Why can't automatic cars have an inbuilt cutout?

[balzamico]

After the awful second death from the Wimbledon school and a car ploughing into local shops too I'm wondering if there's a reason that automatic cars can't have some kind of auto cutout built in to prevent these accidents?

Nobody needs to hard accelerate in the way that vehicle clearly did

This is interesting that you know exactly what happened. Can you explain to the rest of us?

Are you thinking of autopilot rather than automatic? Automatic cars stop accelerating when the driver’s foot stops applying pressure to the accelerator, just as with manual cars.

I don't know what you mean by automatic cut out. Unless cruise control is on you have to press the pedal. And cruise control is only over a certain speed.

This could cause an accident as well though

I don't seem to have explained myself very well. What I mean is a safety mechanism that would stop an automatic car from driving full pelt when the driver has pressed the accelerator down hard presumably by mistake. I have no idea what happened at Wimbledon but there have been many accidents caused by people hitting the wrong pedal ie accelerator instead of brake and I wondered if there wasn't some kind of safety mechanism that could be added to stop it happening

I'm guessing that the OP means that driverless cars or those with driving assistance, lane control etc should be programmed to hit the brakes hard when they are in danger of plowing into an obstacle or person. I know many of the new cars with driving assistance will automatically apply the brakes if the distance from the car in front decreases too much.

I don’t know what happened at Wimbledon but there is a thing of pedal confusion with automatics which has been found to be the cause of some accidents.

However this is ultimately operator error and a cut out wouldn’t help as the driver has their foot pressed down on the accelerator thinking it’s the brake.

A pedestrian was killed outside my house many years ago due to this. And more recently a wall in the village shops carpark was demolished also due to this. Both times drivers were quite elderly and thought they were braking.

But sometimes you need to accelerate hard to get out of trouble. A cut out could be dangerous

No they don't. They remain in 'creep' until stopped. I learnt to drive in an automatic and have driven only automatics ever since!

How would the car know it was by mistake though? My car is automatic and when you take the foot off the accelerator, it slows right down and then continues to crawl along. Car also has a collision sensor so will break if it sees you approaching a car too fast. Unfortunately nothing a car (at the moment) can be fitted with will stop accidents. Although no one yet knows (in the public anyway) what has happened in Wimbledon.

I can't grasp what you are suggesting. Why would a cut out help? If you put your foot on the accelerator as normal, but heavily because you want to accelerate quickly, it will then cut out, assuming you've done it accidentally. No. That won't work for normal driving.

Surely you mean all cars. Or just automatics?

The land rover does have an emergency break once it detects a potential hazard but it can be turned off which might be the case here. The grass doesn't appear to have any tyre treads suggestive of breaking.

If your talking about a dead man's pedal it's not uncommon for people having seizures to exert enough force to apply the gas.

Do you mean driverless cars? There are some cars which can drive themselves to an extent however there are some issues still to address. For example if there is the option of crashing into two different people but crashing into one of them is unavoidable, which one does the algorithm choose? As humans we subconsciously make the decision but it is different when you have to code for that.

There is also the issue of road infrastructure. Driverless cars need good roads with clear, consistent lines to keep them in the correct carriageway. It also helps if they are all driverless so they can communicate with each other.

There is also the potential deskilling of drivers. There will always be some situations which cannot be preprogrammed and which require a new solution. If a car is driving itself 99% of the time, the 1% of the time when the human really is needed they will not have enough road miles for themselves to be the expert that is needed. A learner keeps developing after passing their test because they are encountering new situations and challenges. If they don't have to pay attention most of the time, which any automation will lead to, then they will not learn enough.

I am sure probably in our lifetime there will be totally driverless cars making the majority of the traffic but I don't think they are quite there yet.

We could though have retests and more mandatory sight testing.

Yes. I agree with you. In an automatic if someone presses the gas instead of the brake the car will go full speed from zero. If someone does this in a manual car the car will probably stall. These concerns were raised about 10 years ago when a woman in her 70s, driving an automatic, pressed the gas instead of the brake, in a churchyard and killed an old man. As I am am now 70 and drive an automatic this concerns me! I would soo much like to see compulsory testing for people my age.

I hate automatic cars because I normally drive manual and don't like the creep unless in park.
The big brake pedal is lethal and should be banned: you go to put your foot on the clutch, but hit the brake pedal coz it's massive, so unplanned emergency stop.

None of which has any relevace for the Wimbledon tradegy though.

Someone had a fit driving a car outside my house he probably wasn't going that fast but he his a pole and slingshotted backwards down the footpath wiping out cars as he flew backwards it was lucky no-one was walking down the path at the time anyway the following week he was driving his grandsons car about like nothing had happened

My electric car has a no collision feature.

They may creep from stationary, but if you’re driving at any speed they still stop accelerating when you remove your foot from the accelerator. I own four automatics.

I had an auto Volvo with collision avoidance. If it detected something it would automatically brake. Is that what you mean?

I guess in a manual car if you hit something the car will stall and stop the engine whereas an auto will just keep pushing forward.

I'm surprised that new ones don't have something? We have a Tesla that, like @Sunnysunbun mentioned above, has a no collision feature.

It activated once when I was driving. I was going slowly (I was in Primrose Hill) and someone who'd been drinking stumbled off the pavement quite close to the car. He wasn't in the path of the car, but falling very close to the side, and the car just stopped completely. Scared me witless as it was so sudden.

Do you mean like a dead man’s switch type thing? I don’t think it’d work in cars. That car has a collision avoidance system so the driver would of been warned about imminent impact. Screen would changed to front camera view, lots of beeping.

The next step is an automated braking system that works independently of the driver when it senses a collision.

My automatic golf doesn't have the creep of old traditional automatics, but it also supposedly has collision avoidance but not sure it would work at speed, it has however nearly given me whiplash when I got too close to my wheelie bin.

For the car to have done that much damage in a residential area (i.e. not going that fast to begin with) I'd guess that the driver's foot was down on the accelerator, rather than just coasting with no acceleration, so not sure how any shut off mechanism would work. Also most people take their foot off the accelerator in an automatic and coast downhill stretches of road - it's a great fuel saver, so it wouldn't be ideal if the engine just cut out in that situation either. Agree with other posters though that it's odd there was no anti collision sensor (although mine only works below a certain speed I think).

So - think about being at a T-junction trying to pull out from a side road on to a busy main road during rush hour - you need to be able to accelerate then don't you? The last thing you want is @balzamico 's "automatic cut-off" causing you stop or slow down as you pull out into a busy stream of fast moving rush hour traffic.