Coming Soon to Your Car: Big Rig "Safety" Devices

[acptulsa]

Richard Henley 3 months ago

The last few new class 8 trucks I have driven have had a bevy of new safety features that are the cutting edge of “looks good on paper.” I know some of you aren’t worried about what is mandated on a big rig, but what starts here will trickle down to become the next pain in your rear. If you don’t believe me, look at talk of tracking cars with GPS so they can charge you for the miles you drive. That kind of taxation has been used in the trucking industry for years. What about seat belts? Those were required on commercial vehicles back when they were still a seldom-ordered option on passenger cars.

I’m not ranting about every safety feature; some of them are pretty good. I like ABS, which has helped me avoid some accidents, but that system was thoroughly tested and had the bugs worked out before it was offered. All of the ABS systems I’ve tried are designed such that if the system detects that it may not be working correctly, it shuts itself down lets the operator control the brakes instead of taking control of the brakes away.

He must be a youngster. In the 1970s, the government mandated ABS on trucks long before it was ready for prime time. That system, developed and sold by a company known for making lots and lots of campaign contributions, had a bad habit of not shutting itself off when a truck was below five miles per hour. So, a semi truck would be sitting at a red light, or an occupied railroad crossing, and the little brainbox would decide it was a bad thing the brakes were all locked up, and release them.

That was one of the few regulations that got repealed.

Let me start by saying that if a driver really needs these “life saving” systems, he probably shouldn’t be driving a commercial truck, mostly because if a real situation arises that activates any of these systems and you aren’t already responding to it, it’s already too late. Some of these safety features are already on passenger cars, and others are planned.

Iteris: lane departure systems

Iteris, the lane departure system, uses a camera to detect lines on the road, and speakers mounted on either side of the driver make a rumble strip noise if you get within six inches of the lines; the idea is that the sound of the rumble strip will cause you to jerk the wheel in the correct direction before you run off the road. It works best on freshly paved and painted roadways where the contrast between lines and road is high, but how many miles of those roads do you actually drive on?

It’s not picky; if it can’t see the lines, it seems to make them up as it goes along and gives a false alarm when it feels like it. The county roads back home really drive it crazy, they only have a center line and no fog line, so the system just doesn’t know which side to rumble on and goes off back and forth at random.

It doesn’t take into account that there are times that you might need to cross the line, like when Joe RVer is passing you and he doesn’t really have a clue where the right side of his motor home is, or when you are passing an oversize load and need to give him all the clearance you can.

The designers also forgot that I’m really not steering the truck, but rather the trailer, and to keep the trailer in the lane, I might need to get the truck right on or even a bit over the line.

After a couple months of dealing with false alarms you condition yourself to not react when you hear the rumble strip noise. The point of this system was what? I’m guessing it was to keep me from completely enjoying my Stevie Ray Vaughn CD unless I’m on a freshly paved and painted road.

Automatic traction control

When ATC, or Automatic Traction Control, detects traction loss, it cuts back the throttle, then applies the brake on the wheel that lost traction, theoretically putting the power to the wheels that have traction. My understanding is that Daimler first started playing with this idea back in the 1980s, and they had to invent some superfast servos to activate the brakes fast enough to make it work right.

Traction control works far better with hydraulic brakes on a passenger car than with the air brakes on a semi. Air brakes have brake lag, because air doesn’t travel through a line as fast as hydraulic fluid, so the brakes can’t get applied or released as quickly as in a car — and truck brakes have longer lines. There’s nothing superfast about air brakes; they overcome the lag by using high pressure.

Normal brake applications for an air brake system are usually under 25 psi, even a panic stop that locks the wheels (if ABS isn’t working) may only require 50 psi, but ATC applies 100 to 125 psi when it operates. On a slick surface, this is about useless, as it will lock the brake on the spinning wheel, and with the brake locked the next one will spin, and so forth so that instead of moving all you actually do is spin each of the drive tires one at a time in turn.

Another problem is that traction control is detected by looking at wheel speed differences, assuming that the wheel(s) moving the fastest have lost traction (are spinning). If you lose traction while decelerating, the tires with traction are turning the fastest, and since the system assumes they are the ones without traction, it applies 125 psi to them, locking them up. This means none of your drive tires have traction, and shortly thereafter the pucker factor gets real high as the tractor and trailer are experiencing the infamous phenomenon called “jackknife.”

