At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm.
Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
A lot of these features seem to assume that you're driving on a multi-lane motorway with well-marked lanes. I'm constantly being nudged by my ID.3 one way or another on rural roads. You can turn it off, but it turns itself back on the next time you unlock the car.
You can use OBD2 dongle to change default setting of lane assist to be off by default (after car starts) And many more setting that are decided for you as if you were using a rental car not your own. Like always reseting air conditioner to 22C after starting a car. God dammit i want 20C. Let it stay like that when i start a car.
> You can use OBD2 dongle to change default setting of lane assist
Colour me skeptical. ODBII is just a protocol; it knows nothing of the modules on your buses. I think you will find you need the dealer software. Tools exist that implement big chunks of that functionality, but since they are built on reverse-engineering, the price approaches the dealer software anyway.
The only place i found the Mercedes software was a paid forum that obscures the links. Getting the cracks working was a magic incantation. It's similar for VAG. They won't sell you the software if you're not a dealer.
You will not get there with a £40 ebay special. If you can, please share what works, it will be of much interest to many.
You're correct that the dongle only facilitates the connection, but you don't need dealer software. I have an ODB dongle and a £20 (I think) app on my phone which lets me change a _ton_ of settings on my BMW which aren't available in any in-car menus.
Bimmercode lets you do coding (it's very powerful and you can easily mess up your car so you have to be very careful with it), and Bimmerlink lets you read fault codes etc.
Thanks, i learned something new. I think we're both right by degree. That app is more functional than anything I've found, but there comes a point where you need someone to tell you the modules and fields or you risk bricking your car.
Oh for sure, but you can do a lot of things without ever touching the advanced coding section. It's definitely worth being cautious though - as you say you can definitely brick your car with it if you're just YOLOing your way through it. It does back up the module configuration prior to writing the update though so you do have a safety net.
not affiliated. have used ODB eleven on my vw eup (2021). They have curious payment strategy. Basically you buy tokens and then use them for each enable/disable operation.
"caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within"
Not sure if this has ever been implemented but I know from my time in automotive that there was the idea to exchange driving data with the insurer. If this becomes reality ignoring speed limits could increase your insurance premiums.
The issue is that currently it often gets those speed limits wrong - as one of the parent comments said, when using adaptive cruise control I would often find the car slowing down from 70 to 50 in the middle of the motorway which is really dangerous. Thankfully you're able to turn off that part of ACC and it stays off, but it's on by default.
This reminds me of the time I was (still working) in the US, for one of the big insurers, and we were researching ways to detect on which side of the car our client gets in, to assume (if from the right, in the US) that our app shall not trigger the "driver" mode, thus all the consequences if being assumed responsible. Fun times.
What's the legal status of 'your' car spying on you if its a company or private lease? After all its legally not yours, and they can put a lot of things in the contract.
No they didn't. They had a hiccup in 2020 when the transition to electric cars really started accelerating but after they got their own electric cars into mass production they've reclaimed the top spot at 13.9% of the Chinese market. That's just ahead of Geely at 13.8%, Toyota at 7.8% and BYD at 7.1%.
Correct. I have reasonable insight into that particular world. Most none-sense is regulatory. There is less room for variation than one would assume too.
Ironically, this is, in no small amount, reason for issues in competitiveness: ain't no cheap car with all these additional assistants. Especially for low-margin models it is devastating.
The speeding chime is legally required to be reset to on after every trip. But I find the speed signs are very rarely missed (model 3 highland), also its a single press on the main screen to disable. My warnings are +99% genuine cases where i need to slow down and I bet that’s true for +99% of people who have these system.
Agreed. I live in a relatively new suburb of my city (built in 2022) and it was built past what would have been called "the boonies" a decade ago.
The way to get to the city proper goes through country roads that probably used to only get a few dozen vehicles per hour, now having to handle massive traffic due to the new developments in this area (they're still building!)
They're working on reworking the roads but the speed limits are nonsensical because of this history.
One can still make a good design within the legal requirement. It doesn't say how many dB the beeper has to have or adjust the level of assistance. Maybe pressure from Chinese manufacturers will force them to get their stuff together, cut back on the user hostile design.
In older VW Polos (at least) it was easy to disable that feature with two clicks on a physical button located on the steering wheel. Not so on the ID.3, and other newer Volkswagens, unfortunately.
