No, you just need to translate it in marketing terms.
You don't want a car with radar, but do want one with blind spot detection, cross traffic alerts, back up camera, traction control, ABS, collision prevention.
You don't want a washing machine with advanced sensors, but do want one with auto shut off, door locks, automatic tumble, balancing.
They are very useful. Augmented situational awareness is clearly valuable in a high-risk relatively-low-tolerance environment like driving at highway speeds
Heh, ok. Never had a car with those features, and I've never been in an accident. I even drove professionally for some years before such features were available.
I do wonder whether those features train people to not be able to check a blind spot by turning their head, or just being more generally aware of their surroundings on a highway.
I find I'm even more aware of my surroundings when I drive with these safety features.
When I don't have to pay as much attention to my speed, distance to the car in front, etc I get to spend more time predicting what my fellow motorists are about to do in ways I know my car isn't able to easily compensate for.
He doesn't have to pay attention to actively controlling speed and distance to car in front of him.
It's really obvious which of the commenters in this thread haven't used a car with ADAS (like you). I don't mean that offensively. All the people here saying that ADAS makes driving safer aren't delusional idiots. As the HN rule says, perhaps we should accept others' opinions in good faith rather than shitting on tech we've never used.
I used to have a similar perspective. Then one day on the highway, a quarter inch of snow started to fall. Traffic slowed to 25mph. I was driving arrow-straight at 25mph on decent tires & flat ground - and suddenly my pickup just started to spin. Traction control immediately kicked in & fixed it.
To be fair, the weather's a bit wild here. But now I don't mind having traction control so much.
Which is a good idea because if such a safety feature remains optional, many people won't opt for it. Making them mandatory saves lives. But it also means that if you want your car to be sold in the EU, you must integrate these features, which means you need more chips.
Alternatively: making them mandatory raises the price of new cars and pushes more consumers to buy used older cars, which are generally less safe for a variety of reasons & often worse for the environment.
Economics is always about tradeoffs. Not saying this one isn't worth it, but you're not getting a free lunch here.
source: have not bought a new car despite being in the market for one since 2020 because prices make it a bad decision. Have added an additional 20k miles to existing car.
Only in the short term. In the long term cars only last so long. Plastic starts to wear out from sunlight exposure (ozone?) in about 10 years. Spare parts go out off production so when something breaks it is live without. Some things just aren't worth fixing. Sure it is possible to fix anything, but the labor is too high in general. Collectors sometimes pay $100,000 to restore an old care to brand new, realistically if the assembly line still existed the car would be about $8,000 (of course it wouldn't meet modern standards)
The current new car problems mean some people will be keeping old cars running a bit longer than normal, but all those cars are headed for scrap eventually. Eventually everyone will be jumping to newer cars.
I think a lot of potential car buyers are waiting for the price crisis to end. My comment was made in a more general sense.
Note that the price of the non-optional features is lower than if it were an optional feature thanks to economics of scale. So making them mandatory reduces the costs of the features.
That isn't how economics works. You can't cite a government mandated outcome
and declare that the intermediary processes are cheaper because the government ordered more production of something. An "economy of scale" is something that happens in some circumstances where it is possible to increase production without incurring non-linear pressure on prices. Not a law of production or economics.
Most of the things we are discussing here are places where good manufacturing principals can bring the prices down, but it is only worth putting that investment in if demand goes up by a lot. As such government mandated outcomes often to come to pass just because the mandate ensures there is enough future demand as to make the investment worth it.
Of course the car makers are strongly involved. Things where there is no potential to reduce price don't get mandated unless they are already cheap.
> Which is a good idea because if such a safety feature remains optional, many people won't opt for it. Making them mandatory saves lives.
On the other hand, making them mandatory makes cars more expensive, which means (especially during a shortage) that some can't afford them at all while the rest are forced to do without other things to compensate; either way it reduces their qualify of life. But of course the government knows better than those actually affected by these laws where the ideal balance lies between safety and QoL.
On the other other hand, you can easily use the same reasoning in favor of mandating safety features:
Not making them mandatory means they remain expensive extras, more expensive than if required on all cars. That means second hand cars with these features will be significantly more expensive than those without. Which means that some can never afford these features, while others have to do without other things to compensate. Either way, quality of life is reduced - and more than in your scenario, because the features do not benefit from economy of scale as much when they're optional.
> Not making them mandatory means they remain expensive extras, more expensive than if required on all cars.
If they were rare they might be more expensive, but otherwise it's the same system and will cost about the same amount to incorporate into a vehicle. Making it mandatory doesn't make it any cheaper. (Usually the opposite, in fact. From the POV of those manufacturing the safety systems, there's nothing quite like having the government mandate that people buy your product.)
Economy of scale is not guaranteed, or even really all that common once you get past early research and development or one-off custom products and into the realm of mass production. In general commodities become more expensive in response to higher demand, not less. If these systems are something most people actually want and consider worthwhile then they'll already have the benefit of any economy of scale which may apply without the mandate.
Given your car’s safety features have significant externality effects on other citizens, yeah, the government seems well within its duties to mandate certain safety tech.
There is no negative externality merely from not having a safety feature. There would only be a negative externality if there were actually a situation where someone was harmed due to the lack of a safety feature (or any other reason, really) and the person responsible for the harm was not held liable for making the injured party whole.
Mandatory safety features, on the other hand, are a direct example of a negative externality: Those wanting the safety features to be mandatory get what they want while other people bear the cost.
