if you think about the speeds involved, a single additional car in front of you on the freeway (or even any additional cars) adds pretty miniscule time to the total commute.
Let's compare a few situations. In the baseline you're tailing the car in front of you with a focus on not letting anyone cheat and get in front of you, let's say 50 feet away. Your commute is 30 miles, and in this frictionless sphere of traffic you're going 60mph the whole time. You get to work in 30 minutes flat.
In the second scenario you're following the 3-second rule[0]. This would put you ~285 feet behind the car in front of you. Let's say over the course of your commute 20 cars move in front of you. If the average car length is 15 feet, and they all are 50 feet away from each other, when all 20 cars are in place you're a net -(20 * 65) feet away from the original car, or 1300 feet total. At 60 mph that adds ~15 seconds to your total commute time.
Well worth having an easier time avoiding a potential crash IMO! Also has the benefit of helping prevent traffic to begin with[1]
It is not about efficiency or trying not to be slow. I am not bothered how many people cut in line or "cheat".[1]
Someone will always keep cutting into the space. It is impossible to maintain 3 second to the car ahead. First one car will cut in, you make room for them and add 3 second gap the next car will cut in. Maintaining even a 1 second gap is sometimes very hard close to exits.
[1] Personally my driving pattern changed once I switched to driving a hydrogen fuel cell Mirai, slower is better on the mileage and fuel cell owners are very range conscious.
In the Midwest here and drive the same way, from rural to busy city and back. Never had any issues at all with it minus the car or five I let in front of me. I usually keep about 5 car lengths, so a fairly reasonable gap without being annoying to drivers that happen to be behind me. Also, I have zero panic braking incidents, which seem to be a big cause of crashes and slowdowns in heavy traffic due to the slinky phenomenon that tends to happen.
Not only can I see everything beyond the car in front of me, I tend to "soak" up the braking energy when there is a panic braking incident in front of me. I have no data to back this up, but I'm almost positive I've kept traffic moving much better behind me and prevented rear ending incidents using this tactic. Also, I wouldn't downplay the amount of fuel that is being saved that comes with not having to almost stop, then start over again from the slinky effect.
Tell me you're a bad driver without telling me you're a bad driver.
You need to not care about that, and you're actually supposed to let people change lanes into your lane. You're getting into a mental competition with other drivers and sacrificing the safety of yourself and everyone around you.
And if anyone believes that longer following distance causes more traffic, that is also false and the reverse is actually true. It is the poor reaction times of tailgaters that cause traffic slowdowns.
> Tell me you're a bad driver without telling me you're a bad driver.
> You need to not care about that, and you're actually supposed to let people change lanes into your lane. You're getting into a mental competition with other drivers and sacrificing the safety of yourself and everyone around you.
> And if anyone believes that longer following distance causes more traffic, that is also false and the reverse is actually true. It is the poor reaction times of tailgaters that cause traffic slowdowns.
I think that what they're saying is the flow of cars in front of them keeps that distance between them and the 'next car' to a shorter undesirable distance as more cars fill that gap during traffic.
... And then you end up just going slower than the rest of the traffic, and people behind you change to the faster lanes to pass you, and some of the people passing you change lanes back to in front of you. And so trying to keep a longer following distance than the rest of traffic allows just means thtey lots of people are doing things other than just staying safely in one lane.
you're better off letting people change lanes to the lane they want to be in, and if you're not camping in the left lane then typically you'll find people changing lanes from the left lane to exit, or will change lanes through yours into the left lane.
if you leave lots of space they can do so entirely safely.
trying to prevent other people from changing lanes does not enhance traffic safety.
then you let off the gas slightly and widen the gap. when people change lanes from in front of you, then you can speed up slightly and close the gap. that isn't a practical problem. it comes out in the wash.
It doesn't stop with one, the problem is not someone cut across, the problem is someone always keeps squeezing in the gap. Every time you open a gap, a new car cuts across. How can you maintain any gap in that context ?
As others pointed out - let them. On average all lanes move the same, they might even move away once the lane stops moving. You'll have much worse time rearing a car then letting all those cars in.
