My car hit the breaks for me last week on a highway. I’m quite happy with the computerization of cars for this reason. It could be better as the link shows the downsides, but it probably has saved (tens of?) thousands of lives overall.

My car hit the brakes for me last week on a highway as well, except there was no reason to, there was nothing there. I'm not as happy.

I intentionally opted out of these sort of driver assist features because I don't trust the firmware going into them. If a safety misfeature can be disabled manually you also run the risk of an insurer denying a claim if they find out it wasn't engaged. Better to not have it in the first place and use the mark I eyeball for safety.

Yeah, I'm not happy I have them, but I'm happy other drivers have them. I guess they help overall, since I need to be careful to keep a safe distance from the guy in front of me anyway.

A couple months ago I was driving a rental and I coasted up on slow exit traffic with the intent of dodging right after the person to my right passed me. Well I got that far but I got close enough to the slowing traffic in front of me in the process it decided to brake. And of course because electronic throttle they lock you out of the gas. And it takes a couple seconds for it to decide that no, I really did want to go fast, so it lets me do that but of course the CVT needs to incrementally wind its way there at a leisurely pace.

So instead of cleanly pulling off my merge into a lane going 10mph faster than me I look like a goddamn moron for zipping over and then hard braking away 20mph of speed. All because some programmers buried in Toyota HQ somewhere spent too much time on the HN or Reddit or whatever circle jerking it in the comments with the "you can never go wrong by braking" crowd. Could have been way worse had it been a spicer situation, like merging into traffic with a disabled vehicle at the end of the merge ramp or just about any other case with equal or great speed differential and equal or lesser margin.

A car should do what I say. I can understand doing something when I have provided no input or perhaps ignore a 0-100% press to prevent wrong pedal accidents but this is just horrible systems design. If I'm traveling at speed and mash the gas it stands to reason I did that on purpose.

Even the structures of cars have improved. The crumple zones and structural rigidity is constantly evolving.

I also like sensors and crash avoidance tech.

Each improvement is hugely less influential than the last. Seatbelts get you 90% of the way there. Airbags do most of the rest, etc, etc.

All those improvements have been undone by the entire market turning in to brodozers and soccer mum tanks.