Just watched a video of a Tesla and a pickup going through a green light when a car ran the red.
The Tesla automatically stopped and the car went right past it and plowed into the pickup.
It was an impressive display of a safety feature
Just a few days ago, I was at a four way stop, with a car coming up the road perpendicular to me. I'd arrived and stopped long before the other car got close. But as I was about to go and had started rolling from the stop because I had the right of way, I realized the other car was actually accelerating so I braked again. And sure enough the other car blasted through the intersection, probably doing close to 50mph (these were residential streets, all 25 mph).
I've also avoided several accidents over the years where cars blew through red lights. Another thing I do, on the highway, is note when cars in the middle or right lane are catching up to slower moving vehicles, so I can anticipate them moving into the lane ahead of me which people sometimes forget to check for incoming cars before switching lanes.
All this stuff is part of defensive driving, right? We should drive, at all times, as if someone around you is going to do something massively stupid. But I've noticed that lots and lots of drivers fail to be that alert and drive as if having the right of way means not having to pay attention or worry. And people being human, and easily distracted, sometimes people just make mistakes.
So I applaud the advent of tech in cars that can help alert unalert drivers to potential problems and protect us against our own human foibles. However, at present, I'm still more a fan of driver assistance tech than of fully automated driving tech. The tech for lane-change alerts, or blind spot monitoring, or intersection situational awareness such as what the aforementioned Tesla did and could've warned the driver, had their been one, is best employed as alerts to a human driver.
Because the fully automated driving tech still isn't nearly good enough to not to cause problems of it's own. There's a technological barrier to the approaches used that won't be overcome until we get v2v and v2i.
The best solution, IMO, is one in which both the driver and the car's software and sensors are combined to effectively work as a team. The problem is, human nature is such that if the car is doing all the driving, the driver will eventually fail to remain properly alert and the cooperation between car and driver becomes less effective.
Thus I'm still convinced that the driver should drive and the car should combine it's vigilance into the mix, enhancing the human driver's abilities, rather than replacing the human. That system of cooperation doesn't attempt to dismiss human nature and instead produces a best of both worlds solution.
