字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 We're learning more tonight about a deadly car crash at speeds alleged to be over 100 miles per hour. A man is dead after being hit by a car in Midtown. It's just tragic. The crash happened on the 10 Freeway in Fontana killing four people. Investigators tell us there is a possibility that this was the result of a DUI. Eye witnesses say it appeared the driver didn't realize he had struck the boy and his mother until it was too late. These are only a few of the estimated 38,800 deaths on American streets in 2019. And possibly even more tragically, we actually have the technology to prevent many of those deaths. We're just not using it. This is David Zipper. He's a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and first wrote about this technology for CityLab. What is the risk for people in the United States for car fatalities? What has been the trend there? Well, it's not been good. In the last decade in America, overall road and street fatalities have been relatively flat, but that masks some big differences. If you're inside of an automobile, it's actually gotten safer. Fatalities have gone down over the last decade but they've spiked for pedestrians and for cyclists, between 30% and 45% over the last decade. And meanwhile, if you compare the United States to other OECD countries, other Western countries especially in Europe, we're doing much worse. In Helsinki, Finland last year there were literally zero deaths. And those risks are not spread out evenly. In fact, those most likely to be killed as a cyclist or a pedestrian, they tend to be minorities, they tend to be elderly, they often are low income. So, this is actually an equity issue as much as a safety one. Many city governments have worked hard to address these issues, adopting safer street initiatives around improving crosswalks and lowering speed limits. But those measures can only go so far. The reality is when two tons of glass, metal and plastic hit 150 pounds of flesh and bone, it's the human who's going to lose every single time. This is another David, David Friedman, and he's the Vice President for Advocacy at Consumer Reports. You know, one of the things we just did recently was we put out a report that pointed out that we could actually cut the roadway fatalities in half with technologies that are already out there today. Well, let's talk about speed. In a big country like the United States, speed sells, people like it, and car companies play off of those sorts of ideas that an automobile lets you go quickly and independently. I'm reminded of an advertisement for the Dodge Charger that I saw myself when I was watching the Super Bowl a few years ago. It's a wonderful thing, this game. It really plays on these ideas of being American. To bring an entire nation together. And being loyal. Glorious moment in time. We are thankful, mainly because the streets are just empty as hell right now. It was really striking to me. And I think it is very revealing about how automobiles sell this concept of speed, urban speed in particular, through their products. I mean, when you sort of look back at history, the automobile really showed up in American cities. It changed the speed of the street. That's Seleta Reynolds. All right, let's do it. She's the General Manager for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and as she explains, lowering the speed of vehicles can dramatically shift fatality rates. If you are hit by a car that is traveling 20 miles an hour or slower, you have a 80% to 90% chance of surviving that crash if you're on foot. Once that car is going 40 miles an hour, your chance of surviving that crash plummets down to about 20%. Cities throughout the United States have been really trying to keep especially vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists safe by reducing speed limits or encouraging drivers to go slower. The problem is that they can violate that speed limit. However, there is a technological solution, a simple device called a speed governor or a speed limiter. The speed governors have been around for literally over a century. Today, you can have a speed governor that is pretty simple, saying the vehicle can never go above 40 miles an hour, or you can have a quote unquote smart speed governor that would adjust to the surrounding speed limit. Are there any laws in the books or is there any government action to sort of put these in cars? Well, no. The United States, there's really been no effort to require or even encourage speed limiters, speed governors to be installed on personal vehicles. In Europe, regulators have been more aggressive. All new vehicles bought and sold in the European Union from the year 2022 will have to be fitted with so-called intelligent speed assistance technology. The speed governors there are gonna be smart in that they will use data from a variety of different sources to adjust based on what the surrounding speed limit is. But, and this may end up being a big but, a driver will be able to overcome the limit by keeping a foot pressed down on the accelerator. That may be helpful for a driver who wants to, say, get around a truck on the highway, but it does open questions about just how much protection will be afforded to pedestrians and cyclists from a truly reckless driver. But there are technologies out there that can help prevent some of the most dangerous drivers from ever even taking the wheel. A woman suspected of driving under the influence is dead this morning after driving. Many roadway fatalities occur within a quarter mile of a pub, bar, drinking establishment, which means either the driver or the pedestrian, or sometimes both have been impaired. This is Greg Winfree, the director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and he points to one maybe