The Past, Present, and Future of Technology in Cars and its Benefits and Drawbacks
By: Will Cunningham
Technology has changed people’s lives in many ways, and one of the biggest impacts it has had is on something that Americans have more of than almost any other country: automobiles.
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There is a long history of new technologies making cars safer. From rearview mirrors, to seatbelts, to airbags, the U.S. government has consistently been pushed by advocacy groups to require new technologies in automobiles.
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An important governmental organizations on this front is the National Transportation Safety Board, which is responsible for accident investigation in civil transportation.
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"The NTSB has a long history of recommending and advocating vehicle technology as part of the solution to addressing the deaths and injuries on the road," said Stephanie Shaw, Acting Chief of the Safety Advocacy Division of the NTSB.
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One such group is the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a group that was founded in 1989 to push for “safer cars, safer drivers, and safer roads,” according to Peter Kurdock, general counsel for the AHAS.
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“One of our biggest pushes has always been vehicle safety technology,” Kurdock said. “Airbags were the first thing that we really fought for.”
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The first safety feature that the group focused on was frontal airbags, and just two years after its founding, in 1991, it was announced as part of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act that passenger automobiles and light trucks (8,500 lbs. or lower) manufactured after Sept. 1, 1998 must have frontal airbags.
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The AHAS continued to advocate for new safety technologies, including electronic stability control, which helps prevent cars from spinning out of control, and seat belt reminder systems.
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One of the group’s longest campaigns began in the mid-2000s, when the Gulbransen family began working for a law that required cars to have backup cameras after Greg Gulbransen, a Long Island pediatrician, accidentally backed over and killed his two-year-old son in 2006.
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The Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act, which mandated that all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds must have backup cameras, was passed in 2008 with bipartisan support and signed into law by President George W. Bush, but the push for mandatory backup cameras was just beginning.
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“It was a 10-year fight,” Kurdock said. “We finally got the law through in 2008, and it said the U.S. Department of Transportation had to issue a regulation regarding rear view cameras. Congress put a deadline in place for the DOT to issue the regulation, which it missed, and we had to file a lawsuit, which was pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City when the DOT issued the regulation.”
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The regulation was announced in 2014 and officially went into effect in 2018.
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One of the issues with implementing new safety technologies has always been cost. When new technologies are introduced, they are often only available in higher-end packages that are not affordable for many customers.
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“The key is to make sure it is standard equipment in all motor vehicles,” Kurdock said. “We stand for the democratization of safety, because not every family can afford to buy a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW.”
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It is not just advocacy groups, however, that are pushing for safety technology to come standard.
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"Vehicle safety technology like automatic emergency braking and collision warning systems should be available as standard equipment on all vehicles," Shaw said.
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The backup camera mandate, as well as the implementation of other safety technologies, has certainly had an impact. According to a 2016 report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute, backup cameras cut the number of backing crashes by 16% overall, and by 40% for drivers older than 70.
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According to a 2007 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, roughly 18,000 people are injured and just under 300 people are killed in backing crashes every year. Backing crashes are typically low-speed incidents in residential areas and parking lots.
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But backup cameras are not the only technology that has helped reduce the number of backing crashes.
“The auto brake is one of the places where we are seeing the most benefit, rear auto brake in particular,” said Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at the IIHS.
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By the time the mandate officially went into effect in 2018, the AHAS was already moving on to new technologies, such as automatic emergency braking and blind-spot detection.
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“Now, the things that are really coming to the forefront are driver assistance systems,” Kurdock said. “Automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assist, blind-spot detection, rear cross-traffic alert, those are the driver assistance systems that have been shown to have real benefits.”
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These are not the only technologies that have been put into more cars in recent years, and not all of them have specific safety benefits.
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“They’re designed to take the workload away from the driver and make the driving experience less monotonous,” Reagan said. “Some technologies, like adaptive cruise control or lane centering, aren’t really designed with a safety benefit in mind.”
Many new technologies in cars offer benefits to safety, convenience, or both, but new technologies do not always make driving safer, and one major example of that is the rise of infotainment systems in newer cars. An infotainment system is a touchscreen or display on the dashboard of a car that allows those in the car to do a number of different things, such as controlling navigation, music, and even surfing the internet in some higher-end models.
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“We pushed the DOT to put some regulations in place on the original equipment that comes with the car when it is rolled out of the factory,” Kurdock said. “We want some regulations to allow for the good utilities that come from these screens, but make sure that we’re not playing video games while we’re driving.”
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While technology often makes cars safer, it is an ongoing struggle for organizations like the AHAS, IIHS, and NTSB to make sure that the right technologies are getting into all cars and the wrong ones are not.
Is Self-Driving Technology the Future?
There is another new technology that represents a massive potential change in auto safety, and it is one which has been promoted and talked about constantly over the last five-to-10 years: self-driving.
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Many car companies have explored self-driving capabilities for their cars, but while some of those companies have said that the widespread implementation of self-driving is right around the corner, that has proved to be far from the truth.
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For example, in 2016, Tesla, one of the companies at the forefront of self-driving technology, claimed that all of its cars already had full self-driving capabilities, “We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
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But that has proven not to be the case. In the six years since that announcement, Tesla has been unable to gain approval for its full self-driving technology, as Elon Musk, the chief executive of the company, announced earlier this year, on Oct. 20.
In fact, just a week after that announcement, another one came from the U.S. Department of Justice about a criminal probe into Tesla’s claims that its cars were able to drive themselves.
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One of the safety issues around self-driving technology is that it can lead to a false sense of security for drivers.
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"As we're marketing vehicle technologies to customers, we have to make sure they understand the limitations of the technology that they're using," said Stephanie Shaw, Acting Chief of the Safety and Advocacy Division of the National Transportation Safety Board.
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Despite claims by Tesla that self-driving technology is right around the corner, it still has plenty of hurdles to overcome, and organizations such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety are doing plenty of testing on it.
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“We’re very active in conducting research to understand what the effects are of using these technologies right now,” said Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at the IIHS. “There’s no completely self-driving car that you can buy, but there were a lot of promises made.”
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While self-driving is still a technology that some companies are working towards, others have decided it is not worth the trouble. Multiple companies, including Ford and Volkswagen, have ended their self-driving efforts, and it seems as though the technology is still decades away, at least, from widespread use.
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The companies that are still working towards full self-driving technology have also run into issues, as vehicle testing is mostly regulated on the state level.
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“Most states have introduced legislation to regulate the testing or deployment of automated vehicles on the road,” said Laurel Sims, a senior legislative policy analyst at the IIHS. “(Companies) are doing the testing in absence of state law, which is probably easier than having regulations.”
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“It turns out (self-driving technology) is a lot harder than everybody thought,” said Peter Kurdock, general counsel for the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “It’s not like building an app. If you screw it up, people die. There were so many promises made about self-driving, and it turned out none of it was true.”