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Congress Considers Automatic Emergency Braking, One Hundred Years Too Late
Congress is thinking hard about automatic emergency braking - a bit behind science fiction writers.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has scheduled a Jan. 14 hearing, chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, to examine how government mandates and environmental rules are affecting the price of new cars and trucks...
Automatic emergency braking, or AEB, sits at the center of the technical dispute. NHTSA finalized Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 127 earlier this year, requiring that nearly all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the US be equipped with AEB systems by the 2029 model year, with an extra year for small-volume manufacturers.
In his 1934 story Photo Control, Bernard Brown describes gyrocars with photo-electric brakes:
The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag...
Senate Republicans are preparing to press the auto industry on the cost and effectiveness of federally mandated safety technologies, setting up a January hearing that will test how far lawmakers are willing to revisit long-standing assumptions about vehicle safety rules. At stake are not only the mandates for automatic emergency braking and rear-seat child alerts, but also the broader direction of US regulation as Congress weighs whether to emphasize advanced driver-assistance and autonomous systems over prescriptive hardware requirements.
(Via TechSpot.)
"Don't you see, sir; once you set a heavy wheel spinning, it strongly resists a change in its plane of rotation. Take a gyroscope big enough and fast enough. Couple one side of its cradle to the axle of a car and then, as you apply brakes, increase the length of the coupling arm by any sort of toggle. The gyroscope refuses to change its plane, and so the wheels are forced down by the toggle lever and you get as much friction as the tires will stand!"
(Photo-Electric Brakes from 'Photo Control' by Bernard Brown)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/27/2025)
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