Toyota's new accident avoidance system will take control of the car.

Let the people who can't drive but want to show off their Escalade get this system, the rest of us can enjoy driving.
 
I like the idea of features like City Safety, ESC, and Pre-Collision Warning. Those still let the driver maintain control of the vehicle, or at least some semblance of it.

I do not like a system that takes over steering. Sure the system can likely sense that there is:

*A car stopped ahead of you in the left lane, one in front in the right lane, and a empty space in the shoulder

but I doubt it can "see" that sheet of ice on said shoulder it's about to turn you into, to avoid hitting the cars in front of you.

Also, this is Lexus/Toyota here....you know "Pedalgate." While they've been officially exonerated...(I remain skeptical...the infamous surging/spontaneously accelerating Avalon that a guy nursed to the Toyota dealer that Toyota later took away for "examination" springs to mind....guy got a free Azera out of the deal..but i digress..) I feel like there's a certain segment of the population who wouldn't trust such a technology from them after that.
 
I won't trust a system like that either. I have no doubt that eventually we will all have automated cars, but the AI for driving in real world traffic (or in this case accidents) are not there yet. I guess in 30 years we'll still be running out old cars because all the new ones will come without steering wheels, gas or brake pedals.
 
katwalk said:
Those people should not be driving and they need to teach things properly. Instead of hours of "observing" they need to teach accident avoidance. The other issue is the government isn't unlike toyota and it wouldn't surprise me if they made this crap mandatory on every car and not able to be shut off.
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They can barely teach people to drive let alone accident avoidance. This system is for the people that let go of the steering wheel when things look bad or target lock.



Ford Prefect said:
The much simpler solution (in theory) would of course be for governments the world over to stop handing drivers licenses to anyone smart enough to spell his own name.
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But that might make sense, and you can't have the goverenment trying to make sense now can we?
 
I'm not certain that any system they produce, bugs or not, would be as bad as many ES or RX drivers.
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Good point. I know an RX driver, female....
If it works, it keeps you from crashing into someone else. If it doesnt work, you crash into someone else. What's the problem?
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If it doesn't work it will crash me into someone else even though I could have avoided it.... Imagine a small wiring fault yanking your wheel to the left at 60 on a highway when you are in the right lane...
I won't trust a system like that either. I have no doubt that eventually we will all have automated cars, but the AI for driving in real world traffic (or in this case accidents) are not there yet.
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Well in all honesty the Google self driving car seems to be doing very well but I just don't think that true self driving car is possible w/o a wirelessly linked network, there are a lot of inputs that could be eliminated if cars talk to each other.
 
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This is one of those technologies that I wouldn't want in my car, but would like everybody else to have it in their cars.
 
This is a very bad idea. A computer can only detect so many things, past that you need human judgement. There's no way a computer could detect an oil slick in the direction it plans to swerve, for instance.
 
Evel said:
This is a very bad idea. A computer can only detect so many things, past that you need human judgement. There's no way a computer could detect an oil slick in the direction it plans to swerve, for instance.
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99% of humans wouldn't see and respond appropriately to the oil slick either. While the computer may not take into account as many variables as a human, it will treat the variables it does know with greater logic and speed than a human. I would imagine that this system can respond to an incident better than a human in 95+% of instances. Reaction time is everything.
 
A person could choose to rear end another car instead of swerving into oncoming traffic and causing many probably more fatal accidents, or choose to hit a car instead of children playing on the side of the road. I don't think the computer can figure that shit out at this point and just can tell objects are places.
 
katwalk said:
A person could choose to rear end another car instead of swerving into oncoming traffic and causing many probably more fatal accidents, or choose to hit a car instead of children playing on the side of the road. I don't think the computer can figure that shit out at this point and just can tell objects are places.
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It will be able to detect oncoming objects so presumably won't swerve towards them. It isn't as crude as just swerving around whatever object is in front of the car.
 
But how far is the range for oncoming objects? You could swerve into oncoming traffic when a car is not there but it does not have time to stop before hitting you. It might work for low speed traffic but I have seen roads at like 50 mph without a divider.
 
Like people have said before, most of us here on Finalgear probably don't need this stuff in our cars but like 90% of the rest of the world does. Computers might not always make the best decisions but the average driver clearly doesn't either.

Keep it out of my car and I'm happy, not like I'm ever buying a modern car anyway.
 
This system will work great!

Up until the very first time it decides that it can brake just as effectively on the embankment next to the road as it can on the asphalt. Or that "OMFG SWERVE LEFT!" is a great idea on a mountain road.
 
Great idea, but what these car companies don't seem to realize is that if I am driving my car, I want FULL control of it. Also, in the not too distant future, it will come to the point that if you are about to rear end somebody, instead of using instinct and taking as much control of your vehicle as you can, you're just gonna let go of all the controls and have the computers do it for you.
 
