Vulnerable Road Users

All of this “safety” stuff is eventually going to kill us – if only from exasperation.

Volvo’s latest, for instance. The company announced the other day that its EX90, ES90 and EX60 EVs will get “a host of new warnings, including “alerts” for “large animal detection on the road ahead, the presence of vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, as well as roadwork and accident alerts using real-time data from connected Volvo vehicles or traffic management centers.”

This is all part of an “ecosystem” of safety that can be “shared with other brand vehicles through the European Data for Road Safety ecosystem.”

Here is Åsa Haglund, the head of Volvo Cars Safety Center:

“These innovations represent another step towards our vision of zero collisions. Every time a Volvo car shares safety intelligence, it helps other drivers prepare earlier to avoid accidents and feel safer.”

Italics added.

It is very important – says Haglund – to “feel safer.” She says so – so it must be so. We can never be safe enough! That is why there is more and more “safety” – which is to say, nagging and parenting – all the time. From carding 60-year-olds to buy beer (or Bic lighters) to cars that jerk the steering wheel, slam on the brakes and tell you to sit up straight! and keep your eyes on the road!   

These Volvos “share safety intelligence.” What does it mean, exactly? Well, it means being part of a collective and the thing about collectives is someone’s got to run them. Who will that be? Well, you can be sure it isn’t you or me. Implicit in that reality is that someone else (sommeone like this Haglund person) is going to be the one who decides what’s “safe” and – inevitably – enforced. That’s not how it’ll be sold, of course. One news outlet says it’ll merely “complement existing alerts (warning about) slippery roads and poor light conditions.” That there’s a downed tree ahead. Or a bicycle rider. Apparently, keeping an eye out isn’t sufficient. 

Is it a bit much to worry that, just maybe, these “safety” alerts will become more than just that? 

Consider the case of what they market as Speed Limit Assistance.

Taken at face value, it sounds like what they want you to think it is. Just a friendly warning that you are driving faster than the speed limit. As if you were unaware of that. Just as you are aware you didn’t “buckle up for safety” – especially after the “reminder” chime has been harassing you for five minutes straight. After the initial chime it is no longer a “reminder.” It is a punishment. You are being annoyed in order to cajole you into “buckling up” – in order to shut off the chime. In time, it will be more than just a chime. People forget they tried to to be more direct once, a long time ago – with seatbelt interlocks that prevented the engine from being started of the driver didn’t “buckle up” first. That was back in the ’70s and it didn’t sell. So they got to work soft-selling it, a little at a time.    

Wouldn’t it be splendid if they were just above-board about it and called it what it actually is? Of course, they do not do that because honest language – seatbelt nag – would not go over as well as “reminder.” It’s a low-grade torment-manipulation – like they do at the DMV, when they call you a “customer.”

As if you didn’t have to be there.

As if you wanted to be there.     

Back to the Speed Limit Assistance. In Europe, it is already doing more than “assisting.” It is countermanding. When a car equipped with SLA exceeds the speed limit – which the SLA-equipped cars know by correlating vehicle speed with GPS data – there is push-back from the throttle (which is entirely controlled by the computer that controls everything in a new/recent-model-year vehicle) to slow the car down and bring it back into conformity with the speed limit. For now, the driver can override this by pushing back harder on the accelerator pedal, but you’d have to be short bus material to not grasp that this is just for now. Once people get used to this degree of “assistance,” the “assistance” will become more aggressive. Ultimately – obviously – the end of the road is to “assist” people into complete compliance with every speed limit, all the time.

They call this grooming in the child molestation business – and it amounts to the same thing in the car business, only it’s adults who are to be molested. So it is – and will be – with Volvo’s “Connected Safety” system, which all feeds real-time data about each vehicle that is part of the collective to “traffic management centers.”

What do you supposed these centers will be managing?

Keep in mind that if you accept that “safety” is the be-all/end-all and if “safety” is defined as compliance with what they say is “safe,” then you have already accepted the necessity to control the vehicular collective. To keep it safe!

Nothing is outside the ambit of “safety” because everything has the potential to affect “safety.” Autonomous (that is, independent, free range) driving is therefore outside the ambit of “safety” and must be locked down. They are in the process of locking it down but many people are soothed into a kind of drooly-faced reflexive quiescence by talk of “keeping vulnerable road users . . . safe.” 

There is plenty of such “safety” in a solitary confinement cell, within the collective of a supermax prison.

. . .

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