It's getting harder than ever to see out of modern "safer" cars, too. I regularly entirely lose cars hidden by the B-pillar on my Model 3. I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there. It's compounded by the fact that the driver's side mirror doesn't physically move far enough to the left to cover the blind spot like it would in most cars, and our terrible flat mirrors in the US don't provide the wide angle that european driver's side mirrors have. (still working on sourcing a european mirror glass; currently Tesla only sells the entire mirror body+motors+glass as a single part, for $400ish)
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.
Some manufactures keep great visibility. My Subaru has very narrow A pillars and good blind spot visibility. I can adjust my mirrors to get rid of almost all blind spots on my Impreza.
I mostly ride motorcycle. always super annoyed/amazed when I drive a car at how shit visibility is. Not only all the blind spots but also how low your vision is. I can see over most cars and can always lift up on pegs if I need to see further.
Those pillars are full of de-facto mandatory extra air bags. Crash safety (probability of crash survival) is more easily measured than probability of crash occurrence.
How tall are you? I'm 6'5" and don't have the issues you describe with the B pillars and I sit back pretty far.
The Model 3 ended up being a breath of fresh air for me in terms of visibility overall, it has dramatically better visibility compared to the Leaf, Accord, and Corolla I had been accustomed to driving.
I should note the Leaf has absolutely atrocious visibility and stands out as the worst I've encountered in a car.
> I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there.
Keep in mind some of your behavioral changes are associated with you becoming a more experienced driver and learning just what sort of evil can lurk in curious places. As much as my car's blind spot irks me, there's no way it's as bad the 1979 Crown Vic I learned in.
Seems like you're in the market for a Mercedes-Benz E400: it has no B pillar, and a reasonably sized rear window [0].
Though I guess it could always be better, for me I'd personally prefer if they shifted the the hard panel further forward, trading some sunroof for rear window.. and of course there's the drivetrain which I'm sure is not your first pick.
For now, given the current limits of structural engineering, the only hardtop cars without B pillars are coupes.
Hmm... how about adding displays on the pillars connected to cameras that fill in the view (adjusted to whatever the driver's head position is at any time)?
One of the reasons I am reluctant to drive anything other than a pickup truck. Visibility is just so atrocious in most vehicles, and the trend of making mirrors roughly the size of my palm for aerodynamic reasons is problematic.
I love cars, driving, and freedom in general. Just wanted to put that up front, because I'm going to suggest this isn't an issue with the manufacturer of motor vehicles, but with the massive government system(s) built around regulating them.
There is nothing stopping this terrific government thing everyone is raving about from passing some regulations that require people who operate motor vehicles on the roadways, actually be capable of operating motor vehicles on the roadways. Instead, we get short HS drivers education classes, that really only teach you what the 2 pedals in American cars does what, and perhaps a quick refresher on how "wheels" work.Then you get put on the highway, and taught to speed, but not too much, and generally ignore every other major rule there is.
I ride motorcycles, have taken several high performance driving classes, as well as drive in an amateur (wheel to wheel) auto racing series, and I still catch myself making mistakes on the roads. Its not an easy task, and the current system is woefully under performing when it comes to equipping people to handle it. This needs to be fixed by changing the culture around driving, if for no other reason than because sometimes machines fail, and the person behind the wheel needs to be responsible.
I don’t think you can simply educate people not to text and drive.
Governments are ramping up signs and laws against texting and driving and it doesn’t appear to be doing anything to stop the problem. People know it’s bad but they don’t care because they haven’t personally killed someone yet. Just like they’ve treated speeding laws for decades.
Surveillance apparatus that directly hits people in the pocketbook on a frequent basis with fines is the only way to solve this problem that keeps humans behind the wheel IMO (we had a thread recently about such cameras that are being tried in Australia). Or autonomous cars or a massive and incredibly expensive redesign of our cities and transportation network to get people out of cars.
I agree, and I'm not even American - it's criminal how little is required from people to let them drive on public roads, and their ability is pretty much never tested to any kind of standard again after passing their licence.
Are there studies that show countries where you have to pay lots of money and have to pass rigorous exams have better pedestrian road safety? Maybe it’s so.
Then be careful what you wish for lest you incite the DMV to morph into the FAA, FCC, or ATF.
I'm serious. You have not even begun to contemplate how miserable, soul killing, and inaccessible regulations can make something until you have really dug into something like that.
If you do love it, teach! Don't seek to lock a student out! Help them become better, faster, that they can do the same for someone they know!
Lately my (foot) commute has come to involve a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs.
My current belief is that the single most effective pedestrian safety feature that car manufacturers could possibly implement is some mechanism for preventing Waze from working.
>a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs.
