Im inclined to think it worthwhile.

You wouldn't had you been sitting beside me two weeks ago, third day out with new lorry, going round a curved junction with queueing traffic to my right waiting to turn right, vehicle sensed impending crash and chucked the brakes on, luckily dry road had the road been slippery the sudden braking might well have caused a slide.

Colleague a few months ago, driving through a village, doing below 30mph, vehicle 'sees' bollards in the middle of the road (which he wasn't aiming for) and presumably didn't like the look of them, vehicle stops dead, chap behind overjoyed.

Now imagine when you are driving a car, icy weather like now the last thing you want is harsh braking, by all means buy into it but don't be persuaded it's a perfect system, let alone the possibility of being rammed up the back by someone driving quite normally when your car suddenly stops dead for no apparent reason.

MT does not need me to defend him, but i too was a bit perturbed by Bolt's post about this system saving him from accident(s).

Edited by gordonbennet on 14/02/2018 at 20:39

MT does not need me to defend him, but i too was a bit perturbed by Bolt's post about this system saving him from accident(s).

Not just me then...I did not intend rudeness and I apologise for any offence. Perhaps we weren't meant to take "its saved me from crashes at junctions many a time" literally? It's quite a scary thought that Bolt would have had multiple crashes without it.

I have no experience of it myself. After reading of GB's I don't think I want any.

I apologise as I was rude, the Honda system is linked to parking sensors and max speed of 19mph, so its sensitive but only at close range, which shows how close a motor can get before it activates which as I guess nobody knew makes it sound as though I had time to brake myself

and yes it has caught me out a few times and even prevents you from hitting parked cars though I do not usually get so close for it to activate.

I appologise again, but have been accused of not looking where I`m going where the opposite has been true, the other driver was not looking where he was going

I also think if more drivers were not on the phone/doing other things there would be less close shaves

Perhaps we are trialling fully automatic cars. Increasing number of features make choosing a newer car more and more difficult.

This is where things are heading, fully autonomous is many years away with commercial and buse operation (where they can save wages) where the big payoff is, and infamy, a double edged sword, for whoever cracks it.

It isn't working, all we are doing is dumbing driving skills further down and we see the results every day of the week on the roads.

Driving any vehicle, motorcycle car bus van lorry, is all about being in control, driving should be smooth and flowing and the driver aware of what is happening all around all the time, the good driver develops a feel for their vehicle and most important a seat of the pants knowledge for what is happening at the wheels, anything that takes away the driver's feel and reponsibility takes away the chances of the driver taking the right corrective action when everything goes wrong, just being the fastest to stop might put one in the right but being dead but in the right in the front of a major pile up isn't a great result.

Again, as you correctly said in your post above, what happens when these gimmicks age and starts to fail? and they tend to switch themselves off in poor weather when the sensors get dirty anyway.

Yes i think you are right, we the pubic are trialling these systems one after another, the one that makes me smile is blind spot warning lights, we design cars with arrow slit windows it's almost impossible to see out of, but look buyers we've come up with a device to sees for you, kerching, brilliant.

Would i want a car with automatic braking, no i wouldn't but that's me, other's will disagree, what's next one that takes over the steering?

Edited by gordonbennet on 15/02/2018 at 08:38

as I said if the car has it on board imo it should like stop/start be switchable so it can be turned off

An interesting point there Bolt (and yes, increasingly the only answer to avoiding this stuff is to refuse to buy new), all of our lorries, so far, the auto braking and lane guidance can be switched off, however i'm in a quandry about doing so.

Will it be like the current almost paranoia over the use of mobile phones i wonder, where in the event of an accident, no matter if the driver who had turned the thing off might be completely blameless, is the finger of blame purely by switching off going to be pointed at them?

So far i've left the thing to do what it wants, i can put up with LD going off regularly when it 'sees' old lane markings, or even no markings at all, and tells me off for not departing my lane :), and so far at least, the one time it's braked hasn't been an issue other than a mild surprise and eye rolling moment confirming that this tat is not fit for purpose, i'll carry on for now as a drone reduced to attending the wheel and see what the courts say when the inevitable cases come up.

I can even put with the way it reads the road in cruise control and cuts power several hundred yards before the brow of a hill (this really pleases drivers following) which reduces speed to allow the vehicle to coast down the other side, and yes i do mean coast, because the geartrain is disconnected and the revs drop to tickover, its called ecoroll...now back in the day we used to drop our old lorries into Irish overdrive (ie out of stick freewheeling down long hills) but it was a big no no from a legal view, now apparently its all fine and dandy.

I'm in two minds about automatic braking. Sure, it can prevent some accidents but most of the time it is a pain. On my daily commute, I come off the motorway (well, Autobahn but you know what I mean) and the exit ends in a T-junction with a right filter lane which I take. Although my route is free, the automatic braking activates because it thinks I am going to ram a car stopped at the T-junction. That said, I was thankful for it once when a car in the outside lane cut a corner into my lane and it applied the brakes quicker than I could react.

Thanks for two more helpful posts.

I think I should stick with my suspicion of latest additions. Gordon's post made me think of a current education debate about the place of technology. I think there is a convincing case that if we outsource too many of our brain's functions out personal ability will be diminished.

It is perhaps something to be pragmatic about and not make it a critical aspect of a car , positive or negative. I can't make my mind up about it.

Problem I think is that as a friend said who has just bought a new Ford K A, the salesman took ages explaining the tech on the car, but he wasn`t listening(took so long he got bored) he didn`t understand what most of it did and also was not really interested.

He said all he wanted to do was jump in and drive

and wasn`t given a choice, he bought the car anyway but spent yesterday afternoon finding out what the car had in it Not that he`s any the wiser

I think manufacturers really think most people want the tech, where in reality they are not really interested, they just want to drive it themselves and enjoy it

I think there is a convincing case that if we outsource too many of our brain's functions out personal ability will be diminished.

That i agree with.

This must apply in all fields, not just motoring, but in motoring terms we've seen the performance grip and handling of cars come on a tremendous rate in the last few years, whilst the skill required to drive fast have diminshed because the car is controlling increasingly more, this is good in some ways but when the inevitable idiots (who would have lost the fast cars of yore on the first wet roundabout at 20mph) do their thing, maybe the speeds involved and inevitable end results are far worse.

An interesting facet of all this is "human factors".

One of my children is a specialist in this in relation to medical devices. Any amount of effort can be put into the design of say a device for administering insulin but if it is possible to hold it the wrong way round or shoot oneself in the eye with it, somebody will do it.

As soon as you put any sort of machine into the hands of a human, there is scope for errors that wasn't there before.

A simple example is the use of calculators. It's been fairly well established (I have been told) that using a simple desk calculator for even critical calculations results in about 4% of the answers being wrong, hence the need for checking.

Part of the problem is that once a machine 'takes over' less responsibility falls on the user, less attention is paid, and skills are lost. If the 'automatics' aren't very very well developed and tested, then things get worse, not better.

I don't think collision avoidance systems should make you a less attentive driver

well it shouldn`t, but there are limits to the system, drivers should know these limitations rather than just jump in the motor thinking it will work in any situation, which I think is part of the problem

some people think they work in any scenario but they don`t, in the case of the Civic it may not work when you expect it to, and I do not rely on it to, but that doesnt mean you dont try to brake when you need to

the system in my opinion needs further work to iron out reasons why it only works when it does rather than when it feels like it, its possible that at times the system sees ghosts caused by the light/shade but doesnt know whats real and whats not