Obviously I can't. The same goes for the case where my car with auto braking kills you—auto braking reduces the risk slightly but doesn't offer absolute protection. Either way the liability for your death is mine as the operator of the vehicle, though if it can be traced to a defect in the auto-braking system I might be able to redirect that liability to the manufacturer. There are any number of other ways you could die due to an accident or negligence, and we can't make you whole for those events either. The best we can do is try to atone for it with respect to those you leave behind—to make up, as much as possible, for the hole your absence leaves in society. That doesn't mean we paralyze ourselves with inaction or always prioritize marginal improvements to safety (even others' safety) over all other concerns.
> That doesn't mean we paralyze ourselves with inaction or always prioritize marginal improvements to safety (even others' safety) over all other concerns.
Frankly I don't care if a (private) road owner wants to require specific safety equipment on the vehicles allowed on their roads. Their property, their rules. Other potential users of the roads can then decide whether they're willing to accept the residual risk. But that argument depends heavily on those who are being excluded (for lack of required safety equipment or low risk tolerance) not being forced to pay for those roads' construction and upkeep. It doesn't work for a government mandating systems to be installed on all vehicles, or for tax-funded roads.
There was massive resistance against seatbelts when they were introduced. Maybe sometimes the government does know better than those actually affected.
When my son heard that "luxury cars are being shipped without touchscreen infotainment systems" he thought "Great!"
That is, a touchscreen infotainment system in a car inevitably sucks, and takes away a bit of the "luxury" that a "luxury car" has.
At 19 years old he definitely is into retrotechnology, particularly when it comes to cars. He wants a boat car from the 1970s so he can get away from all the junk in modern cars.
> He wants a boat car from the 1970s so he can get away from all the junk in modern cars
Hope he enjoys getting single-digit miles per gallon, and you'll have to decide how you feel about him driving around in a car without modern junk like "airbags".
The unleaded transition started in the early 1970s you can find plenty of boats that take unleaded gas.
Of all the problems cars of that generation have the one that bugs me the most is poor rustproofing. You see people driving classic cars all the time in dry places like California and New Mexico but in Upstate NY road salt will eat a car like that alive if you drive it in the winter.
So if we got a boat we'd need a garage to keep it in and another car to be a driver in the winter.
Don't know if you've owned e.g. a 1980s Toyota Corolla in an environment that's always-wet, always-salted for six months a year like Western Norway.
The difference to modern cars is night and day: The Corolla rusts to death in five years, as in you can stick your whole arm through the holes in the wheel well if the structural integrity of the chassis doesn't fail first. Whereas most cars produced after 1990 will last about two decades without owner rustproofing.
You obviously can't dictate that all redox reactions will halt, but the manufacturers have absolutely done something that makes their cars rust slower.
The "end-user rustproofing" we do here generally consists of spraying some super-heavy, super-sticky oil-based coating onto the metal so it doesn't get wet. But this obviously complicates other maintenance.
If the manufacturer or the customer applies a thick heavy undercoating I think it can make a big difference. It's robust enough to resist the abrasive nature of the salt, at least for a while.
The thing is I don't think manufacturer's like adding products like that as it messes with the fuel economy results. It's actually quite heavy, despite being just a "coating"
Most cars ran just fine on unleaded. Unless you actually raced them, or otherwise worked the engine hard the rest of the car would die before the lack of lead killed the engine.
Note that I live in an area where we salt the roads in winter. If you live in a dry desert old cars last a lot longer, and you might actually need to worry about your valves.
No, it’s a colloquialism that refers to sedans as large as a boat. Of course boats come in all sizes, but it’s usually referring to something the size of, say, a present-day Chrysler 300 or larger. A truly full-size four-door sedan.
Exactly. Even in a "dumb" TV there are dozens of ics, lots of complexity that we don't see. Removing the smart TV part removes the equivalent of a roku stick worth of components. It doesn't change the calculus, it's a red hering. Ok, so you remove 4 ics out of 100, still in the same boat.
I believe instead of word "dumb" you mean "aligned with customer": doesn't steal their data, doesn't extract more money from them, doesn't deny them service, doesn't prevent repair
When I shell out for the new thing, it's because my current one died. If I wanted the new features, I wouldn't be driving a 16-year-old car.
I want airbags, anti-lock brakes, adaptive suspension, intermittent wipers, and a back-up camera. I don't need the rest. I even fear some of the rest. (Remote hackability is not a feature!)
Same but even more for a washing machine. I don't need advanced sensors. I don't need my washing machine to hang out on the internet. It's not a celebrity with its own blog, it's just there to wash my clothes.
I always wanted to make a spoof of the GM ads that promoted OnStar for "safety". That is, a white collar criminal is heading for the hydrofoil with suitcases crammed with cash and the FBI calls up OnStar to track the vehicle and turn off the ignition.
They do, actually. Particularly children, who can be difficult to see, especially with reduced sight lines in modern cars due to aerodynamic improvements.
The instant gratification part of my brain is constantly at war with the environmentalist part of my brain and that passion play happens at least weekly due to my HE washing machine, which takes fucking forever to finish a load, especially now that yardwork has become a priority hobby (pre-soak + heavy soil).
I don't know if the solution is fewer sensors or more sensors, but the way it fills the bowl feels like watching an episode of Monk. And not the ones where his OCD is cute, the ones where it ends up costing him dearly.
"People can be made to want" != "people want". We may be more in touch with peoples' real desires, but out of touch with what marketing wants to sell us.
> consumers are not willing to buy cars without radar, or washing machines without advanced sensors
What?
Am I that out of touch?