The person who taught that class - they weren't a mechanic, were they?

Well, as a trained mechanic, I can assure you that A) it is not an emergency brake, as well as B) using it in such a manner sounds like a great way to break your brakes.

IF you insist on using your parking brake as an emergency brake, the safest method would be to slowly apply increasing pressure to the handle/pedal, as you would with your hydraulic brakes, coupled with engine braking, to gradually slow the vehicle.

Hilarious. No, not the shady tactics - the fact that companies like Uber and Lyft whine about being regulated as taxi services, arguing that they are not taxi services, then getting into the same sort of idiotic, self-harming feuds that forced the government to start regulating taxi services.

History, on a loop!

That sounds a lot more logical and reasonable than all the "OMG UR A SHITY DRIVER" arguments I've seen.

OK, so I just read through a random handful of those slides... and I'm not sure "Toyota code is horrifying" properly characterizes that absolute clusterfuck.

Outliers at this point, thankfully.

However, that reference does serve to further my contention that putting all the vehicle's functions into the hands of the same people who apparently can't write decent code for a single sensor is a really, really, terribly bad idea.

Well OK, you might WANT to use it, but I maintain that it's not wise to fulfill that urge.

Every human construct is a tool, even philosophies - they are applied to others in order to influence thinking, the way a hammer is applied to a nail, in order to influence it's position.

Even as a pure philosophy (taking the human factor out), communism is a tool to move ownership of the means of production (also tools) from the oligarchs to the workers.

... under all the varying road conditions that most humans successfully navigate today.

Kind of - it's really more "improperly trained humans."

Properly trained humans, ie professional drivers, statistically get into less collisions as non-trained humans, thus negating the "it's humans" hypothesis.

Since we already have millions of manually operated automobiles, as well as a culture that values the ability to travel anywhere at anytime for any reason, it occurs to me that the most economically and socially reasonable solution is to increase driver training requirements, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is where I am as well - from a safety standpoint, similar gains can be demonstrably achieved with a national, reasonable standard training requirement for licensing drivers, without any major, expensive technological changes.

But then, you can't effectively control the travel of properly trained drivers operating independent automobiles, now can you?

How have they fared in adverse conditions, like deep snow, accumulating ice, or muddy, washout conditions?

You are obviously not an automotive engineer.

Or a lawyer.

Here's a protip: engineering ethics == taking legal responsibility for the results.

So the real question isn't, "will cars be programmed with ethics," but rather, "will any car companies be stupid enough to make themselves legally culpable for deaths caused by their products?"

And of course, phrased in that manner, the answer becomes obvious.

That's essentially how air brakes in big rig trucks work - default to locked, air holds them open.

How the hell did you even do that?

In before the pedants:

Assuming enough force to overcome the holding force of the brake pads/shoes against the rotor/drum, of course. I.e., another car pushing would overcome, whereas a single human pushing probably would not.