>> your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal.

You know that safety for pedestrians is also a very tightly regulated car safety category, right? Obviously, there's not much that can be done if you get hit by a car going 70mph, but the fact that most people should survive a 30mph impact with a modern car is mostly thanks to regulations requiring crumple zones specifically designed to protect pedestrians in a collision. And yeah, there are huge trade offs - I imagine people would generally prefer a car that doesn't need incredibly expensive repairs after a minor collision because everything at the front just crumpled, but then they would be guaranteed to cut off legs of any person hit - it's a trade off.

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bucephalos 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not in the US. Specific pedestrian safety features are not included in cars sold there due to lack of regulation. FMVSS was planning a regulation modelled after ECE R127, then the administration changed and no progress since...

	▲	1718627440 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Lack of regulation resulting in worse outcomes is also a data point for regulation being able to solve problems.
	▲	gambiting 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well yes, which is why most American cars are not approved for sale over here.

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lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.

Or mandate in car cameras that record the driver to a blackbox to determine if the driver’s negligence caused others to be damaged. Also a cheap implementation that would immediately make drivers be more attentive.

	▲	gambiting 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>>It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars. Only partialy agree. As in - yes I agree in principle, but I don't agree it would be trivial. My sister had insurance with a black box policy, where everything she did in the car was recorded. And on her drive to work, she would always get a threatening email saying "we've recorded you going 70mph in a 20mph zone, if this continues we will cancel your policy". We had to ring them up and demand the GPS trace, and guess what - at one point she was going on the motorway above a 20mph road, but the system probably just did "what is the speed limit at X/Y coordinates" and was getting 20mph for the nearest road. We've had to do this several times when she had the policy. My own Volvo XC60 frequently tells me I'm going over the speed limit as it thinks the road I'm on has a 50mph limit when in fact it's 70, and in another place it thinks it's 30 when in fact it's also 70. Not to mention that the speeds entered on Google Maps are often just wrong and take forever to update. And it's funny when people like Harry Metcalf say that every new car he tests insists that his own private drive has a 20mph limit when obviously there is none. Imagine if you couldn't turn that off! So yeah, very easy to implement(and it's a great idea!) but in practice it's one of these "looks easy on paper, but in reality it's super hard to do reliably".