What if technology could solve all your problems?
Take, for example, speeding. Your vehicle always has known how fast it was going. The fact you were speeding was your choice. But computers and telematics data now tell your vehicle the posted speed limit on the road you are driving on. Your vehicle already knows how to slow itself down; it’s in the cruise control systems. So, let’s eliminate speeding by just preventing your vehicle from exceeding the posted limit.
Rear-end collisions occur all too frequently, often from following too closely. The highways are choked with vehicles that are not following at the recommended safe distances. Your modern vehicle, equipped with collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control systems, knows how close you are to the vehicle in front of you. If you bothered to turn those systems on, they would even keep you at a safe, set following distance. Why is that not just the default operation?
There has been a good deal of push for drivers to be able to read English. For decades, drivers have been hitting well-marked and well-known low bridges and underpasses. It’s not because they couldn’t read English; it’s because they chose not to. Telematics data knows where most of those underpasses are. Traffic accident data of overheight impacts is another data source. There is plenty of data available. Your vehicle knows where it is driving; the software in the vehicle merely needs to brake before it hits a known low-clearance obstruction.
Drivers drive erratically for any number of reasons. The onboard telematics systems know that. Why can’t they just intercede and stop the vehicle?
A truck careening down a mountain, out of control? The telematics systems and vehicle controllers know what the driver should have been doing with the truck before it went out of control. Telematics knows it’s a 7% grade and knows what gear the truck should be in at the top, and everywhere else down the mountain.
And if the truck is out of control, telematics knows where the safety runoff ramp is and, with some lane-keeping assist technology probably already on the vehicle, it can put the truck squarely onto it.
The idiot in the car who swerves from the left lane of a four-lane freeway to get to an exit — well, the technology to prevent this stupidity is probably already resident on the vehicle. The mapping program probably has told the car the exit is coming up. Lane-keeping assist can keep the car from switching lanes at too high a g-force rate. The car can prevent the driver from swerving to reach the exit, risking all the other traffic.
Overweight trucks on bridges? The truck powertrain has a pretty good idea of what weight it’s pulling. Telematics databases know where load-limited bridges are. The vehicle can physically and safely stop the overweight truck before it crosses the bridge.
That squirrelly, windy, narrow road that big trucks aren’t supposed to go on, but always do? Telematics data knows not to go there.
None of this is brain surgery or rocket science. Kids in FIRST Robotics competitions can do this kind of programming.
You want proof of this? Just look at autonomous trucks today — they are doing it. Removing the human driver from the truck just validates that the technology for safe driving is here already. Why aren’t we using it better?
For years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has professed a goal of zero deaths on U.S. roads. The technology is here already to make major progress toward that goal.
The framers of the Constitution had no idea that 250 years later some idiot could endanger other people by ignoring road signs, or driving erratically or impaired. I think I missed the "freedom to make stupid choices while driving a vehicle" amendment buried somewhere in the Bill of Rights.
The majority of technology pieces for safer vehicles are already on most new vehicles. And better capabilities are evolving daily.
We have all this technology. Why don’t we just start using it?
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