Same where I live in Europe. When I commute by car, over 50% of drivers I look at are on their phones and another 25% are doing another semi-distracting activity(eating, smoking, fiddling with stuff). Maybe on the highway it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm talking about city streets that are full of cyclists and people running to catch their bus.
It's one of the reason I'm super afraid of biking on some streets, thinking that one day someone's gonna run me down since he was texting his wife and didn't see me(had some near misses already).
Anecdotally, a friend of mine was hit on a zebra crossing by a texting driver while he was with me. Broke his collar bone and definitely left both of us with some mental scars that will not heal too soon.
It got me to feel like smartphones are a huge issue for traffic safety as some drivers simply can't leave it alone during their commute.
Totally agree. Waze is increasingly awful and ineffective as more people use it.
My block ended up being selected as a detour around an intersection that gets gummed up by a poorly programmed traffic light. After a few near misses, a couple of the neighbors got together to basically double park with blinkers on in such a way that the traffic slows down.
I see that a lot during my morning dog walks. I have made it a habit to step into the car’s path to freak out people and make it really clear that I am there. You just have to get ready to jump quickly...
> Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2017, the latest year data were available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was up 35% from 2008
I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit.
This is where the material from the college engineering ethics course I was required to take kicks in. It's stuff like this we should pay attention to.
> At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night
When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving.
I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.
Car companies seem complicit in promoting distracted driving in their commercials, too, by promoting automatic braking for drivers who aren't paying attention:
Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.
You can also look this from a completely different mentality.
> The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn.
That means that in that simple no-turn circumstance, the car DOESN’T hit the child 11% of the time.
It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. You still have to drive your car. You still need to stay off your phone. But these systems only have to work sometimes for them to be worth installing.
I think a huge part of the problem is that car companies aren't properly incentivized to protect pedestrians. It's easier and cheaper to prevent my car from hitting something that can damage it than to prevent my car from hitting something that it can damage (easier to detect buildings and other cars than to detect children). If you were the CEO of a car company and had a finite amount of money to spend on research on driver assist features would you rather spend it on the easy problem of protecting your customers or the expensive problem of protecting other people? Furthermore, as a consumer, would you rather buy a car that costs x dollars that protects you or costs x+y that protects other people?
It seems to me this encouragement of partial attention while driving just doesn't work for human reasons. The more you give people an excuse not to participate the more they will withdraw and blame technology when something goes wrong. You're either driving or you're not - there is no middle ground.
Pedestrian safety is of almost not value to us manufacturers. The could improve it significantly but there were actually a couple cases where manufacturers would strip off pedestrian safety features off cars originally designed to European standards to make them more aggressive looking.
It took a bunch of old NIMBYs to have scooter companies install speed limits within certain locations. We have the technology to have cars automatically limit speeds to the maximum allowed on the given road. We choose not to. Instead people keep getting killed.
This is not pie in the sky science fiction to drool about. We could do it now. We could do it 5 years ago.
Huh? Are you actively advocating for everyone's car to send location data, and have the ability to be remotely controlled? Terrible idea. The difference between cars and scooters is that you buy a car that you OWN, and you rent a scooter for 10 minutes.
I am 100% blind. This article confirms my fears. In the future, it will be more dangerous to walk the streets then it already is. I was born with an deep fear of automatic doors. And I will likely die due to the autonomous car revolution.
Relatedly, a 1939 vision of the future (discussed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 ) shows a simple --- but probably quite expensive --- solution; people and cars can't collide if they're separated:
Sadly, this is well known inside the industry. The functionality of these systems significantly degraded when dark.
I've been told that there is similar degradation in the performance of autonomous emergency braking and forward-collision warning not only when dealing with pedestrians, but with cars that have their lights on and are perfectly visible to human drivers.
[+] [-] rconti|6 years ago|reply
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.
[+] [-] Zhenya|6 years ago|reply
In 2001 Volvo released a concept car called the SCC (safety car concept) that had see through a pillars!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_SCC
image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Goteborg...
[+] [-] majormjr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|6 years ago|reply
The Model 3 ended up being a breath of fresh air for me in terms of visibility overall, it has dramatically better visibility compared to the Leaf, Accord, and Corolla I had been accustomed to driving.
I should note the Leaf has absolutely atrocious visibility and stands out as the worst I've encountered in a car.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|6 years ago|reply
Keep in mind some of your behavioral changes are associated with you becoming a more experienced driver and learning just what sort of evil can lurk in curious places. As much as my car's blind spot irks me, there's no way it's as bad the 1979 Crown Vic I learned in.
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
Though I guess it could always be better, for me I'd personally prefer if they shifted the the hard panel further forward, trading some sunroof for rear window.. and of course there's the drivetrain which I'm sure is not your first pick.
