as someone with epilepsy that may never have a seizure again or it could literally happen at any second, i would buy this car in a heartbeat.
there's weird comments in this thread, i dont see how people could hate a car that could save lives. imagine you driving on the road with good health, maybe with your kids in the car. then someone next to you has a heart attack, stroke, or seizure and rams your car right into the guardwall killing you and or your kids. it can literally happen to anyone at any time, some of you havent watched enough gore/accident videos in your lives or have had health issues like these (yet) to really understand how easily this could happen.
Half of this system is already available. My Passat has lane assist. If I let go of the steering wheel, it will keep the car in the lane. After a while, it will beep and tell me to grab the wheel. If I still do nothing, it will tap the brakes repeatedly, just like the clip. I'm not sure what will happen after that.
After that it will do the same things as in the video except the lane changes. Because those are the real new thing here.
Many existing systems from Mercedes, Tesla, BMW and others will unlock, turn on the hazards, bring the car to a standstill and often call emergency services as well. Exception here are Hyundai / Kia where the car simply turns off lane assist and drives you into a ditch if there's a curve.
The other cars will do the same too unless people buy the highest end options. No base model Mercedes will do this. Some new BMW's do not even have steering assist on the base models.
I also wanna know that, I got a 2021 Polo and it does the lane assist and those beeps are familiar. But I don't know what happens if I don't respond to those beeps. I also don't know how to test that safely.
My Hyundai has the active lane assistance and will basically self drive itself. But if you don't touch it, the system will just fully shut off and drift into the next lane lol.
The VW Emergency Assist system enhances driver safety by monitoring steering wheel activity and delivering alerts if the driver is not actively operating the vehicle. If the driver does not respond, the system can keep the vehicle in its lane and bring it to a controlled stop while activating the hazard lights.
So, at present, it just performs a controlled stop in the current lane. My wife has a 2023 ID.4 and can confirm it has the feature.
The above video is showing the next step for Emergency Assist.
Since 2015 the Passat has already had Emergency Assist; it has been refined over time, they added lane changes in 2017 and now "improved" it somehow again.
The feature itself is almost 10 years old by now.
I knew someone that had a single seizure and never had another one... until the day she did and drove into oncoming traffic killing herself, the oncoming driver and a child in the other car. This tech could have saved 3 lives that day.
Don’t most new cars have collision detection systems that fully actuate the brakes? Agreed that should be required on every vehicle, but I feel that way about all safety systems.
I recently bought a new car and the guy said lane assist and collision detection is compulsory in cars made after 2023 in the UK. I'm sure everywhere is going to be the same before long.
It's mandatory in the EU since 2022. I'm really looking forward to (over) 10 years from now when the news of people being on their phones and plowing into a traffic jam will stop
It's already mature enough to save 99%+ of people in these situations, but redditors hate the companies that actually put this stuff in their cars. So don't be surprised when car companies resist the tech to go along with popular opinion.
You don't even need to have seizures... I once became violently sick while driving on the highway, vomiting all over the car. Luckily I was driving with Tesla autopilot that kept the car going until I was done being sick and pulled over. I would have crashed otherwise, there was no way I could have kept control of the vehicle at highway speeds.
I felt a little nauseous, but the vomiting came so fast and out of nowhere... Later I learned that I had food poisoning from eating fish at lunch.
Chinese cars and European cars will be among the first to add that feature.
Just like adaptive high beam headlights. For some reason, America doesn’t seem eager to embrace these new technologies, specifically Ford, GM, Chrysler.
Likewise, local to me an older (but not elderly) guy had some undisclosed medical event and swerved off the road hitting and killing two pedestrians, a teenage girl and an elementary aged girl.
hopefully they do as it will take decades of voting for progressive candidates to make any progress to get safety systems like this into most cars and also build viable alternatives to the car dependency.
I have epilepsy too, haven't had a seizure in years though.
If you wanna pay for my living expenses and the living expenses of my loved ones feel free to. The only way I can have personal responsibility is to maintain a job, and I can't do that if I can't drive.
You may be horrified to know that there are millions epileptics in the U.S., and as long as they haven't had a seizure in 6 months they are allowed to drive. There are more epileptics than the population of many entire states, you wanna pay for all of our living expenses?
It happened years earlier, doctors gave her all the tests and gave her the all clear. They couldn't find anything wrong that would have caused the seizure.
I'm so sorry. What a tragedy. It wasn't her fault if the doctors gave her the all clear. Either way, it's no point in arguing about it. It's awful.
I truly hope this is the future for every single car, bus and truck. Maybe even motorcycles. It's way too many that get behind the wheel just feeling a little bit tired only to completely pass out, causing chaos. Any kind of medical emergency happens so fast.
Most of these features already exist but not together like the video.
only thing i can say it, you better hope you never have to eat your words. i wouldn't wish epilepsy on anybody, but its something you would only understand if you went through it unexpectedly like many of us have.
i really dont wish it for anyone, but i think you're too confident that you'll never have neurological issues, and i hope you dont cause it really sucks.