I also keep additional distance in traffic to minimize slowdowns/stops, which ultimately actually improves/fixes the flow.
Real braking happens for a reason, to avert accidents. Sane drivers don't do it just randomly in perfectly safe situations. Random braking is major risk for everyone around and if you are source of it, you are in fact danger foe others.
> Sane drivers don't do it just randomly in perfectly safe situations
You can't always assume that you will be able to tell when a situation has turned from safe to unsafe. You just can't exactly see what the driver in front of you (or the driver in front of _them_) is seeing.
And you can't assume that the driver in front of you is sane!
I hear people talk about people brake checking all the time (whether they're the brake checkers or the person tailing). A buddy of mine was tailing a (non-Tesla) car a little too closely on his motorcycle and the driver deliberately brake-checked him and he wrecked. And that's just people deliberately driving erratically, never mind the people who are responding to debris, animals, people, etc darting into the road.
Fault of your friend for not keeping a safe distance.
If both drivers only had basic insurance covering damages that aren't your fault, he got nothing and the other driver got paid for having his car damaged by a reckless driver that smashed into his car.
How does your friend even know it was without reason? Maybe a kitten or a squirrel crossed the road.
We’re not debating fault, we’re debating whether other drivers drive predictably. Whether the driver brake checked him or whether there was a squirrel or kitten in the road doesn’t really matter: the point is the human driver braked unpredictably. You don’t have to drive with special caution around a Tesla, you should drive with the same amount of caution that you would drive around any car. I have a Tesla and I use autopilot pretty liberally (but not carelessly—I’m always ready to take over) and phantom braking was really frustrating last year, but it was never unsafe unless perhaps someone was literally a foot or two behind you at high speed. They seem to have fixed that sometime in 2022, and since then I’ve had fewer than 5 phantom braking episodes and they have been almost imperceptible (certainly not dangerous). The Tesla critics in this thread are reacting to some pretty extreme assumptions about autopilot (that phantom braking happens all the time, that it’s less safe than the unpredictable behavior of human drivers, etc). We certainly need more evidence, but I’m going to be biased toward the people who actually have experience driving Teslas rather than the people whose information comes from the rumor mill.
Sure, but an unexpected full ABS lock when you can see nothing in front of the tesla is going to be yard for most to react quickly too even at a decent distance. 10 second follow distances are only possible in most metros during very light traffic.
Then you're driving unsafely, although 10 seconds as a general rule is a straw man.
At any time, a child could run out from a hidden spot and the car in front of you could have to slam on the brakes as hard as possible. Or any of a hundred other realistic scenarios.
These things aren't common, but statistically they will happen to you multiple times during a lifetime of driving, and it's your responsibility to always be at a safe distance behind in order to react as well.
The common rule of thumb is generally 2-3 seconds in perfect conditions, and 4-6 seconds in rain or other normal challenging conditions. 10 seconds is only in cases of ice/snow where most people wouldn't be driving in the first place (you know, when you're going just 15 mph but it still takes 5 seconds to come to a full stop on the slippery ice). The heaviness/lightness of traffic is irrelevant.
>10 second follow distances are only possible in most metros during very light traffic.
I've usually heard that it's three seconds. Even still, you control your follow distance. Even in heavy traffic, you can give yourself more space between you and the car in front of you than other people do. It's easy to do, and I've been able to do just that even in metro areas with heavy traffic.
> You should ... allow at least a two-second gap between you and the vehicle in front on high-speed roads and in tunnels where visibility is reduced. The gap should be at least doubled on wet roads and up to ten times greater on icy roads
I avoid them too. Erratic drivers too. I'm not sure if its them coming out of autopilot back into control or just that's what happens when you have a lead foot and a car that goes to 60mph in 3 seconds entirely silently.
It's a shame this is getting downvoted because it's true. In any level of traffic except stop-and-go--and even then to a large extent--you should be doing everything within your power to either pass the cars on your right, and/or move over to let cars pass you on the left. It is a vanishingly small number of scenarios where you are keeping pace with a car next to you and you're not in the wrong. This isn't just at high speed or on highways, any two-land road operates (or is designed to operate) this way.
