mostapha

And if they're running through a red light, that means the cross street has a green.

The pedestrian might be in slightly less danger if the car reacts properly. But then the car stops unexpectedly and the driver wonders what happens…and winds up stopped in an intersection for some nonzero amount of time.

Also, unless I'm visualizing this wrong (right turn on red hits a pedestrian in the crosswalk to his right that's parallel to his original direction of travel) the only way the pedestrian would have been in that crosswalk at all is if s/he was crossing against the light and crossing the path of cars going straight on a green.

Headsets would also decrease your ability to hear other things. You'd hear the prius with the transmitter but not the real cars or other pedestrians or bicycles.

Dumb idea.

You don't make the decision to drive and then that's it. At any point, you can decide "i'm too tired," and pull off.

Take a nap in your car. Let someone else drive if you're not alone. Call a cab and pick up your car in the morning. Call Safe Ride, and they'll send a driver and a moped that will fit in your trunk if you're somewhere they operate.

There are always alternatives to putting yourself in a dangerous situation. And, I believe these systems will lead people to drift further into these types of dangerous situations before even thinking about safer alternatives.

Once again, they won't benefit if the systems aren't a hell of a lot better than Mercedes was capable of producing in 2006.

And unless you know what's going on "under the hood" well enough to either evaluate their code or design a real-world test that you can perform in an empty parking lot…you're left to decide based on what Mercedes says. And they're never going to say "our system can't detect the cause of a skid…it just reacts based on detecting the speed wheels are spinning and assumes the driver is completely incompetent."

Some of the systems are great. There's no reason a car sold today shouldn't have ABS: the driving techniques required to get similar performance out of non-ABS brakes are very skill specific and time-intensive to develop. It's not worth it for >99% of drivers. And there are "good" traction control systems. Subaru's computer-controlled differentials in their AWD system are pretty good. But that system isn't capable of making a mistake as bad as the "active braking" systems that are coming out.

Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration.

Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW?

The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy. The vast majority of 1st world residents know how to do it, and very very few of them make mistakes severe enough to affect anyone else's lives. The average driver is nowhere near as bad at it as most people seem to think.

But taking the driver's commitment to and awareness of the risks inherent in driving away and placing that burden on active "safety features" is a bad thing. I know their hearts are in the right place and that I'm not the person these systems are designed for. But they're going to get people killed.

My issue with Mercedes's Traction Control in particular isn't even that it makes drivers lazy. It's that in at least that situation, it can't tell the difference between power-induced oversteer and breaking-induced oversteer. In that situation, it reacted EXACTLY WRONG. It doesn't matter whether the driver is competent or not if the system makes the opposite changes that it should.

No, I don't. I'd rather he have to take responsibility for his actions and decide whether he really needs to take that chance instead of thinking "it's okay that I'm exhausted…my car will wake me up."

That's interesting, because Mercedes's Traction Control system almost killed me one night. Apparently it's possible to accidentally induce a very slight but controllable oversteer slide by overshooting the exit to a fast curve and touching a rumble strip with the outside tires. No surprise there.

In a normal car, you keep your front wheels on the line you want to follow, release power, then smoothly add power to "shift weight" to the rear wheels and increase traction (acceleration causes the rear suspension to compress, making the rear tires push harder on the ground, increasing the normal force and increasing rear wheel traction). Doing that stops the oversteer (rear wheel skid).

In a Mercedes, the car assumes that you're an idiot for doing that, cuts engine power to the drive (rear) wheels, and applies breaks to the OUTSIDE REAR WHEEL. That procedure has the effect of decompressing the rear suspension and decreasing traction to the rear wheels, which are already skidding. The slide that resulted was unrecoverable. Yank the parking break and shift into neutral while in a hard corner at 40mph if you want to know what it felt like. For a few seconds, my instincts and the car's Traction Control fought each other as I tried to correct for the skids that improperly braking the rear wheels was causing.

Finally, I came to rest having skid across the double yellow…and then somehow the automatic transmission stalled.

It was a "mistake" that could have been fixed in less than a second driving a 1908 Model T. After a hundred years of innovations, Mercedes has completely removed the driver from direct control of the vehicle, WITHOUT an option to turn off those so-called "features."

I spent the next several months talking to people who did tuning for Daimler-Chrysler for a shop in Montana, cracking ECU encryption to reprogram the fuel injectors and intake system to perform well at high altitudes. And apparently there's no good way to turn off that Traction Control system except removing large chunks of code from the ECU, which voids the warranty and might have serious side effects. When I learned more about how the Traction Control system actually works, I sold the car.

I will never own another Mercedes. They breed laziness and irresponsibility without giving competent drivers the control they need to drive safely.

I'm currently an avid BMW fan because of two major factors: first, it's possible to buy manual transmissions without special ordering a new car from Germany; second, it is possible–by holding a button on the console for a few seconds–to COMPLETELY disable traction control. I have driven in snow and ice, torrential downpours, and heavy traffic in the last year. I haven't driven with Traction Control on since Mercedes almost killed me in 2006.

Frankly, I think EVERY SINGLE ONE of the safety features you suggested is a horrible idea. Pay attention to what you're doing, and don't drive if you're not physically and mentally capable of driving. I don't want my car to wake me up if I fall asleep driving…I want to be smart enough to not drive that night.

Frankly, the more I hear about Mercedes safety features, the more distance I like to keep between me and them on the highway.

You know it clearly says to enter your email address in the input field, right? Of course "password" hasn't shown up in the database…it's not an email address.