this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The famous asleep-at-the-wheel film scene in National Lampoon's Vacation, where Clark Griswold goes off to slumberland for 72 seconds while piloting the Wagon Queen Family Truckster (a paragon of automotive virtue but lacking any advanced driver safety systems), might be a comical look at this prospect.

But if Clark were in the real world, he and his family would likely have been injured or killed—or they could have caused similar un-funny consequences for other motorists or pedestrians.

Early in 2023, the Automobile Association of America's Foundation for Traffic Safety published a study estimating that 16–21 percent of all fatal vehicle crashes reported to police involve drowsy driving.

These systems chime a warning and project a visual alert on the dashboard asking if the driver wants to take a break, often with the universal symbol for wakefulness—a coffee cup—appearing in the instrument cluster.

It's a lengthy programming exercise that can take control of a vehicle in a simplified way, but not before three forms of human stimuli are triggered to wake up a drowsy driver: sight, sound, and a physical prompt.

This is all great in theory and in a digital vacuum, but I wanted to explore what occurs inside a car that has determined that the driver is no longer actually driving.


The original article contains 545 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] db2 -2 points 10 months ago

Step one for me is not to own a car that I can't control. I already dislike antilock brakes since I'm fully capable of not locking the brakes without assistance. Having the car come to a full stop by itself is worse.

Most of the problem that this "solves" becomes a non issue if mandatory tests are given above a certain age to verify continued ability to actually control two tons of metal going 60mph. And make the punitive measures for doing stupid shit like texting while driving actually hurt a little.