
New Cars’ Pedestrian-Safety Features Fail in Deadliest Situations - lnguyen
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-cars-pedestrian-safety-features-fail-in-deadliest-situations-study-finds-11570075260?mod=rsswn
======
rconti
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.

[https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-
to-s...](https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-
on-the-roads/)

>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.

~~~
majormjr
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.

~~~
soperj
Was gonna say, my Forrester has probably the best visibility of any car I've
driven.

~~~
ummonk
Same here - my forester has excellent visibility.

------
AcerbicZero
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.

~~~
salawat
>I love cars, driving, and freedom in general.

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!

~~~
lutorm
Actually it's funny you should mention the FAA. I have _much_ greater freedom
at modifying my airplane than I do modifying my car.

~~~
ryandrake
Sure, if you have an E-AB airplane. If your airplane is certified you can’t do
much as run a USB charger out to the panel without the FAA coming down on you
like a ton of bricks.

~~~
lutorm
That's true, but at least you have the choice of which route you want to go.

I guess even CA allows "home-made, specially constructed, or kit" vehicles.
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/spcnsreg](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/spcnsreg)

------
mumblemumble
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.

~~~
unsignedchar
Maybe we should all start carrying oversized fluorescent umbrellas when
walking

~~~
llukas
How does this help if driver is looking at their phone?

~~~
nullc
Since the umbrella is so visible, they may see it from further away during one
of their brief glances at the road.

~~~
llukas
How do you know if you're seen when carrying umbrella? Eye contact is not
enough (info you can find in pretty much any driving handbook).

~~~
nullc
You don't, but it's almost certain that you'd be safer with it than without.

------
mfer
> 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.

~~~
magicalhippo
> 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.

Not just drivers. Plenty of pedestrians which just walk straight across the
road with their eyes firmly fixed on their screens and earbuds protecting
their ears from the sounds of the world around them.

~~~
InitialLastName
People should pay attention to the world around them, but keep in mind that
the pedestrians aren't the people doing the activity that causes the damage.

~~~
magicalhippo
In the same way that if I stick my hand in the table saw, it's not me causing
the damage.

Of course drivers who can't pay attention to the things they should pay
attention to don't really deserve to drive. But physics is physics, and
there's a limit to how fast a driver can react and a car in motion can stop.
And a lot of pedestrians at least here seem to not keep that in mind when
roaming about.

------
chiefofgxbxl
Car companies seem complicit in promoting distracted driving in their
commercials, too, by promoting automatic braking for drivers who aren't paying
attention:

1\. [https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30](https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30)

2\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38)

~~~
dehrmann
I get that, but the feature's there for when you're not paying attention, so
I'm not sure how to advertise it.

The other more boring use of automatic braking is applying extra force in
emergencies because people might not apply enough.

------
BurningFrog
1\. Even if they fail to stop 90% of pedestrian accidents, that an improvement
from the 100% of previous car generations.

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...

~~~
xenocyon
Pedestrian deaths in the USA have steeply risen over the last decade, as you
can see in this graph: [http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/5/2019/0...](http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/5/2019/03/ped-deaths-graph-1.jpg)

~~~
mikelyons
Hard to say if this is the result of drivers or pedestrian inattention.

~~~
sbierwagen
Only one of the people in that interaction is wielding a deadly weapon.
Perhaps the burden of responsibility should be slightly greater for the one
who can kill half a dozen people with five seconds of inattention.

~~~
kelnos
I think the burden of responsibility _when there is an injury or death_ should
fall on the car, because, yes, a ton of steel and plastic tends to win over a
couple hundred pounds of meat and bone, and drivers should keep that in mind
when driving.

But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some
responsibility for _keeping safe_. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes
be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to
keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into
the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars
around me are going, for however long I'm in the street.

I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the
street, and it's just _stupid_. If they get hit and die while crossing the
street, it's (probably) not their _fault_ , but that's little consolation:
they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely
reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it
worth it? I'm talking about _outcomes_ here, not responsibility. If you can do
something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable,
non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no?

And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about
responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the
increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased
pedestrian inattention.

~~~
xenocyon
Re the last sentence in your comment: the New York DOT performed an analysis
that "found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking
contributes significantly to pedestrian fatalities and injuries":
[https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-
shou...](https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shouldnt-be-
deadly.pdf)

~~~
kelnos
Interesting, but I'd like to see a broader study. Note that this was the New
York _City_ DOT, not the state DOT. The study does reference some national
figures, but otherwise mostly focuses on NYC itself.

Given the volume of people walking around in NYC at most hours of the day, I'd
expect a sort of "herd immunity" to come into play: sure, you might be on your
phone, but you're surrounded by 15 other people while crossing the street, and
a car is going to be hard pressed to not see all of you. At least _one_ of
those people is likely paying attention, at any rate.

