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posted by Fnord666 on Friday November 01 2019, @09:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-buck-stops-here dept.

Tonight, drivers in the US will kill more pedestrians than any other night of the year. An increase in people walking in low-light conditions makes Halloween the most dangerous night of the year for pedestrians.
[...]
In "bad intervention" scenarios, the main driver (either human or machine) makes a driving decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrian, but the secondary driver intervenes with the wrong call, resulting in a collision. In bad interventions, it makes sense that the secondary driver is really the one to blame, since they overrode the correct actions of the primary driver.

This expectation matches how people reacted. When participants saw this scenario and rated how blameworthy each driver was and how much they caused the death, on a scale of 1 to 100, the secondary driver came out bearing most of the blame. This was true whether or not the secondary driver was a human or machine.

In "missed intervention" scenarios, though, things looked a little different. In these scenarios, the main driver is the one who makes the wrong call, but the secondary driver doesn't intervene to rescue the situation. In these scenarios, both drivers made an error.

Participants did apportion some blame to both drivers in these scenarios—but the human took more blame than the car.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/humans-take-more-blame-than-cars-for-killing-pedestrians/
Nature Human Behaviour, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NateMich on Friday November 01 2019, @12:07PM (1 child)

    by NateMich (6662) on Friday November 01 2019, @12:07PM (#914530)

    This vaguely reminds me of my car emailing me once a month with the hundreds of "hard takeoffs" I was apparently making. I do anything but take off hard in my car, and pride myself on shifting as carefully as possible. I haven't had to change a clutch in about twenty five years and countless cars. Amazing that I was both taking off like a maniac, and getting ridiculously good mileage doing it.
    It didn't take me long to realize that their system somehow couldn't comprehend that my car had a manual transmission, even though they built the damn car.
    I also noticed a few "hard stops". I soon realized those were me avoiding opossums, deer, and raccoons on the nightly trip to work (third shift).
    The option to "share this information with your insurance company" is there, but has never been checked.
    I'm not looking forward to the day where you have no choice, because I'm sure this will all be used as an excuse to raise the insurance costs for people like me that are very careful, drive a lot of miles, and have never caused an accident.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday November 01 2019, @06:58PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Friday November 01 2019, @06:58PM (#914747)

    I agree, whatever this system is in your car probably wasn't programmed for manual trans. I forget the stats, but I think maybe less than 5% of new cars are manual. It sounds like a warranty problem.

    This stuff strengthens my resolve to never buy a newer car that has all of these "features".

    My only suggestion is buy a dashcam and storage media. Some insurance companies will offer a discount for dashcam usage.