For now, given the current limits of structural engineering, the only hardtop cars without B pillars are coupes.
[0]: http://cdntdreditorials.azureedge.net/cache/7/b/c/3/e/3/7bc3...
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Mirrors/b?node=491998903...
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rladd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argonaut|6 years ago|reply
Thicker pillars means better structural integrity during crashes, particularly the roof during rollovers.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] goshx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|6 years ago|reply
There is nothing stopping this terrific government thing everyone is raving about from passing some regulations that require people who operate motor vehicles on the roadways, actually be capable of operating motor vehicles on the roadways. Instead, we get short HS drivers education classes, that really only teach you what the 2 pedals in American cars does what, and perhaps a quick refresher on how "wheels" work.Then you get put on the highway, and taught to speed, but not too much, and generally ignore every other major rule there is.
I ride motorcycles, have taken several high performance driving classes, as well as drive in an amateur (wheel to wheel) auto racing series, and I still catch myself making mistakes on the roads. Its not an easy task, and the current system is woefully under performing when it comes to equipping people to handle it. This needs to be fixed by changing the culture around driving, if for no other reason than because sometimes machines fail, and the person behind the wheel needs to be responsible.
[+] [-] javagram|6 years ago|reply
Governments are ramping up signs and laws against texting and driving and it doesn’t appear to be doing anything to stop the problem. People know it’s bad but they don’t care because they haven’t personally killed someone yet. Just like they’ve treated speeding laws for decades.
Surveillance apparatus that directly hits people in the pocketbook on a frequent basis with fines is the only way to solve this problem that keeps humans behind the wheel IMO (we had a thread recently about such cameras that are being tried in Australia). Or autonomous cars or a massive and incredibly expensive redesign of our cities and transportation network to get people out of cars.
[+] [-] gambiting|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salawat|6 years ago|reply
Then be careful what you wish for lest you incite the DMV to morph into the FAA, FCC, or ATF.
I'm serious. You have not even begun to contemplate how miserable, soul killing, and inaccessible regulations can make something until you have really dug into something like that.
If you do love it, teach! Don't seek to lock a student out! Help them become better, faster, that they can do the same for someone they know!
[+] [-] mumblemumble|6 years ago|reply
My current belief is that the single most effective pedestrian safety feature that car manufacturers could possibly implement is some mechanism for preventing Waze from working.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|6 years ago|reply
Same where I live in Europe. When I commute by car, over 50% of drivers I look at are on their phones and another 25% are doing another semi-distracting activity(eating, smoking, fiddling with stuff). Maybe on the highway it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm talking about city streets that are full of cyclists and people running to catch their bus.
It's one of the reason I'm super afraid of biking on some streets, thinking that one day someone's gonna run me down since he was texting his wife and didn't see me(had some near misses already).
Anecdotally, a friend of mine was hit on a zebra crossing by a texting driver while he was with me. Broke his collar bone and definitely left both of us with some mental scars that will not heal too soon.
It got me to feel like smartphones are a huge issue for traffic safety as some drivers simply can't leave it alone during their commute.
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
My block ended up being selected as a detour around an intersection that gets gummed up by a poorly programmed traffic light. After a few near misses, a couple of the neighbors got together to basically double park with blinkers on in such a way that the traffic slows down.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsignedchar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfer|6 years ago|reply
I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit.
This is where the material from the college engineering ethics course I was required to take kicks in. It's stuff like this we should pay attention to.
> At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night
When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving.
I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.
[+] [-] chiefofgxbxl|6 years ago|reply
1. https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
2. These systems are primarily for avoiding car-on-car collisions. They're very good at that. Which is maybe why it's not mentioned in the article...
[+] [-] gok|6 years ago|reply
Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.
[+] [-] dangus|6 years ago|reply
> The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn.
That means that in that simple no-turn circumstance, the car DOESN’T hit the child 11% of the time.
It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. You still have to drive your car. You still need to stay off your phone. But these systems only have to work sometimes for them to be worth installing.
[+] [-] chickenpotpie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermarks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtwo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihaveajob|6 years ago|reply
This is not pie in the sky science fiction to drool about. We could do it now. We could do it 5 years ago.
[+] [-] kart23|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlang23|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohittidke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] userbinator|6 years ago|reply
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_i...
[+] [-] Piskvorrr|6 years ago|reply
Yeah. It's been tried, and kinda didn't work.
[+] [-] carlio|6 years ago|reply
I've been told that there is similar degradation in the performance of autonomous emergency braking and forward-collision warning not only when dealing with pedestrians, but with cars that have their lights on and are perfectly visible to human drivers.
[+] [-] UglyToad|6 years ago|reply