Safety has always been a top priority in the car and bike world, ‘coz duh, we all need to be alive to keep driving and riding. These days, the push for safety has brought about tons of innovations—cars that come standard with all sorts of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), even on cheaper, bottom-dollar options.
The story’s pretty much the same when you lop two wheels off and get into motorcycles. Bikes with crazy tech like radar-powered adaptive cruise control, collision detection, and lean-sensitive ABS and traction control are quickly becoming the norm, too.
This leads me to ask myself: are we reaching a point where safety technology is crossing over into overkill territory, so much so that it might actually not be as safe as we initially thought?
Hear me out.
In the automotive industry, all cars sold in the US will need to come with AEB—autonomous emergency braking—by 2029. This means all cars will need to be equipped with all the fancy gizmos that allow them to see ahead and automatically apply the brakes and come to a stop, all without a single bit of input from the driver. It’s all pretty weird, and I’ve experienced it for myself with my Mazda2 equipped with AEB. I was curious one afternoon and decided to hang a blanket up on a clothesline. I drove straight toward the blanket, and voila, my little red hatchback came to an abrupt stop.
