Studies find automatic braking can cut crashes over 40%

Implementation matters. The automatic braking on my compact SUV has falsely triggered hundreds of times over the course of 3 years, usually when transitioning from a moderately-pitched-down driveway into a roadway. The result of this scenario is the car coming to a dead stop with its front end halfway into a traffic lane, putting me and my passengers at greater risk of a collision from oncoming traffic approaching from the left hand side. It’s happened so often I’ve made a habit of disabling it whenever I exit certain commonly used driveways know to trigger the behavior.

Oof, my experience with with auto-brake in a 2021 Subaru Crosstrek (anecdotal, sample size of one, all that good stuff) is much the opposite. It&#x27;s too sensitive and tends to brake shockingly hard during fairly mundane maneuvers.<p>When backing up near a wall&#x2F;obstacle, the auto-brake seems to kick in when anything is closer than three or four feet away from the bumper. I use my mirrors and have an accurate impression of where the four corners of the vehicle are - I don&#x27;t need the computer slamming on the brakes when I am reversing in a tight spot. It feels _more_ dangerous and I fear that one day, my knee-jerk reaction will be to fight the machine (press the gas harder, or get distracted looking at the console which emits lights and sounds every single time auto-brake kicks in) and wind up wrecking with even more force than I might have otherwise.<p>Also, in traffic, I&#x27;ll often take my foot off the gas and coast&#x2F;idle, letting the vehicle slow down naturally. I try to do this instead of braking sometimes as I believe it assists with keeping the flow of traffic predictable for others. Usually this is no problem because I follow the next person at a safe distance.<p>Sometimes, while decelerating as described above, I will allow the distance between myself and the next car to close, for example, if they&#x27;re turning and will be gone in a second anyway. The Subaru then ruins my slowdown maneuver by slamming on the brakes because it thinks I&#x27;m approaching the vehicle ahead of me too quickly. Well, yes, maybe, but they&#x27;re also halfway out of the lane already so it&#x27;s not terribly significant that I&#x27;m closing the distance. Another half-second and they&#x27;ll be gone, restoring my follow distance. (This has only happened once or twice but I imagine it gives the person behind me quite the unnecessary shock.)<p>I wish there was a way to fine-tune the sensitivity, or at least an option to say &quot;I am an attentive driver, please switch auto-brake to a lower sensitivity level.&quot; Currently the only option is to disable it each time the engine starts, which feels wrong to do...

It feels like a simple thing but I also suspect it is effective from my personal experience.<p>We have automatic braking (fixed: breaking) on my Toyota Rav4:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gbnoFbb8G8Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gbnoFbb8G8Q</a><p>It is a simple thing but the PCS has been triggered 4 times in the last 5 years and never incorrectly. I think I would have stopped soon enough without it (as I&#x27;ve never hit anything in my 20+ years of driving), but it was always in those unexpected situations like a car rapidly slowing down in the middle of the highway for something I can not even see.<p>It feels like initializing values to 0 automatically. You shouldn&#x27;t need it if everything else goes perfectly, but it doesn&#x27;t hurt to have it.

Got a new M340i a month ago, first day driving it I get cut off by some 90 year old in a buick who didn&#x27;t want to miss his turn. Was really glad to have automatic braking, by the time my foot had lifted off the gas it was already braking.

Sure, but try to convince people who are okay with accepting (other) deaths just to feel &quot;in control&quot; of a two ton vehicle.

In my experience, I only had my car activate this once in 8 years. I was on the M6, and it was slowing down, I changed lane and start slowing, and somehow just miscalculated, and was still going 10 mph when the other car was stopped. I was just too relaxed, and it kicked in and braked for me. Saved me a rear end, and became worth the money.

I wonder how many extra crashes will something like this trigger and who will pay when accidents happen because the car decided to break for no apparent reason. I&#x27;ve seen PCS working well at slow speeds and, arguably, they would be more helpful at higher speeds. But would you trust such system with your life at high speed on a busy motorway ?

I had a rental with automatic breaking. Gave the really strong impression it wanted to kill me on empty roads. Not keen.

I have to back out of my driveway in a 2021 Ford Explorer on a fairly busy street. I am typically very cautious because there are parked cars along the street obstructing visibility and you have to be real careful backing out. Even with this heightened caution level, one time I missed a small, gray car that happened to be perfectly obstructed by the rear left pillar as I elected to back out. The &quot;collision avoidance autobraking&quot; kicked on and definitely saved an accident. I may get false positives now and then, but that one instance of a saved accident makes up for all the random quirks as the manufacturers work to improve these systems. I&#x27;m a believer.

Consumer Reports has a good summary of active safety features, then a breakdown of which models include or offer each feature: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consumerreports.org&#x2F;car-safety&#x2F;cars-with-advanced-safety-systems-a7292621135&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consumerreports.org&#x2F;car-safety&#x2F;cars-with-advance...</a><p>The features most related to this article are: FCW, AEB, CAEB, HAEB, and PD. Note that some manufacturers have much better implementations than others, so after you settle on a few models, investigate how good their implementations actually are.