Also I was a little confused by their conclusion, given this statistic in the
linked report, under "Pedestrian Self-Reports of Distraction":

"Using emergency room data from 1,075 pedestrian injuries (2008–2011),
researchers at Bellevue Hospital found that 7.7% of admitted pedestrians were
using an electronic device at the time of the crash."

How is 7.7% not "significant"? I'm sure those 83 people would rather not have
been in the emergency room, and maybe have changed their behavior for the
better. And that's just injuries; obviously dead pedestrians can't self-report
what they were up to in the moments leading up to their death. Also consider
that 7.7% is a _lower bound_. While it's unlikely that someone would lie to
say they were using a device when they weren't, it's likely that there are
quite a few people who _were_ actually using a device during the incident but
didn't want to admit it out of embarrassment or fear of fault or blame being
assigned to them (legally, even).

I just don't find this study all that compelling.

------
gok
An interesting study on US pedestrian fatalities:
[https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes...](https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf)

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.

~~~
bsder
Actually, one of the big changes in that report is that more _pedestrians_ are
drunk.

A drunk pedestrian is likely to indictate 1) nighttime, 2) walking in a target
rich environment (most bars exist near other bars) and 3) lots of distracted
Uber/Lyft drivers.

What is interesting is that Texas/Arizona/Florida/Georgia have increases in
deaths that completely cancel out California's decrease.

~~~
gok
That is an issue that was touched on in one of the Freakonomics books too:
increased DUI enforcement has lead to many would-be drunk drivers instead
being drunk pedestrians, which is much more dangerous (for the drunk).

~~~
lonelappde
That's an improvement because the victim is the person at fault, not a
bystander. The incentives are aligned to motivate people to behave
responsibly.

~~~
gok
We're getting into the realm of Trolly Problem-esque ethical thought
experiments, but how many drunk pedestrians should be allowed to die to save
one victim of drunk driving? Consider also that those dead pedestrians are
often not really at fault, but just unable to avoid a bad driver due to poor
reaction times that would also affect children and elderly pedestrians.

I'm not saying that driving drunk is ever morally acceptable, of course. There
are just some interesting unintended consequences of public policy at play.

------
dangus
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.

~~~
solidasparagus
The main issue here IMO is that these systems are being advertised in a way
that gives people a false sense of confidence, leading to them being less
attentive. Autopilot might have some useful safety features, but that won't
improve overall driving safety if people believe (to some degree) that it can
actually automatically pilot your car.

------
chickenpotpie
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?

~~~
gridlockd
> 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?

Reducing the chance of having to live with the fact that I ran somebody over
and seriously harmed or even killed them, that's indeed worth an extra y
dollars to me.

Furthermore, it is in the interest of my insurance company too, they might
factor that into the premium.

~~~
lutorm
I seem to remember somewhere that insurance companies have been reluctant to
factor the risk of injury to others into the liability premiums for cars. This
was in the context of a discussion of the externalities when SUVs and trucks
became popular.

It's hard to separate driver inattention from the effect of having vehicles
that are much more deadly these days, too. If you get hit by a sedan, it'll
take out your legs and you'll get flung up on the sloping hood/windshield. If
you're hit by a truck/SUV, on the other hand, the majority of your body will
take the direct hit.

~~~
gridlockd
It is my understanding that driving an SUV pushes up liability premiums, but
this is offset by them being generally safer for the driver.

------
olivermarks
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.

~~~
clairity
yup, driving must be a full-focus activity because of the non-negligible
probability of death (to you or others).

partial self-driving tech like lane-assist and collision avoidance only serve
to dull our driving skill and makes us unattentive while driving.

~~~
bob1029
The in-car distractions that come factory standard are absolutely ridiculous
at this point.

Everyone is such a lazy asshole now that you probably couldn't hope to start
moving the needle back in the other direction though. The consequences of
ripping out all of these driver 'assist' technologies at this point would
probably cause a Mad Max episode to unfold on our roadways every morning.

It's also really sad the impact this has all had on the car market as a whole.
The diversity of options has radically diminished in my opinion. Look at 2007
lineups and compare to 2019 lineups. Every car today is just the same goddamn
turbocharged V6/I4 with whatever arbitrary body tacked on top. Everything.
Ford has what? Like 4 unique chassis now for the consumer market? I think BMW
finally got down to monochassis. I bet that higher degree of coupling makes
their lives a lot easier, but it makes my experience as a driving enthusiast
dull.

~~~
clairity
yes, and to be fair, most driving is pure drudgery, going back and forth to
the same places over and over, often zoning out on the tail lights of the car
creeping along in front of you. it's understandable how things got this way,
but it's certainly not desirable.