That's not the same everywhere in the world though, and even in places where it is strictly passing on the left (or on the right in the UK, Japan and a few other places) 'keep your lane' tends to be the rule if the right hand lane is also moving at the speed limit (so you can't legally pass).
That way the carrying capacity of the road is higher. But when traffic is less dense 'station keeping' should be avoided at all times and if someone moves into my 'dead zone' or just to the left of me I'll gradually slow down to force them to finish their overtake.
> 'keep your lane' tends to be the rule if the right hand lane is also moving at the speed limit (so you can't legally pass).
Why are you in the lefter lane if you can't pass?
I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit. Some are in the right lane doing a few below the limit, some are in the left-most lane doing a few above.
Occasionally, someone who is late to work, emergency services, or whatever goes flying by in one of the left-most lanes.
> I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit.
I've been on interstates in every continental US state and I've never seen this, but I think something has been lost in translation because "bumper-to-bumper" and "everybody doing the speed limit" are mutually exclusive as I understand the terms. If everybody on the road can fit into the right lane with enough space in-between to do the speed limit, that is done but I wouldn't call that traffic "bumper-to-bumper". I would call that light traffic. Bumper-to-bumper is when the space between cars really starts to contract, because everybody is going substantially below the limit, or because people aren't maintaining a safe distance.
Once the road has too many cars to fit them all into the right lane at the speed limit, then in every state I've driven, cars start using the left lane for travel, not just passing. If the right lane is so full that it can only sustain 5 below the limit, then people start driving in the left lane and stay there for as long as the right lane won't support speed-limit traffic. In this kind of traffic you'll start to have cars moving fast alongside each other with low relative velocity.
Have you ever driven in Philadelphia during high-traffic, non-rush hour times? 75mph easily, with at most half a car length between every car. I didn't believe a friend's dad when he talked about "bumper-to-bumper 80mph traffic" in the highways around the Philly suburbs but it's absolutely the case.
!!!! 2 meters separation at 70 km/h gives you a tenth of a second to react to anything the car in front of you does, that's flatly insane. Where in the world do people drive like that?
Seriously, that's objectively insane. Try the ruler drop test for reaction times if you don't believe me, a 10th of a second to even initiate your response isn't realistic and obviously gives no time for the response itself to have effect. What I'm saying is that at a tenth of a second, you can't even start to press the brake pedal in time, let alone have enough time to actually slow down.
In America, with only 2 meters between vehicles the traffic would be inching forward at a snails pace, under 20 km/h at least. "Stop and go", as in people would stop their car and then drive forward slowly when a larger gap ahead of them appears.
If the car in front of you instantaneously goes to 0, yes.
Reminds me of driving in western Virginia, people drive insane there. This is going into Amsterdam in the morning. Highly recommend “Not Just Bikes” on YouTube if you want an interesting comparison between roads here vs. Canada/US.
Where is this? In eastern canada that's impossible to imagine - although most highways are 2-3 lanes, not 6, I couldn't imagine having a free lane on the side while having bumper to bumper everywhere else.
> It is a vanishingly small number of scenarios where you are keeping pace with a car next to you and you're not in the wrong.
I think it really depends on where/when you're driving. I find this to be a common scenario on interstates during rush hour:
I'm in the right lane, doing approximately the speed limit. There is a safe distance between me and the cars in front and back of me, but only just. If many more cars enter the road, traffic would need to slow down to maintain safe distances. In the left lane is the same situation, except they're averaging about 1 or 2 mph faster. In this situation, there are cars in the left lane passing very slowly, spending a lot of time alongside me. I could slow down below the speed limit every time a car passed on the left, to reduce reduce that loiter time. But this would make my driving less predictable to the drivers behind me (and waste a lot of mileage too...)
So normally, when the other cars are my size, I maintain my present course and speed, driving as predictably as possible to help the other drivers anticipate my course. Changing position in traffic is inherently risky, so I avoid making changes unless doing so is necessary to avoid something I judge to be more dangerous than the average. If a truck passes me on the left, I'll slow down to make the passing faster even if that means a car behind me has to brake. But if in that moment I judge the guy behind me to be even more dangerous, then maybe I won't. It's the kind of decision that needs to be made on the spot in a case-by-case basis. On interstates that are flowing fast near capacity, you need to be constantly evaluating the relative threat of the traffic around you.
