I appreciate a car manufacturer acknowledging that their product is dangerous to people outside of the car but a better way to mitigate injuries would be to make speed restriction devices standard on all cars. If the car can’t go faster than 30kph in the city and 20kph near houses and schools, the cars would rarely kill anyone even when they hit someone. #FuckCars
Reducing the height of the hood would also significantly reduce fatalities. It’s hilariously sad that they’re testing this system on an SUV, where the kids and shorter adults hit by this thing won’t make it to the windshield.
Put the engine in the middle or back of the car’s frame and move the driver all the way to the front in a glass bubble where they can’t use the excuse that they didn’t see what was in front of the car. Also if they go to fast and hit something, they get hurt immediately. Risk to the driver will make them more cautious.
How about just separate cars from pedestrians and bicycles?
Freeways outside busy city areas for just cars and no pedestrians or bicycles
City centers and busy foot traffic areas for pedestrians and bicycles only.
What do you think will happen if you mix fast moving two ton iron machines in the same space as people randomly walking around everywhere or on slower moving bicycles.
How about just separate cars from pedestrians and bicycles?
How would road crossings work? If those airbags are standard, I see it as a good thing. Subaru building bigger and heavier cars isn’t though.
In an urban core, there simply shouldn’t be any roads (ie corridors for connectivity) that need to be crossed by pedestrians or bicyclists. Instead, the densest urban areas would have only streets (ie corridors for access) with human-scale and human-speed traffic, and public transport of course. Delivery and garbage trucks would operate off-peak at night, a la New York City
If there are to be roads, they need to be fully separated, with automobiles going above or below grade. After all, cars can climb grades with ease, hence why trenched or viaduct highways make more sense than those obnoxious, towering, loud, narrow, fenced-off so-called pedestrian overpasses.
Outside of the urban core, where roads should be, there’s a better case for level crossing of pedestrian and bikes. To which point, the leading designs would be ones where so-called beg buttons are eliminated: the UK already demonstrates how automatic pedestrian and cyclist sensors work, and they have the benefit of also detecting if they finish crossing early; no need to hold road traffic longer than necessary. The Dutch have their own designs for detecting and yielding a crossing in advance of approaching cyclists.
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How about both?
Here in Sweden, we have plenty of excellent bicycle paths, yet even when there is a beautiful bicycle path going parallel to the big road, bikers insist on using the big road.
Ok, they have every right to use the roads just like any other vehicle, but I don’t believe that it is wrong of me to get annoyed at a biker slowly going up a steep hill at 5kmh on a road where the limit is 70kmh when there is a bike path right next to the road going the same way.
If there isn’t a bike path, then I don’t get annoyed, they don’t have a choice, but come on, if there is a bike path going parallel to the road, please use it.
Please provide an example in street view or otherwise. I’ve seen lots of people make this claim that cyclists won’t use cycle paths but every single time they provide an example it’s plainly obvious why it’s not being used. Bicycle infrastructure is frequently built to shockingly poor standards by people with a clear disdain of its users.
If people are cycling on a road, the cyclepath must be strongly perceived as lower quality. Perhaps we need to focus on why so many people who cycle a lot feel the facilities created for motorists are far better than the ones created for cyclists
Speaking as a cyclist: If I’m choosing to bike on the road with cars over using the cycletrack, then there is a problem with the cycletrack. I’d ask cyclists why they avoid it and improve that.
Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons why I sometimes choose to leave a bike lane to use the motor lanes.
Shouldn’t that be on the bumper? Does rolling across the hood cause more injury than the initial impact?
Looks correct for an Imprezza hitting an adult, not so sure about the Forester hitting a child though…
Imprezza hitting a child isn’t gonna be great either.
Yeah true, seems like the airbag should be in the bumper for that reason. Would still be a lot better than the Forester though…
I guess it can’t react to hitting a cyclist until an impact happens? Otherwise you’d have to worry about false deployments. It does seem like this could at least protect the head as a cyclist is thrown onto the car.
Grill and up is more important for protecting the really important human bits, ideally you want to lessen the impact by making the pedestrian roll over smoothly, it’s why Nissan (and Suzuki, might be others) had hoods that prop up automatically. This is just the logical next step.
edit: completely forgot about Volvo. From the article
Pedestrians 80cm tall and above can be detected, and crashes can be avoided through full automatic braking at vehicle speeds up to 35km/h.
So it seems this airbag is intended for faster crashes.
Similar tech has been around for literal decades. Some BMW have a bonnet/hood that springs up when the car detects a pedestrian impact. It has a soft suspension and makes sure to move away from the actual engine and other rigid things directly behind it. Works great from what I’ve heard, but probably isn’t exactly cheap.
That’s nice and all, but I’d much rather that cars simply stay the fuck away from me altogether while I’m cycling. They’re absolutely miserable and dangerous to be around.
I’m fine with both.
Well me too, I only pose it diametrically for comparison. Though I’m always cynically suspicious that regulations like this are in lieu of creating actual cycling infrastructure, or to justify putting off the construction of said infrastructure.
I wonder how much cheaper it is to install automatic braking.
That is standard in many vehicles, when I first got my license, I unfortunately got into a situation where I didn’t see pedestrians walking over a crosswalk as I approached, they were hidden by the A pillar, the 2016 Volvo V90 I drove at the time hit the emergency brake for me and it was quite effective.
Since then I have not been in that situation, I do my best to analyze and learn from my misstakes
Probably more expensive to make that system than airbags, don’t know about R&D. I’m assuming even the newest EyeSight is camera-based so there will be times it just can’t see
edit: nvm, newer eyesight includes lidar
