having earned a 4 star safety rating from Euro NCAP (https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ratings/en/results/renault/clio/15525). Alternatively, I quite like the compromise made with the third gen clio. It earned a 5-star safety rating, without significantly compromising its light weight nature (weighing in at around 1100kg) and good visibility. It carries over the sporty character from the old clio aswell. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ratings/en/results/renault/clio/15679
I can totally believe that. Granted, sporty vehicles usually come with a substantial power to weight ratio making you want to take those risks. Trust me... for the longest time I drove a 3000+lb (probably) car with probably less than 80hp. If you could see a car in the distance when you were trying to pull out you had to sit an wait. You just had no get up and go, so that kept you from wanting to make that jump. You never took risks in a car like that. Now, though, I own a Corvette. I now have more than enough power to get out of my own way, so if there is even the slightest gap in traffic, I go for it. Oh there are 5 cars in front of me going under the speed limit at this passing zone? Pass all 5 of them... you have the acceleration, just go for it. That is also compounded by me paying almost nothing for the car which really adds to that taking risks factor. The kind of ideal car that I was alluding to would be more like old hatchbacks. They have seat belts, crumple zones... perhaps even an airbag or two... but that's it. That and have a very small amount of power to strike that pulling out fear back into everyone. That will make them think their car is slow and in turn will keep them from taking those risks. I say that because a good majority of people out there that don't know cars very well will consider a car "sporty" if it can just accelerate fast. If it can they just assume that it can do corners and stop fast as well... if it can't, then it can't to them. I know this because a great deal (a very great deal) of my related family members seems to think this way. Where they got this idea I have no idea but it drives me insane. I don't mean to burst your bubble, but just because it's not in the list doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. For instance, in 2013, my dad bought a 2013 Ford Escape... nice car, but it has a few problems. For one, the infotainment system keeps dying, and when I say dying, I mean dying. Last time it went it blew out almost every fuse in the car including most of the fuses for the driving components of the car like the turn signals, fourways, abs, ecu, headlights, and possibly worst of all, the power steering. This happened in the winter up on the highway at about 60mph... not cool. Ford has replaced the infotainment system in that car 3 times so far. Its most recent problem? This is kinda nitpicky at this point, but the most recent one freezes a lot when you are trying to use the CD player (my dad likes to listen to audiobooks, I guess they come on CD's now?), as long as you don't touch any buttons it seems to be fine, but if it wont eject the CD because it froze, you actually have to restart the car to get it out. That and for whatever reason it will not keep time... I have no idea why, but it can not keep time to save its soul. I thought about it having a dead CMOS battery, but after a few minutes of thinking about it that didn't make any sense as it's always hooked up to the car battery. Plus, if that were the problem, it would be 12 every time you would turn it on... but its not... it has never turned on to 12... it's always some random weird ass time for no reason. Granted, we have never complained about the car... why? Simple. Ford keeps replacing all the parts for free and every time they do they extend the warranty because they are adamant that this kind of stuff just doesn't happen. Right... sure it doesn't. This is more along the lines of what I was talking about, the perfect blend.