After it did this to me on Wolf Creek Pass on snowy night, I tried to complain on the NHTSA website, as I couldn’t seem to get anyone at Freightliner, Eaton, or my company to take the flaw in the system seriously. I found the page where they tested the prototype and decided it was a good thing. It doesn’t take too much of an engineering student to figure out where the flaw in the test is (or maybe it does), as they only tested it under acceleration — not under deceleration.

You can’t complain about a faulty system if there is no radio button for it on the form. They must really like the system, or else someone there got an awful lot of palm grease from the manufacturers to omit the system on the complaint form.

Smart Cruise / VORAD (laser accident warning)

The Smart Cruise/Vorad system was one of the first of the idiot compensation features on the market. This one is a prime example of what I wrote about “if a driver needs the nanny systems…” Smart Cruise/Vorad has a radar unit on the front of the truck, a display unit on the dash, and is wired in with the cruise control. If you are approaching something in front of you too fast, it flashes a bunch of lights on the display unit and makes all kinds of crazy noises to distract you from the problem at hand, and if you are using the cruise control it cuts the throttle, and if it deems necessary, throws engine and service brake on. Looks good on paper, right? Now are you ready for the reality of Vorad?

When I was almost eleven years old and my dad was teaching me to drive a truck, one of the first rules he pounded into my head was that in a big truck you want to leave at least 8 seconds between yourself and the vehicle in front of you. Much later in life I took a wonderful driver improvement course called the Smith System (fleet owners, you really want to look into that course, it is bar none the best!), and they stress the same thing, at least 8 seconds following distance. What do you know; father knows best, and the experts agree with him.

Problem number one with Vorad, the maximum setting is 3.25 seconds. Now while I’m not college educated, I did manage to graduate high school, and if I recall correctly 3.25 is just a bit less than 8, indeed, it’s less than half.

Problem number two, if you try to use it while it’s set at the 3.25 second range, it not only picks up every vehicle within 3.25 seconds in front of you, it picks up every fence post, sign, bridge railing, overpass, pothole, roadkill, and tumbleweed within 50 feet of either side of the road, and goes into full on panic mode when it does. At 3.25 seconds, the system is constantly cycling back and forth between full acceleration and full deceleration, making for a very interesting ride.

A flatbedder learns early on is that hard acceleration or deceleration will shift some loads, like pipe. It’s a long drive from Charlotte, NC to St. George, UT when you don’t dare use the cruise control for fear of shifting the load. (Don’t ask how I know Smart Cruise will shift a load of pipe, I don’t want to talk about it.)

Automatic braking is one feature I will never own. If it comes to be mandated on all new cars, I will rebuild an older car as much and as long as necessary. Every car can change lanes in far less distance than it can come to a stop. If a lane suddenly becomes blocked--from a refrigerator falling off a pickup to someone swerving into the lane and grabbing their brakes to a meteor falling out of the sky--even if you don't have enough room to brake you probably have room to steer around it. But if the vehicle you're driving grabs the brakes hard as you're trying to perform an emergency lane change, that's liable to make that lane change impossible.

Do. Not. Want.

Roll Stability Control

RSC, or Roll Stability Control, is another fun one. My last Freightliner had this, and I’m told the new Peterbilt does also. The Pete has the bugs worked out, as I’ve yet to get a false alarm out of it. This system amounts to a sensor that measures sideways G forces and a sensor that measures the amount of turn on the steering wheel, hooked up to a computer that cuts engine throttle and applies the engine brake and service brakes if it deems necessary.

The Freightliner was notorious for false alarms with this system, and one of the neat gadgets they had on it was for “driver education,” it had a display on the dash that would chime and tell you that you had cornered too fast and needed to slow down by however many MPH it deemed appropriate.

