modern vehicle safety tech...

[arsevee]

Lane keep assist on most new cars is similarly useless. Imagine if we could fit a counter that recorded how may useful corrections the system made as opposed to how many useless corrections.... Since most people don't actually run their cars off the road and into trees, and most systems make corrections at least once per km in cars that I've driven the ration must be at least 100,000 to zero against including the system. Then add in the extra fatigue due to fighting the system and in some cases listening to audible alarms and it starts to look very pointless...

Some manufacturers do it better than others; Tesla has got it nailed, apparently MB do it pretty well, as does BMW, but the first time I drove a car with active lane-keeping, I thought the car was 'tram-tracking'... This was on a drive from Newcastle to The GC, at night, in rain...

Did it help.

Did it f--k.

 

[Pablito]

I blame the likes of ANCAP.
They added crash avoidance systems as part of their safety rating assessment a few years back.
So now car companies have to cram their cars full of this 'safety' **** otherwise they can't get a top safety rating.
So I think its more to do with this and not to do with people's driving skills getting worse.

 

[mpower]

So, there's a bucketload of safety & driver assist equipment on the ZBs, even in the base-models, so here's a 'poser' for you all:

Are there more safety devices on modern vehicle because people are worse drivers?,

or

Are people becoming worse drivers because there's more safety devices in new vehicles..?

per capita road deaths have gone down. so does it matter? also in 20 years time, cars will be driving themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_Australia_by_year

 

[Skylarking]

ANCAP should have kept the star rating system backward compatible so we could directly compare older vehicles to newer vehicles. But in their corporate stupidity, they seemed fixated on 5 stars being the top level so made it impossible to compare second hand vehicles.

I’d have preferred that they added a second star rating scale for active safety systems (stuff like seatbelt reminder, AEB, pedestrian detection) you know the stuff that isn’t directly related to reducing crash forces on a human body (crumple zones, seat belts, seat belt tensioners, etc). That way the first star rating is backward comparable and the second star rating for cars having such features is also comparable for such cars. The two stars would give a clearer picture of expected safety.

Having said that, I’d probably ignore much of the second star rating because active safety features don’t always work as intended and third party real world testing is next to impossible. As is, pedestrian detection systems don’t work very well.