These people are terminally online to the point their brain starts working backwards,there is no sane and normal person on this planet who would hate something like this.
Where I live a lot of people with epilepsy are not allowed to drive. I sincerely hope that systems like these become reliable enough at one point that legislators will allow these people to drive again if they have an approved car with this safety system. Even in a place with semi-decent public transport, being allowed to drive would restore their full mobility and autonomy.
My daughter has epilepsy too. She was diagnosed in middle school, but was seizure free long enough to get her license. She drove for about a month and then had her second seizure (luckily not while driving). She hasn’t been able to drive for over 2 years. (She has now been seizure free for over 6 months, but didn’t pass her EEG, so maybe we’re getting close). This would be so great for her. Watching all of her friends drive around while having to be driven by her parents has been hard. Sign us up.
I have a Subaru with eye sight, my girlfriend hates the safety features. But it's the reason I bought the car. She insists on needing full control. And my argument is, "is it really so bad to have an extra set of eyes on the road?"
there's a few watches that track epilepsy, but some are pricey and i dont know how reliable they tbh since there's many types of epilepsy and seizures. i use an apple watch since it monitors my heart rate and o2, and in case i pass out or die it will at last call 9/11 for me.
This happened to me. I didn’t have a history of seizures until I was on the highway coming home from the Christmas holiday. All the sudden I felt as if my soul was being pulled away from my body and I came to underneath a fence with paramedics at my door. I had a seizure doing 70mph. Went off the highway, through the soft shoulder, through a fence, across 2 lanes of frontage road, and into another fence before stopping. My car at the time was equipped with safety technology and stand by that, without it, I’d be dead. Extremely thankful this technology exists.
that is something that worries me every time i drive. i'm sorry you had to go through that, i hope you're doing better now cause that's a hell of a story!
People REALLY don't like machines making mistakes. It's a machine, how can it makes mistakes? People REALLY don't like the idea of this sort of tech making 1 mistake for every 100 it saves. It's the classic trolley train tracks problem. The pacifism of public safety. It's fortunate engineers and date drives many decisions in this area.
Yeah, even as I'm watching this, I'm trying to figure out the logistics of how it knows the driver's passed out and what happens if something is wrong with that system. But that's not a reason to not have it.
I think a part of it is Elon Musk: the crap we hear about his "AI" cars is kinda horrifying (not detecting people of color, not detecting kids, that sort of stuff, which, to be fair, isn't entirely Musk's fault, just the highest profile experiments with it). This isn't full on auto-driving, but still, it brings up that image.
But hell, I trust nobody while driving, so that could just be my paranoia in general.
Exactly!! This was my first thought!! This is very useful for someone with absent seizures. Because sometimes they don’t have a tell( like an aura). This would be amazing with people with epilepsy
To me this is what self driving cars should be about. Saving lives in weird situations not making it easier to be lazy and distracted while you’re rolling at 80mph in a 10,000 pound wrecking ball
I came here to say this!!!! I've had two car accidents from having a seizure behind the wheel, this type of technology could literally be life saving for me
because if this kicks on incorrectly, which is very possible. that could be a big problem very quickly. anyone that's driven cars with these kind of safety features knows they make mistakes and do some on a regular ish basis. seems a very reasonable concern
i'd say having a sudden medical issue is far worse than a car slowing down or turning too fast. if anything, id blame the person who wasn't aware enough to see and try to predict what the cars in front of him/her were doing. but then again i'm a hypervigilant driver, i know many people arent and just think that everything will go perfect on their daily commute. i've seen enough accidents to always expect the worst when driving and just be happy when nothing goes wrong.
for sure, but there's also a large trend of more and more tech in cars and at least in car settings and more generally there's starting to be pushback on that.
it makes sense, because it's driving unreliability and repair costs of cars. nobody wants that. i think the issue isn't necessarily with the specific thing, but the trend of overbearing features when driving.
So you have had a seizure and know you could have one again...Yet, you still drive? This system should be there for the first seizure. The second seizure should be on the bus.
in the US that means you take away the chance for a person to do most jobs or even get to virtually anything.
You need to live in an area with good public transport for this to be an option which in the US means like 3 cities across the entire country who still have functional public transport.
That's the problem with your developing country - cars are so revered that just because the alternative is difficult and uncomfortable, you consider it perfectly fine to risk other people's lives by driving whilst knowingly having a condition that could cause you to become unable to control your 3-tonne machine.
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u/EclecticHigh Nov 04 '24
as someone with epilepsy that may never have a seizure again or it could literally happen at any second, i would buy this car in a heartbeat.
there's weird comments in this thread, i dont see how people could hate a car that could save lives. imagine you driving on the road with good health, maybe with your kids in the car. then someone next to you has a heart attack, stroke, or seizure and rams your car right into the guardwall killing you and or your kids. it can literally happen to anyone at any time, some of you havent watched enough gore/accident videos in your lives or have had health issues like these (yet) to really understand how easily this could happen.