Signs and road markings designed to make the road safer mainly contribute to drivers sense of safety. Counter-intuitively, the road can be made safer for all by removing safety markings and thereby increasing driver awareness:

http://thomasthethinkengine.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/shared-space-unsafe-is-safe/

I had a neighbor back right into a friend’s car in my driveway, because they were relying on their backup sensor which hadn’t gone off yet. It would have been easy just to look back themselves and know there’s a car back there, but when you get used to automatic things like this you lose focus.

Auto-braking just encourages faster and unsafe driving, and it puts the blame on the system instead of the driver when it’s not quick enough.

As a cyclist, I’m all for auto-stop technologies on cars. 100% of fatal car bike crashes in my city over the years have had “I didn’t see ‘em” listed as a reason for the crash. I’ve been wearing an orange vest and been hit by a car myself. Humans suck. Let the computers have a chance.

What about the possibility of being rear ended? If the driver is alert and wants to think fast and swerve to avoid being rear ended but the system tries to break. I have had a few close calls where I had to break but not too fast to avoid both hitting the car in front of me and being rear ended. Also, what type of things can they detect and would trigger the stop, you don’t want to stop unless absolutely necessary. It says it would detect a pedestrian but what if there is something like a box that fell in the road or a person who may be running across road, etc. Will this type of technology be in the cars of the future?

1. You can damage the sensors by (quick) charging the battery.

2. When a sensor is damaged, there’s apparently no warning.