I hate to admit but I got into a couple of corners too hot a time or two in the truck, and the system never did go off, but these were all on smooth roads. If there was a good bump in the corner, you could count on the system making all sorts of noise about it though, whether or not you were going too fast. It was kind of humorous to be rolling around a parking lot about 10 MPH and hit a big pothole in the middle of a turn and have the system tell you that you needed to reduce your speed by 15 MPH. What wasn’t humorous was when I hit a pothole in the middle of a 15 mph corner in Kansas City during a rain storm and instead of making the left turn I intended, the system locked up the tractor and trailer brakes (remember the unregulated 125 psi brake application to speed things up?) and I wound up jack-knifed across the oncoming traffic lanes.

Class 8 truck safety features

As I see it, the real problem with all the above features is that they are designed to compensate for a poor driver; but they can’t make a computer in a vehicle that is smarter than a human, or that can detect everything that may become critical.

In the situations on Wolf Creek Pass and in Kansas City, there wasn’t actually a problem until the system made the wrong assumptions about the situation at hand, took control of the truck away from me, and did the wrong things to cause the incident.

Fortunately, in both situations there wasn’t any loss of property or life, but if there would have been, who do you think would have been held responsible? They wouldn’t have went after the screwball engineer that came up with the idea, nor the idiot that proclaimed it as safe. They wouldn’t have gone after the people that offered it on the truck or the people who ordered the truck that way either. The driver would be listed as the cause of the accident, even though the accident was caused when the system(s) in question took control of the vehicle away from him.

I feel that If I’m going to be held responsible for something, I want it to be for something I did or something that I neglected to do, but I don’t want to be held responsible for something simply because I happened to be the unfortunate one sitting in the left seat when one of these systems decided to take me for a ride.

Instead of throwing millions into designing, testing, installing, and marketing these phony “safety” systems, why don’t we put some of that money into educating and testing the most important safety feature a vehicle has, the driver? Creating more intelligent drivers is the only way to create a safer driving environment, because there isn’t a computer that can beat real intelligence. In other words, the only way to truly create a safe driving environment is to adjust the loose nut behind the wheel.[/B

Before Vorad was installed in their trucks, I was never in an accident where I ran into another vehicle in front of me; after Vorad, I still haven’t had one, so there’s a 0% reduction. Before the Iteris, I never accidentally ran off the road, and after Iteris, I still haven’t accidentally run off the road, another 0% reduction. I never had a jackknife accident in my life, until the ATC and RSC systems were installed, and then each caused one, so that’s a 100% increase for both. I think the safety department needs to re-examine their numbers.

Read the whole of this excellent and informative essay right here:
http://www.acarplace.com/2017/12/safety-features/amp/

This might seem like a gearhead type of a topic. Obviously it's germane to the liberty conversation, when some of this garbage becomes federally mandated, but maybe no one considers it the very heart of the liberty movement. I disagree.

It's not just a gearhead kind of a topic. It's life and death. It's a matter of life and death.

It's not just tangentially related to the liberty movement. It goes to the heart of the big liberty v. security debate. It cuts right to the heart of the divide between people that the government is using to keep us conquered, so they can do just as they please.

The people who want things like anti-lock brakes and airbags and automatic collision avoidance mandatory don't understand those who don't. They aren't good enough drivers to be able to lock up brakes on an icy road, and stop faster that way (which is about the only road condition where locked brakes can shorten a stopping distance). So, they can't conceive of the kind of people who are that good, and don't want to admit that someone that much more talented exists. When forced to admit such people exist, they don't want those people to have the tools they can use because then there are non-idiotproof vehicles out there which could fall into the hands of idiots like them. Same with automatic collision avoidance. And airbags? A person who is not calm in an emergency can get sideswiped on a mountain road and keep steering the car, thereby avoiding going off a cliff. Even a sideswipe can set off the airbag in the wheel, knocking the driver's hands off that wheel. How does one avoid going off the cliff then? Why would anyone be forced to have them if they don't want them? You tell me. They're mandatory.

The people who don't want these things also don't understand those who do. What's more, they get upset about it. The people who try to make these things mandatory are endangering those skilled enough to be better off without them, and those people know they're being endangered. And since the MSM resolutely refuses to air an adult conversation about the subject, the disconnect remains.

'You're trying to kill me.'

'By making this system mandatory? You don't understand. Let me speak to you like you're a fifth grader. This is a safety device. See?'

