Gadgetory

full 28 percent of the accidents in the US every year are rear-end collisions and that probably shouldn't come as any surprise because most of us handle a gap to the car in front of us that we're following and how we glanced at it with a combination of past good luck and wishful thinking so let's apply a little science the Transportation Research Center at Ohio State did a study of 60 drivers over 6,500 miles highway and city to see how they manage the car ahead first they tended not to focus on how close that vehicle is nor how fast they were traveling they did tend to focus on the rate of gap change when it's steady we tend to get complacent and look elsewhere as if the car ahead would never break because it isn't now the study found that glances away when we are following a car directly in front of us go anywhere from a tenth of a second to about a full second which is substantially shorter than when we're driving and don't have a vehicle directly in front of us and then it's more like 1.62 to full seconds but that behavior fails to take into account a lot of things like what the driver in front of us sees which we can't see and also their braking behavior do they ride the brakes do they moderate them nicely do they stab on them only at the last minute when they need to we get our distance following cues and our prompts to look ahead of the car in front of us in three major categories first there's geometry things like intersections ahead great changes rail crossings approaching those are all fixed things we can see or that are called out by graphical signage then come othman ting cues here's where you'll find brake lights considered augmenting because information you get from brake lights ahead will vary by how the driver uses their brakes it's not real rigid data finally there are primary cues this is your own spacial and depth perception of the car ahead and that change in distance and speed so two major takeaways first of all remember that old one car lengths for every 10 miles per hour of speed rule you've been ignoring since the week you got your license turns out it's pretty good and secondly since a lot of us don't take into account the gap to the car in front of us nor the speed at which we're following we need vehicle to vehicle technology to get in there to more elegantly moderate between vehicles on the road right now we're really putting the gap at a fixed level even though the dynamics change a lot at different speeds and different amounts of space as we wait for b2b technology to arrive a simpler somewhat cruder technology is becoming more common today and that is forward collision detection and automatic collision avoidance braking it's kind of a sledgehammer approach that fixes the bad situations we put cars into in follow distance while we're mostly asleep at the switch it pays to double check how you manage the gap to the car ahead