EyeMWing said:
This system will work great!

Up until the very first time it decides that it can brake just as effectively on the embankment next to the road as it can on the asphalt. Or that "OMFG SWERVE LEFT!" is a great idea on a mountain road.
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Do you honestly think the system will be that stupid?
Why do people always resort to pathetic arguments in this place?
 
Jens said:
If (and that's a big if) they manage to make this system work as it should, I would trust it more than 90% of the people I see on the road to make a decission in an emergency situation.
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Basically. I think plenty of people would be surprised how many people are at their car control limit just navigating lanes on a highway. For a great many drivers, a system like this will improve their chances of avoidance tenfold.

That said I wouldn't have it in my car. But then, avoiding crashed cars is day-to-day for me.
 
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Peter3hg said:
Do you honestly think the system will be that stupid?
Why do people always resort to pathetic arguments in this place?
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Do you think they can design in the ability for it to look for every possible outcome or circumstance?
 
Peter3hg said:
Do you honestly think the system will be that stupid?
Why do people always resort to pathetic arguments in this place?
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They're trying to think something up to motivate their knee-jerk reaction. Many engineers will have spent years developing and testing this system to make sure it works before it's released on the market. I wonder why there is no outrage on FG against current auto-parking features, as that also allows the car to move the steering wheel on it's own? It's because these systems exist and work well. Volvos (and others) City Safety can brake the car on it's own, and it works well. Lane assist exist (also a system that can control the wheel), and works well. Traction control does not go about randomly locking up rear tires due to computer failures either. In conclusion, technology works well.
 
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AiR said:
They're trying to think something up to motivate their knee-jerk reaction. Many engineers will have spent years developing and testing this system to make sure it works before it's released on the market. I wonder why there is no outrage on FG against current auto-parking features, as that also allows the car to move the steering wheel on it's own? It's because these systems exist and work well. Volvos (and others) City Safety can brake the car on it's own, and it works well. Lane assist exist (also a system that can control the wheel), and works well. Traction control does not go about randomly locking up rear tires due to computer failures either. In conclusion, technology works well.
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Low speed stuff is good. I'm fully in support of ESC and Traction Control, as well as City Safety and other Pre-Collision warning systems. All of them have been proven to save lives, and in fact, Consumer Reports recommends that no one buy a new car w/out ESC. Self parking is a godsend for those who aren't good at parallel parking, a'la me. Also Ford among others, have built in algorithms into their electric steering systems that account for things like road crowning and such:

Ford Fiesta press release said:
EPAS also includes Pull-Drift Compensation to help Fiesta track true regardless of road crown or side wind conditions. In addition, active nibble control helps detect and compensate for tire balance irregularity. Both features - enabled by EPAS - are class-exclusives.
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so admittedly their steering systems adjust the steering as one's driving on the highway to begin with...the Lexus thing just takes it further.

The difference between all those features and this upcoming Toyota technology is that the driver still has some semblance of control. Grab the wheel during a self-parking maneuver and the session is auto-canceled. Also, most of those systems that do the most dramatic steering adjustments work only at low speeds. (City Safety and Self Parking) Yes, part of the reaction is probably stereotypical at best, the whole "a computer can't do things better than I can" thing. But part is also logical...how CAN a system like that account for near every scenario?

I'm sure that the Lexus system has been tested and tested and tested. But it cannot account for everything. How can it account for rapidly changing things on the shoulder? What if there are obstacles that show up there? I'm sure it's tied into their VDIM system, so it'll get input from traction and stability control but still...its something to think about.

Perhaps the system will auto cancel if one pulls the wheel in the middle of a avoidance maneuver...that opens another can of worms though...
 
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rickhamilton620 said:
Yes, part of the reaction is probably stereotypical at best, the whole "a computer can't do things better than I can" thing. But part is also logical...how CAN a system like that account for near every scenario?
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Fatal logic flaw: the people who will use this system are not the people who will be able to rationally interpret a complex situation and choose the best course of action. For those people, the survival of a complex multi-lane crash or worse is a matter of luck. So they may as well let the system do it's thing, because it might see something they don't. For example, the radar would probably be able to see through dust fairly well. Many accidents are obscured by dust. The system would then be able to place the car properly without the driver guessing.

No, it can't account for every scenario. But neither can people. Should we not allow people to drive because there are some situations they cannot get out of without pure random luck? If a car goes off the road in front of them, spraying debris into an open driver's window, that driver may well be blind. Or what if the hood latch fails and the hood flies up? Or a driver has a stroke or a heart attack? It's all too easy to get embroiled in the what-if game.
 
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