Incidentally the last VW I will ever own. Although I doubt other modern cars are any better.
I’m fascinated by the use of advanced software systems in the context of human safety. What manufacturers seem not to understand - or perhaps do understand but face competitive pressures to ignore - is that when human lives are in the balance, a 99% success rate isn’t good enough. It has to be unreasonably close to 100%, or people will learn not to trust it, they will come to hate it, and they won’t but your product. Self-driving strikes me as folly for that reason.
Another example - also from my VW - are the audible proximity sensors. They are calibrated to panic when you get even remotely close to anything. Maybe that’s okay in the US, but here in Asia, it’s mostly false positives from normal driving in a space-constrained environment. It renders them completely useless. Am I actually dangerously close to something? Don’t know. As a result I just ignore them completely, then bitch about their shitty product on HN.
Man, my driving instructors car had those. Driving around the neighborhood where I live had those going off pretty much the entire time. Makes one wonder how incredibly oversized the parking spaces are where the designer of that feature lives.
Holy shit, any automaker who says that needs to have all their vehicles banned from US roads immediately.