I think if you're in the left lane only going 1 mph faster than the cars in the right lane, especially in traffic, something is wrong. Especially on interstates where lanes are typically wide and the road relatively straight, and in good weather & visibility, if you have any appreciable amount of traffic on the road it's much better to go 5-10 over to pass then get over to the right and go back down to the speed of the right lane than it is to be in the left lane holding up a line of traffic while you take 5 minutes to pass one semi.
In light traffic, I wouldn't. In medium traffic there often isn't that much choice, but in those situations I prefer the company of other cars my size, and preferably ones with attentive drivers (so I discriminate against Tesla drivers.)
Most people are pretty much unaware of anything outside of their car other than for the couple of seconds they look up from their phone to look at the car in front of them. Look to the sides? That's too much time away from the screen in their hand! /s (only partially)
Since my time of learning to drive, the requirement to have formal driving training has ping ponged in being a requirement or not. The number of hours as an observer is just as important as the hours being behind the wheel. One of the things repeatedly mentioned by the instructor was to not drive side by side any car unless absolutely necessary. It was also a recurring theme in my repeated defensive driving classes. I also have an uncle that drove trucks for a long time, and he would tell stories of things he saw on the road. A relevant story was when one of the wheels of a tractor-trailor doing 70mph down the highway lost the outside wheel of the trailer and seeing the damage it cause the car driving along side. All of that added together makes me never like to have a car on my sides and I will speed up or slow down (which ever has more space available) to avoid it. For those that did not have to take a driving course, this is just information they may never have been provided.
It is totally normal to just go behind one car without constantly overtaking or being overtaken. It is even actually safer then being constantly in and out of lanes.
I would like to see mercedes publish their own statistics on their FSD. Given the tight constraints where they allow self driving, they could easily claim 100% safety record and thus infinitive more safe than any other manufacturer. It would be misleading, but statistically it would be the truth (any accidents could be said to be outside the constraint and thus will not count).
Personally I would only really trust such statistics if insurance companies would reflect that in the premium. Somehow I doubt they would be willing to cut the fee based on what Tesla claims.
Can someone present evidence that Teslas are more expensive to insured than other comparable vehicles? Along with evidence that the difference is because of safety rather than cost of repairs?
> Why else would they come up with their own insurance?
If they had evidence that their cars were less likely to be involved in accidents then it would pay them to set up an insurance company and charge just below the usual rates.
Even if they are merely as safe as other cars then Tesla could provide insurance at lower prices because they need only break even and they have better statistics.
There is a reason it is said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistically, there's a ~7% chance I won't die because ~7% of all humans who have ever lived haven't died.
That's not a great idea. The driver is still in control of the car and is no better than anybody else, and maybe even not paying attentnion because some think autopilot is self driving. You should treat all other traffic with the same defense.
Agreed. With human drivers you can, in most cases, see their intent with the way they move. With tesla or other self driving systems it is a black box that is way less predictable.
This is not true, I purchased a Model 3 brand new in 2021; it has HW3 and it absolutely does phantom braking regularly on road trips. This is on US interstates.
Why do you keep driving it? I had a car that did this to me twice and got rid of it, the first time could have been a glitch but twice is simply broken and dangerous. The dealer said the car was fine.
Yeah, you're right. I haven't had a phantom brake in quite a while, and even the ones I used to have were not so aggressive as to be unsafe. Unfortunately, I suspect downvoters are conflating 'observing phantom braking has been fixed' with 'complete endorsement of everything Musk does'. Black and white thinking and whatnot.
Any car with regenerative braking is obnoxious, by federal law they aren't required to flash the brake lights when decelerating, ONLY when they're applying the physical brake and not when the car is regenerating, etc.
I don't know about the law, but that's not true of Teslas. Deceleration triggers brake lights. Here's one example where a guy tests it https://youtu.be/dmptMElBpjI
