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The safety features are worth millions of crashes prevented and thousands of lives saved, making them remarkably cost-effective.
Capping the luxury features and size of passenger vehicles would do a lot more to bring down costs than removing safety features.
Back up cameras are also important for sedans, hatchback, and anything else where you can’t see something 24 inches tall right behind the rear bumper. They are a benefit for every enclosed vehicle, just like airbags and abs.
They also put a distracting video monitor in front of the driver 100% of the time, not just the 0.2% while backing. Manufacturers have moved a lot of controls to that screen, rather than leaving them on tactile buttons and switches that could be operated without taking eyes off the road.
How many collisions have been caused by distractions from the these screens?
They would have done the screens without the backup cameras.
Not if those distracting screens were prohibited.
They could ban the screens and keep the camera with a small screen that only displays the rear camera when in reverse and nothing else.
This isn’t the fault of regulators. They would have done this regardless of backup camera regulation.
Unless they only permitted that screen to show a rear view. They could have prohibited any other use, or prohibited non-tactile controls that required ocular attention while driving. They could have required that touchscreen controls be disabled while driving. But they didn’t.
They mandated the distracting screen, and probably killed more people than they saved.
The law doesn’t mandate a touch screen, nor that it be on while driving. And why should it? The goal is to address the blind spot, not to tell automakers how to build head units.
And enforcing telescreens into every citizen’s home is critical to ensuring public safety. Without constant monitoring, how can the State prevent sedition and deviancy? If you let people disable their telescreen speakers, how will they stay informed and alert if there’s an emergency?
If you don’t accept your telescreen, you’re neglecting your duty to protect others.
Back up cameras as a requirement does not require an infotainment that steals data, just a camera and a way to display it to the driver. The fact that car companies tied it into other things doesn’t make the core requirement comparable to 1984.
For example, at least one car I drove had the backup camera display in the rear view mirror, not the infotainment screen.
Just a screen, camera, sensor, relay, 20ft of wire, nbd right? It’s not like that makes stuff more expensive or harder to work on or anything
Same with requirements for cruise control, lights, brakes, and pretty much everything else on the car. Hell, most windshield wipers are probably more complex than just having a camera that displays on a screen when in reverse.
Brakes are obviously essential, cruise control isn’t mandatory, lighting doesn’t require a single pcb. Wipers can be pretty simple but are already one of the more expensive/annoying things to fix on a car, a mandated screen (and inevitable infotainment system along with it) to make up for lack of visibility over a mandated high beltline is just… not something I want to deal with. And you know the surveillance state’s gonna tap the feeds from those millions of cameras and stick us with the bill for the hardware to do it, way too juicy source of data not to
Nonetheless, you’re arguing that the government should force people to install cameras on their private property in the interest of public safety, are you not?
Same vein: Should drivers be required to keep over-the-air software delivery enabled so that manufacturers can distribute safety-critical updates to their cars as fast as possible?
A backup camera doesn’t require any kind of connection to anything other than the display for the driver. At the most basic level it is a safety feature like headlights at night and brakes that does not have an inherent connection to anything other than the camera. No recording requirement, not broadcasting, nothing.
You are conflating things that don’t have anything to do with that basic concept.
In a vacuum, sure.
In practice, the government has moved from speed cameras (benign monitoring) to ALPRs (pervasive surveillance) without the public blinking. In practice, many auto manufacturers (Telsa, Hyundai, GM brands) have made it a matter of regular policy to ship home audio and video data from drivers’ cars to use for marketing and surveillance.
Backup cameras are a small drop in the bucket compared to other transportation design choices if you’re serious about a Vision* Zero endgame, and in my book, the potential for abuse makes them a liability rather than an asset towards that end.