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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.
The mandate isn’t that cars have infotainment screens, it’s that they have backup cameras. The choice to use the infotainment screen is the automakers, not the regulators. Early backup cameras had the screen embedded behind the rearview mirror, which was a much safer solution IMO. But cost cutting killed that because it was a second screen.
That could have been the mandate. They could have mandated that be the only allowable screen. It shows what’s behind you, and that’s it. No distractions tolerated. No pop-up logos or other advertising. No driving controls on that screen. Touch screen disabled while in motion, with all essential functions actuated by physical controls.
But they didn’t. They mandated a rearview and monitor, but didn’t restrict its use. And that failure has probably caused more injuries and deaths than it has prevented.
Okay so we should do either everything or nothing, no solutions can exist between extremes. Got it 🙄