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kleinbl00  ·  1356 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The case against American truck bloat

Unless those sensors automatically trigger the brakes 100% correctly 100% of the time, you get in the habit of ignoring them in parking lots. I drove a Mazda 3 station wagon for a couple weeks and it couldn't go down the 101 without informing me I was about to die every 10 seconds. I had a Porsche Boxster S for six weeks and any prole that got within six feet set its sensors to shrieking. My favorite is the collision avoidance system on the Tesla 3; it gives you a phantom display in which jerky car silhouettes lunge and dodge away from your vehicle like cockroaches on meth as it tries and fails to translate disparate sensor data into a cohesive whole to make you feel self-assured in your $70k golf cart.

The thinking works like this: (1) huh that annoying noise that happens every time I'm within 30 feet of a fire hydrant (2) I see nothing that looks like something I should bother with (3) skeesh. They teach you in motorcycle safety courses that psychologically, drivers grow conditioned to focusing their subconscious attention on oblongs, since oblongs occupy the majority of their environment. As such, objects that are not oblongs (motorcyclists, bicyclists, pedestrians) get filtered out of the conscious decision-making process.

I had a GTI lunge at me and scoop me onto the windshield - from a dead stop - while in a crosswalk - eighteen inches from the asshole's front bumper. I was literally looking at him. He was literally looking at me. I was at least 40% of his field of view. Yet after I picked myself up off the ground he berated me for "wrecking his car" and "jumping out of nowhere" because he was 100% focused on the traffic. Did a little collision warning system warble at him as he did it? Don't know, don't care. I know that if he had one, it was warbling at him anyway because he was attempting to merge into traffic and those sensors are exceptionally good at reminding you they're there and exceptionally poor at providing you useful information.

So you ignore them. Everyone does.