Even if they had paid for that feature this probably wasn’t the best way to find out if it worked.
Reminds me of when Reno 911! opened each episode with the comically inept department conducting a “safely test” of their new bulletproof vests… by shooting at a fellow officer who was wearing one.
Well, Volvo is kinda right, aren’t they? They obviously aren’t testing any kind of self-parking feature. And maybe should’ve R’dTFM before accelerating a freaking CAR towards some bystanders.
Wasn’t that based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am-Qdx6vky0 ?
Anyway, “tests” like this run by idiots? Reminds me of facebook “natural medicine” quacks. If you don’t know what a test is, if you don’t understand what you’re doing or the function of what you’re supposed to be testing, stop. Just stop.
Many people who drive Volvo’s have good reason to want to feel safe in an accident.
or, you know, Sunday.
http://www.cbs19.tv/story/29146571/man-dies-fooling-around-with-bulletproof-vest-gun
“Idiots Who Assumed Cruise Control was Auto-Pilot in 80’s Make Same Mistake in 2015”
Yeah, not a lot of room to blame Volvo here. If someone runs a dangerous test to demonstrate a special safety option that isn’t actually on the vehicle there’s pretty much not anything they can do about that.
I don’t think they were “bystanders” so much as “willing participants in a very ill-advised test.” Look how they’re all filming the car with their smartphones—I think they were all there to see a demonstration of their friend’s awesome-but-woefully-nonexistent auto-braking system.
A moron drives a car directly into a group of morons, and we’re blaming the car?
I was going to say the same thing, only instead of a satirical show, people in real life who have shot or stabbed bullet proof vests and then died.
Hot Tip - bullet proof vests will not stop knives.
That’s why they’re called bullet-resistant vests, not bulletproof vests.
The subtext seems to be “it’s terrible that volvo has car protection as a standard feature but you have to pay extra for pedestrian protection.”
Well, maybe, it depends. What’s not clear to me is whether the pedestrian protection is just a software upgrade because they all have that radar installed, or if the radar for pedestrians is a separate bit of hardware.
If the former, shame on them. But if it’s the latter it’s a different story. Maybe someday such systems will be like seatbelts. But until then, being mad at volvo for not making all their cars thousands of dollars more expensive for an advanced system that most other cars do not have is a bit premature.
The article says the people hit were just bruised. Which for my money, considering their foolishness, changes the “horrible” part of the headline to “hilarious”.
Ah, it wasn’t clear to me on first viewing that there was actually a driver in the car, accelerating it forward.
The headline “self-parking accident” made me immediately assume driverless parking, and since it’s hard to see in I didn’t challenge the headline’s assumption. That given, I was amazed to see people defending Volvo — you shouldn’t need to pay for additional DLC to prevent your self-parking car from accelerating wildly into a pedestrian. That’s absurd.
Realizing that some idiot driver was actually there, jamming his foot on the accelerator, makes the whole thing entirely different.
I wonder if perhaps other people who think this is the car’s fault were making the same jump I did.
Inorite? You think that’s horrible, you clearly didn’t watch the “hamburger movies” we had in driver’s ed in Virginia in the 70’s.
I thought for sure there was a mistake in that article when it said it took place in California.
Shouldn’t that say Florida?
To be clear, “self-parking” is intended to refer to a feature whereby one’s car will automatically parallel-park itself, right? In that case I would certainly hope the mechanism would be sufficiently intelligent not to mash one’s car into a pedestrian-shaped object (e.g. an inconvenient post) without a further upgrade.
Oh god, those videos.
(Cop with GAINT-BRIMMED novelty sheriff-hat, cradling ketchup-covered girl dressed in c.1963 teen fashion): (wooden, somewhat embarrassed, directly to camera:) Why. Why.
Reminds me of this:
FWIR, they forgot to activate the system…
