HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

Would requiring drivers to wear hearing aids make them more acceptable?


The idea is to require drivers to have excellent hearing if possible via hearing aids if necessary.

Would this make hearing aids cheaper and more socially acceptable even when not driving?


  👤 elmerfud Accepted Answer ✓
Hearing is not a prerequisite to be able to drive or even to drive very well. Just like color blindness or even legs are not required to drive and drive well. It absolutely helps to be able to see in color to have a good hearing and to have all of your appendages functioning, but driving on the roads do not require these things. It requires an appropriate level of skill in relation to any handicap you may have.

So what is your goal in proposing this? Is it to increase driver safety or is it to socialize the use of hearing aids outside of driving? Those are two totally different goals and I think conflating them is the wrong approach.

Most of the problems we have with drivers is that we fail to require continuing education for driving. At least in the United States and I suspect many other countries driving is a skill that is taught early in life in the teenage years or early twenties. What is taught is the minimal acceptable level of driving. You get the rules of the road you have some hands-on experience with teacher that teaches you all of the most fundamental and basic skills needed. At that point you're handed a license and released into the world. This causes there to be people who have 60 years of driving experience but their experience is only in the most basic driving techniques. They have never learned advanced techniques for driving.

If we want to improve driver skills there needs to be some sort of randomized continuing education that is required. This way people are guaranteed to learn advanced skills or at least have the opportunity to learn them.


👤 solardev
I think the current safety systems that are beginning to see more adoption (lane drift warning, collision avoidance, automatic braking/engine shut-off, or infrared HUDs etc. in fancier cars) are probably more effective. If the car can detect dangers and act without waiting for you to respond, that's better than just trying to amplify a warning and hoping you hear it and react in time.

Now that (in the US) hearing aids are available off the shelf, hopefully we'll soon see more airpod-wannabes that don't look like the traditional aids. Cheaper too. But IMO that's not really a great solution to driving safety. By the time you hear something (be it a horn or a screeching crash) it's usually too late anyway.


👤 navjack27
I'm unsure what you're talking about in terms of hearing aids not being socially acceptable... What places are discriminating or judging people because they have hearing aids?

👤 aurizon
If they surveyed and found bad hearing caused many accidents/deaths as it did with vision problems(glasses) they could pass a hearing test in the drivers test to remove bad hearers from licensing?

👤 ggm
My parents in law crashed their car trying to swap a hearing aid between them in motion.

Thats a combination of darwin-award stupid (ok their reproductive years were behind them) and ewwww to sharing earwax.