I have a 2018 VW Atlas and its automated braking system has done the right thing 99.9% of the time. It&#x27;s definitely saved me from 5-6 accidents -- being cut off a number of times, a racoon jumping in front of my car, and that one time my attention waned.<p>My Tesla, on the other hand, get&#x27;s it right about 10% of the time. I wanted to type a higher percentage, but phantom breaking happens so often. The number of times I&#x27;ve seen the red X on the atlas in the entire time owning it is about the number of times the M3 loses its mind on a monthly basis.<p>The other interesting thing: I could probably write the algorithm for the adaptive cruise control on the Atlas. It&#x27;s so predictable that I know exactly what it&#x27;s going to do in reaction to traffic around me. If a car ahead of me slows down, I slow down at a constant rate. If the car speeds up, I know exactly how much it&#x27;s going to speed up. Same with people changing lanes ahead of me, etc.<p>The M3 OTOH feels like a buggy machine learning model. I have no idea why it&#x27;s at the current speed it&#x27;s at. If I set it to 120KM&#x2F;H and there&#x27;s no car in front of me the chances of it being 120KM&#x2F;H is about 30%. If a car pulls away from and my car should speed up there is no rhyme or reason to when and how quickly it speeds up.<p>All that being said, I&#x27;d still take the Tesla automated braking over nothing at this point. Reading the other posts, it sounds like VW is doing something right.

One time my car decided that I was going to crash into one of those water tank things at a fork in a highway (actually, this was at a merge, on a curve, which is odd because you don&#x27;t expect that) and it started doing it&#x27;s alerting thing, and I had to swerve just so it would stop thinking I was going to crash into it. It was a curving merge, so briefly the car thought that I was driving towards an obstacle, but as long as I stayed in my lane that was never going to happen.<p>That incident gave pause. If the brakes had engaged, might that have caused a crash?

I have a 2017 Outback and there exists a cluster of switches on the dash for easily toggling all the EyeSight features.<p>They actually recommend to disable the &quot;pre-collision braking&quot; feature before driving through an automated carwash. Apart from that situation, I also disable it when I&#x27;m facing highly congested traffic for the reasons indicated in the other comments. It&#x27;s very easy to do. I don&#x27;t understand why this is a big deal.<p>I think the system works very well and has saved me several times over the years while approaching intersections and on the highway.

&gt; The group found front-to-rear crashes were cut 49% when the striking vehicle had forward collision alert plus automatic braking, when compared with vehicles that didn’t have either system.<p>I wonder about front-to-rear crashes when the struck vehicle has automatic braking when the rear one doesn&#x27;t.<p>I worry about people with automatic braking not paying attention and being on their phone and letting the automatic braking keep them from hitting people in front of them, while coming to abrupt stops and getting hit more from behind.

Anecdote here: 2015 Chevrolet SS was slightly aggressive, but overall I&#x27;d say tuned extremely well and saved me once when someone drove through a stop sign without looking onto my freeway offramp and then stopped dead. I was already on the brakes but it went into full panic stop a touch faster than I would have and that made the difference. A few times I noticed it preapplying the brakes when someone cut me off, but it never kicked them in during those situations.<p>Side note, that car has astoundingly good brakes.

Someone recently opined that the boffins should have started with collision avoidance. Then build up to FSD.<p>Facepalm slap. Seems so obvious once said out loud.<p>That&#x27;d be like a Rodney Brooks inspired actionist strategy, right? Our vehicles as boids, with implicit coordinated action, like flocking, herding, pacing, station keeping, etc.<p>Maybe a bottom-up emergent behavior strategy has potential. Or a hybrid strategy.<p>When it comes to AI, FDS, etc. I obviously know nothing about nothing, so please chime in.

Doesn&#x27;t seem to help those Teslas driving full speed into stopped cars. Or the ones that intentionally steer towards barriers on the highway.

The title is a tiny bit misleading. Here are the stats from the article:<p>Automatic braking has demonstrated the ability to:<p>- reduce rear-end automobile crashes &quot;in half&quot; (technically 49%)<p>- reduce Rear-end crashes with injuries by 53%<p>- vehicles without automatic braking, but with collision warnings only cut accidents by 16% (compared to 49% with automatic braking)<p>- pickup trucks are less effective at preventing crashes, only preventing 43% of accidents and reducing injuries by 42% (compared to above numbers for other vehicles)<p>- lane departure systems reduce crashes by 8% and reduce injuries by 7%<p>- A consortium of 20 auto manufactures have voluntarily committed to offering automatic braking technology to 95% of their light-duty models during the 2023 model year

Fuck no. I had to deal with a rental that had driver assist technology and it damn near killed me. There was a boulder on the road around a blind corner and the car fought me trying to swerve out of the way, I barely avoided it.<p>Imagine auto braking on black ice or because of a faulty sensor. We&#x27;re giving immature technology too much control of the vehicle.

I don&#x27;t have an automatic brake in my car, but a sensor that warns me when I&#x27;m about to crash into something. There has so far been a single incident where this was actually helpful. In &gt;95% of the cases, it&#x27;s false positives.<p>I can only imagine what driving would be like if the car did indeed autonomously brake in those situations.

Automatic braking on my Mazda almost caused me 2 accidents.... because it breaks to almost a full stop on the highway for almost no reason sometimes (and someone was right behind me)

Cut to clip of car stopping in front of the murderer

&quot;Can&quot; is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there.

Headline claim only pertains to rear end collisions (which to be fair, are a large portion of collisions on our modern cell-phone filled roads). AEB won&#x27;t save you from losing your shit in the woods trying to dodge that deer or road debris you couldn&#x27;t see until last minute nor will it save you from entering a corner too hot.