'Grrrrrr...'

This is the liberty debate in microcosm. This is the nutshell the liberty debate lives in.

At the heart of the matter is a lack of respect. The system is designed by some well-meaning engineers who never actually drove a truck. It is then sold to the regulators and the media by a corporation which has made an investment, and is happy to pay a few brib--er, I mean campaign contributions and buy several ads to sell it. Then a push is made to convince the public that this is a good thing. People are told thirty-seven cent computers programmed by codewriters who never drove a truck are smarter than the professionals whose careers and very lives are put at risk by them. And they believe it. This is a lack of respect; this is a real threat to life and limb. This is the tension.

The public cannot be expected to understand the ins and outs of everything that gets regulated. The obvious solution to this real, complex problem, however, is simple. It is liberty.

 

[Anti Federalist]

And airbags?

'You're trying to kill me.'

Takata airbags are known and proven deadly menace.

The company knew the airbags were faulty and posed a serious risk of injury and death.

They get a slap on the wrist when compared to the criminal and civil sanctions that were heaped on VW, who did nothing more than provide good cars with excellent fuel economy and performance, while sidestepping Uncle Sucker's emissions fatwas by 4 tenths of a percent, that harmed nobody.

You'd think that, in light of the fact that there are millions of vehicles with these deadly bombs under the dashboard, Uncle Sucker would at least "allow" us to shut off the fucking things that are mounted in property we own.

Nope.

Still a federal felony to disconnect these abominations.

Fuck a bunch of computer generated safety.

 

[acptulsa]

Takata airbags are known and proven deadly menace.

The company knew the airbags were faulty and posed a serious risk of injury and death.

They get a slap on the wrist when compared to the criminal and civil sanctions that were heaped on VW, who did nothing more than provide good cars with excellent fuel economy and performance, while sidestepping Uncle Sucker's emissions fatwas by 4 tenths of a percent, that harmed nobody.

Hardly a track record that inspires confidence.

The worst part is, safety garbage on cars up to this time has all been in the nature of stuff designed to assume you will get into an accident, and make that accident more survivable. That sounds good, but they have added so much weight to cars that despite decades of development of weight-saving materials and techniques, cars have actually gotten heavier. Now mass means momentum, and momentum makes it harder to either stop or change direction. Therefore, these safety devices, designed to make accidents more survivable, have made it harder to avoid accidents.

Now, given this track record--safety devices which are deadly in their own right, safety fatwahs which are very likely preventing the overall number of accidents from going down why would we go on to the next stage?

But we seem to be rushing into it headlong. And the next stage is devices that take control of the vehicle out of our intelligent hands, and give it to thirty-seven cent computers using untested code, with no real sense of self-preservation.

Sell it to those who want it. Only. Don't try to force it on the rest of us. We actually have an instinct for self-preservation, and we may try to kill you in self-defense.

 

[CCTelander]

Takata airbags are known and proven deadly menace.

The company knew the airbags were faulty and posed a serious risk of injury and death.

They get a slap on the wrist when compared to the criminal and civil sanctions that were heaped on VW, who did nothing more than provide good cars with excellent fuel economy and performance, while sidestepping Uncle Sucker's emissions fatwas by 4 tenths of a percent, that harmed nobody.

You'd think that, in light of the fact that there are millions of vehicles with these deadly bombs under the dashboard, Uncle Sucker would at least "allow" us to shut off the fucking things that are mounted in property we own.

Nope.

Still a federal felony to disconnect these abominations.

Fuck a bunch of computer generated safety.

The priorities of the state once again on display. Obviously filing the proper paperwork and meeting the proper arbitrarily arrived at standards is much more important than the lives of a few mere mundanes. Get with the program, man.

 

[shakey1]

... choking the life right outta the driving experience.

 

[Anti Federalist]

... choking the life right outta the driving experience.

We have cars that are faster, more powerful, more capable, better handling than ever before.

And nary a chance to use any of that, due the stultifying safety culture that surrounds us.

 

[CCTelander]

We have cars that are faster, more powerful, more capable, better handling than ever before.

And nary a chance to use any of that, due the stultifying safety culture that surrounds us.

"If it saves just one life ..."