obvious technology, the breathalyzer. Breathalyzers are typically used to ensure compliance from folks that have been convicted of a drunk driving offense. You know, so there's stigma. Would I want to voluntarily put in my vehicle a device that to a passer-by might say this guy is a DUI guy? The auto industry with some regulators has been developing some new technologies in a program called DADSS, or D-A-D-S-S that would actually look at a driver's breath or their touch on the steering wheel to be able to passively determine if there's alcohol in their system. And then frankly they wouldn't be able to operate the vehicle. That technology is still a few years away. But there's other types of technology being developed as well that have a similar goal. These technologies fall into what are known as driver monitoring systems and they can detect more than just drunk drivers. Some of them can keep an eye on your eyes and figure out whether or not you've got your eyes on the road and/or whether or not you're doing proper scanning, so that it knows that you're consciously engaged in the driving task. So these sorts of driver monitoring systems are still quite rare and they're really put only onto luxury vehicles. So the vast majority of vehicles sold today and for the foreseeable future aren't going to have them. Yeah, you know, the only exposure I've ever had to this kind of technology is there's these Subaru ads right now, where parents are kind of worried about their phone-addicted teens out driving and getting into these sort of horrific accidents. Parents have a way of imagining the worst. Automakers are trying to differentiate themselves with the quality of their safety technology. There's another one that Honda did a couple of years ago about a guy named Mark. Mark is the best husband and father you could ask for. Who is praised by lots of people. Great guy, best man at my wedding. Just got to keep him off the dance floor. And then it shows Mark crossing a street and he's not really paying attention and he's almost hit by a Honda, but the Honda uses its pedestrian detection system to spot him and the driver stops in time. Pedestrian detection systems are one version of, sort of like a broad category of safety technologies known as advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS Engaging green light. Oh my God. Automatic emergency braking. Smart cruise control or adaptive cruise control. Lane assist. All of those are ADAS systems. Those are all important safety features when you're thinking about cars operating in higher speed, simpler environments but they are almost useless when you're talking about vehicles that are operating in complicated urban environments. AAA did a study recently showing that they're highly suspect when detecting a pedestrian at night, or when the vehicle is making a right-hand turn. They do a really poor job even detecting adult pedestrians. Only detecting adult pedestrians about 60% of the time and then when it comes to smaller pedestrians and children, they hardly detected them at all. In another study, AAA also found that other ADAS technology like lane assist and adaptive cruise control were simply unreliable. Over 4,000 miles of driving, researchers encountered an issue about every eight miles. And I assume this technology, along with any other technology, it'll only get better over time. But I'm curious with this technology already out there who's really pressuring these car companies to improve it, to make it better? As of now, really no one. This is all voluntary work that's being done by the automakers. Some of them really do invest a lot of money and effort in it, some don't, but it's really up to them. The shoulder belt and lap belt are now combined so that one buckle secures both belts. The reason we have seatbelts, the reason we have antilock brakes is because it was mandated by the government. Historically however, government action around safety often faces backlash, both by automakers and drivers. It's always been a struggle to get safety technology into automobiles. It took decades to make airbags, which are commonplace today, be mandatory. In 1974, the federal government tried to impose what's called a safety belt interlock. So you couldn't turn on your car if you weren't wearing a safety belt and within a year, auto interests and drivers were so irate that they forced Congress to backpedal. So there's a long history of challenges made, sometimes from drivers, oftentimes from auto companies themselves. Multiple carmakers and the automaker lobbying group Alliance for Automotive Innovation declined to comment for this story. The car is so entangled with American ideas of independence. Built for freedom. And cars mean that to Americans. The open road, power and rebellion. Nobody can tell you how to drive or what to do. It's all about you. And that I think leads to a real resistance among many people for any sort of technology that it comes across as potentially limiting their freedom, even if it actually enhances substantially the safety of other people in society. You would not accept 299, 737's which is crashing on an annual basis. One plane crash, crashing with that level of souls on it is not lost on society, but for some reason in the US, we don't focus, don't pay attention to 38,000 road fatalities, that it's not the human cry that it should be. We're two things in America. We're a car culture. We love our cars and we love our tech. People love technology at the end of the day, right? So, the challenge isn't the engineering. The challenge is the political will of getting these technologies on every car so that we could take on the nearly 40,000 lives lost every year and cut that about in half.
B1 中級 美國腔 車的科技(Life-Saving Car Technology No One Wants) 17 0 joey joey 發佈於 2021 年 03 月 13 日 更多分享 分享 收藏 回報 影片單字