Safety systems only as good as driver at wheel
COMMENT Tech safeguards cannot be relied on exclusively
Ireported recently on Aviva Canada’s decision to lop 15 per cent from the car insurance rates of car owners who purchased a vehicle with automatic emergency braking ( AEB). More carmakers are offering this system, along with its sister, front collision warning (FCW). Their names explain the difference: one is a warning, while one actually applies the brakes when a driver is facing impact and not reacting. The warnings are abrupt and jolting, as they should be; the challenge facing manufacturers is to keep the false positives down so drivers don’t tune out the warnings. It’s a work in progress.
I was driving the 2017 Infiniti QX30 AWD a couple of weeks ago. It was equipped with a technology package which i ncluded f orward emergency braking and it would qualify under Aviva’s advertised rate reduction. I drove home near midnight as a winter storm started kicking up its heels, sleet and snow blowing on the highway and making it slick. It wasn’t newsreel footage worthy, just enough to be flying out of the dark and sticking to the car and coating the road.
Within 10 minutes of hitting the highway, I got a notice on the dash that the system was currently unavailable. It remained unavailable for the duration of my ride. What’s important is that I was notified; what’s also important is that as more and more technologies like this come into play, drivers are going to have to be more engaged in the act of driving, not less so.
I consider lane-departure warning ( LDW) and blindspot warning (BSW) systems both a blessing and a bane. I call them “text assist,” because I’ve seen too many people texting away, their car happily keeping them between the lines like bumper guards at a five-year-old’s bowling party.
We also have inadvertently created two generations of drivers who seem to think shoulder checking is for the other guy: new drivers who trust the technology too much, and those drivers — frequently older — whose physical limitations mean many can’t turn their heads to do a shoulder check. Yes, placing your mirrors correctly can greatly improve visibility of your surroundings, but shoulder checking should never go away.
Uber has admitted in its self- driving- car testing that bike lanes are a problem for the cars. They make a “righthook” turn without checking for cyclists; if Uber admits a problem, I’d propose that other systems are experiencing the same issue. Cyclists are agile and quicker than pedestrians, but often less predictable, and anything operating autonomously has to be safe for all road users, not just drivers.
The functions we are seeing on the market now — FCW, AEB, LDW, BSW — are all steps in the march toward automation. The fact they can be imperfect or compromised is a given, but the fact drivers may believe they are infallible is a problem.
An industry legal insider told me “basically, all of the existing technology (camera or radar based) have limitations due to contamination — mainly snow or ice. While not documented, I’d think heavy salt accumulation or excessive dust would similarly affect these systems, with camera-based systems more prone to degraded operation. Also, camera- based systems can be blinded by sunrise/ sunset conditions.”
If you have a rear- view camera on your car here in Canada, you know it is rendered useless throughout much of the winter. Even though makers are working on recessing the cameras or covering them, our extreme weather can compromise even these protective mechanisms. The salt and brine and beet juice they use on the roads here in Ontario sticks like glue to the underside of our vehicles. It doesn’t take long for a camera lens to look like it’s been smeared with Vaseline, if you can see anything at all.
So how can an insurance company trust in the tech enough to offer such a large deduction? The answer is a combination of two things: those warning signs I received put the onus back on the driver (though technically, it never left), and even imperfect technology is better than what most drivers are doing on the road today.
All OEM systems should warn a driver if a system is blocked or degraded below some threshold, even if only for liability reasons. We’ll no doubt see a court-tested scenario if a safety system is documented as being not operational without warning the driver first.
For all the discussions we had in 2016 about autonomous cars, the fact remains we’re still going to need competent, trained drivers for years to come.
Don’t let the advertising on your new ride convince you otherwise.