~~~
olivermarks
All the more reason for people to remain vigilant. Truck driving is often
described as 95% tedium and 5% of unexpected nerve wrenching events. It's that
5% we all have to be in good shape for even if you are 'zoning out on the tail
lights of the car creeping along in front' \- that's when something might come
flying out of nowhere at you and you need to be ready...

------
rdtwo
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.

~~~
s0rce
Further there are almost no regulations in the US that would prevent the end
user from removing or negating the manufacturer supplied pedestrian safety
features. People routinely drive massively lifted trucks that would be deadly.
Just like tampering with the emissions systems is illegal in some areas so
should removing or negating pedestrian safety features.

------
ihaveajob
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.

~~~
kart23
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.

~~~
michaelt
No, remote control is not required. It would probably be implemented as every
car having machine vision to recognise road signs, or a built-in sat nav with
the map data including speed limits. Both of which are already available on
production cars - the new "feature" would be linking those to a speed limiter.

Of course, whether this would be popular with voters or car companies is
another matter...

~~~
judge2020
My 2018 Honda regularly detects the wrong speed limit (45 miles per hour
limit, but it detects 70) and will fail to detect any speed limit. It also
seems like it can't detect Florida's interstate speed limit signs at all,
since they have both the maximum and minimum speed limit on the same sign.

------
beat
I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation
of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.

~~~
kelnos
There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation:
the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually
actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it
can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to
keep the plane in the air.

The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving,
the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver
is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a
collision.

This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least
automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but
we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close.

And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the
automation _does_ fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because,
even if they're entirely wrong, people _feel_ like they could have done
better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without
that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even
though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation?
Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion
of blame in these sorts of situations?

~~~
beat
It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars
with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even
the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me
bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff?

We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car
and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out
of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other
hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.

~~~
kelnos
I've had a car with a manual transmission for 12 years now; I dunno about
feeling more in control. I personally find it more fun to drive a manual
transmission car, but I recognize that I have no logical basis for this.
Modern automatic transmissions (or CVTs) likely get better fuel economy than I
do.

And I honestly don't even really think about shifting that much when I'm
driving; after doing it for so long, it just comes automatically (despite the
fact that I drive very little, on the order of 1500 miles per year at most).

It's extremely annoying if I'm ever in stop-and-go traffic, to the point that
I'll probably get an automatic transmission car whenever I need a new one. I
can also count on one hand the number of friends who can drive stick, so if
I'm ever driving people on a long road trip, there's no one to share the
driving.

------
mlang23
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.

------
rohittidke
Guys, I want to buy a car and my Main concern is pedestrian safety. In the
report they didn't mention which car fares the best.

~~~
njharman
You, the driver, have much much more control over pedestrian safety than any
tool. Tech is not silver bullet, it fails (rta). If you believe the tech will
"protect you", do you job for you, that is dangerous. Get skilled first,
augment those skills with tech second.

~~~
vegardx
That's a naive approach. Sure - technology shouldn't replace safe driving, but
it sure does help a lot. It was amazing when the collision avoidance system
kicked in on my Volvo V60 and did an emergency breaking, stopping in time when
some kids snow sled into traffic. I think could have been able to stop in
time, but that would have been a much closer call.

~~~
njharman
> Get skilled first, augment those skills with tech second.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/yeqkN](http://archive.is/yeqkN)

------
userbinator
Relatedly, a _1939_ vision of the future (discussed recently at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762](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:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_i...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_intersection_Futurama.jpg)

~~~
Piskvorrr
...which, in practice, leads to a lot of deteriorating walkways ($$$), a car-
first-, and eventually a car-only-city.

Yeah. It's been tried, and kinda didn't work.

------
carlio
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.

------
UglyToad
A relevant article
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-
course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars)

------
m0zg
If any of those systems use deep learning, they _by design_ will not
necessarily recognize a _dummy_ as a _person_, particularly in difficult
lighting conditions or if the dummy does not show up on IR (if the system is
multi-spectral).

~~~
Piskvorrr
That's essentially the story "build a ML system that recognizes the time of
day, instead of tanks" ;)

~~~
m0zg
More like "build an ML system which recognizes real tanks but not toy tanks".
Doable with today's tech.

------
WalterBright
I view these systems as a backup in case I miss the danger, not as a primary.

------
perl4ever
That headline seems exceedingly tautological to me. If a safety feature fails,
then the situation isn't going to be the safest, or if it was, who would
notice?

------
bookofjoe
[http://archive.is/xVI0g](http://archive.is/xVI0g)

------
Halluxfboy009
> the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 ... When
> testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark,
> however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to
> provide any alert of a pedestrian’s presence before a collision.

Oh good.

