I’ve owned cars without and with ABS. I find ABS is better. I know how to pump my brakes. But ABS does it better, because there’s no human decision making involved. It’s easy to panic if pumping isn’t doing enough & then jam brakes fully on.
The auto emergency-braking system on the Tesla & on some luxury cars (Mercedes, Lexus, Audi) is great as a fall-back. But adaptive cruise control encourages lack of human attentiveness. Fine for good drivers, but for less skilled drivers it can create dangerous situations.
Automatic braking isn’t the autopilot package. Tesla includes the hardware for self-driving features standard based on a business model that heavily promotes the self-driving upgrade package, and reducing hardware differences, which makes it straightforward to implement automatic braking, even though they leave the rest of the automatic features deactivated. This fits with their place as a luxury car manufacturer. Other manufacturers have typically only installed the hardware if the automated features are included in the options package the car is being built to.
That is changing, however. Automatic braking is being made standard by all the major manufacturers by 2022. As of 2 years ago, Ford’s plan was to roll it out as they implement model upgrades, and to have the overwhelming majority of their cars equipped with it by this year. Elsewhere I saw an update for 2019 indicating they were at 65% that year.
But it is. If you watch the screen in my car as I drive you see it visualizing the lane markers and other cars. And this is without Autopilot paid for. The only difference between my car and one with “Autopilot” is they have taken away the enable button from the driver. Want proof? If I let go of my steering wheel and the car heads for the ditch, the same warning sound comes across the speakers. But instead of applying the brake, it engages full autopilot for 1 second and straightens the car out. Notice I didn’t say it steers left. With your hand on the wheel you can feel it’s driving a full corrective S shape to fix your trajectory.
It’s become obvious the car doesn’t just use proximity to brake or painted lines to jerk the car away. It is Autopilot being engaged to act with the least amount of panic required to fix the situation. When it brakes, it has already determined the best stopping distance. When it steers, it has calculated a path to follow. It really is the Autopilot system running in the background.
