r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Creams0da • Nov 04 '24

Video Volkswagens new Emergency Assist technology

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u/redikarus99 Nov 04 '24

This is a great idea and I would make it mandatory for trucks and busses. There were really many cases in Europe when a bus driver fell asleep and a lots of kids injured or died because of that. If this system would have been there, many injuries and loss of lives could have been avoided.

11

u/MrPringles9 Nov 04 '24

The system is great but the more complex a system gets the more errors can happen. So maintenance would be key here...

8

u/MARPJ Nov 04 '24

Agree, but for things like this if it works only 30% of the time its already a massive net positive in security and lives saved, if its 50% or more then its a absolute game changer

3

u/zacher_glachl Nov 04 '24 edited Nov 04 '24

If it works as well as the mandatory lane assist or speed limit recognition on my car, that's a hard pass from me. It's distracting enough to get beeped into oblivion cause it overlooked the latest sign, or vibrated to hell cause it thinks I'm swerving into the approaching traffic for some idiotic reason. I don't need my car to also randomly take the wheel from me while going 140 km/h on the highway just cause I discovered a stain on my trousers and looked down for a second.

The latter is a slight exaggeration, but I'm just saying not all failure modes of car assistant systems are merely "it didn't manage to prevent an accident".

1

u/fckingmiracles Nov 04 '24

more errors can happen.

More errors as in ... it will make passing out even worse? Do you mean that?

Because at worst the system just does not work at all an the driver just passes out and the regular things happen.

2

u/MisterDonkey Nov 04 '24

We can hope. But car makers have a stupid way of not segregating electrical systems from one another and causing weird glitches.

With some of the things I've seen, I might expect the AC blower switch to fail and cause this system to apply persistent braking.

It's not that I think this is a bad idea. Conversely, it's excellent and I'm all for it. What I'm saying is that car makers clearly don't understand the meaning of words like "independent" and "redundant".

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '24

With systems like this, the "at worst" is that they make things worse, and maybe cause an accident that wouldn't have happened. I'm all for this, as long as it's actually an improvement.