Annoying for sure but on VWs you should be able to add lane assist and speed limit assist as shortcuts on the screen and click on them to turn them off. Again, annoying but I would like drivers that have been caught speeding to have them turned on permanently as punishment for X months.
> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".
Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.
I distinctly remember that there was an article years ago about this. Automotive bodies have been mandating features for decades, and were doing followup studies.
The introduction of seatbelts, ABS, ESP all came with noticeable drops in accident rates.
However it was noticed, that these new driver assist features didn't reduce the number of accidents accordingly. These systems are not new. We know they don't really help.
It's a moat. If you're afraid of losing market share you want your competitors to be busy finding out ways of passing these kind of rules you already figured out how to implement. That's why quality doesn't matter, only compliance does.
I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.
The thing is, the "walking experience" can be pretty miserable as well. Road fatalities still are unacceptably high in Europe, even if we're better than the US.
The irony there being the "cars are evil" politicians are typically the strongest advocates for EVs, but EVs (being new) are the cars most likely to be affected by these annoyances.
I would love to replace my 2007 GTI with something cleaner and quieter but I genuinely don't see anything new as that big of an upgrade - my car has physical buttons for every feature, it doesn't (intentionally) make any stupid noises, and it's a stick shift in the US so it's essentially theft-proof.
> It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer.
It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new apps and won't update the apps they have.
If you're in that meeting... speak up. I do and sometimes it even gets people to re-consider annoying defaults that don't even benefit the company very much.
I used to work on a military base in the US. They have a similar culture, but with warning signs. Where I worked there were glass doors that were so festooned with signage that you couldn't see the other side. Floors are slippery when wet. Smoke free facility. Phone calls are monitored. Etc, etc.
Every few years they do a study and realize you quickly get to the point that people simply ignore all the signage when you do that, and they take all but the most important signs down. Then the sign creep starts again. It's a cycle.
I know when I drive I ignore all the beeps and dinging noises my car makes. I haven't even bothered to find out what they mean.
Yeah I don't like alarms and random beeps. I now have a Peugeot 106. The only thing that beeps is the cd player to remind me to remove the front plate. I need to sort that. Grrr.
I disagree, It's about treating people as sheeple that the politicians need to supervise and teach.
Basically these brainrotten politicians consider themselves the only responsible ones that need to remove choices for the simpletons they administer because they (the politicians) know better.
That's the core of our current woke culture that has become the zeitgeist since the 2010, especially in Germany - and it's especially strong on the left side of the spectrum ... But can be observed across all current parties to varying degrees.
That causes the politicians to think more about what "should" society be like (from their "I know better" perspective), instead of looking at reality - consequently ignoring that what they're trying to create isn't even within the bounds of our technical capabilities right now. Yes you can get close, but close is not enough for such features
Driving4answers had a similar rant recently about the 2024 Prius, where there's an always-on warning beep every time you enter an intersection, which intrusively pulls away your attention in the exact moment when you need to be focusing on the road the most. I'll be surprised if it doesn't cause someone to die in the coming years. Laws for drivers written by people with chauffeurs.
> Laws for drivers written by people with chauffeurs.
Not even that. They know the laws are stupid. They don't care. It's just another day at work for them. They're trying to surgically write laws to garner support/votes from shorsighted hand wringing Karens (plenty of examples in HN comments) while also not actually hurting industry/donors.
So stupid rules and stupid beeps are what you get.
Women's suffrage was the stupidest thing humanity ever did. And the general populace is still not ready to admit the mistake, as proven by the expected incoming downvotes.
I'm not going to upvote you, because I don't agree. I do hope they don't bury this though. A lot of people (some women included) think as you do. But I have never felt comfortable asking why in person. As long as you are exposing yourself to ridicule would you mind explaining? The obvious answer was always the notion that women make decisions on emotions more often, but is that really well supported? My experience is that they simply make decisions based on different emotions.
Edit: I think most destructive decisions are made in fear, and everyone does that sometimes. But we fear different things.
I think it's entirely baseless. It's pretty clear men can be very emotional about the decisions they make. Look at all the stupid wars throughout the centuries based on pride, anger, greed or vengeance. Look at all the counterproductive economic policies, or counterproductive police systems. And if you question it, all the arguments are based on feelings.
There have been rational leaders and politicians, but there have also been many irrational and emotional ones, and I see no evidence men are less affected than women. If anything, it seems to be the other way around, although there's not that much data yet on female decision making in politics.
But I'm pretty sure that the claim that women would be more emotional, is itself driven by emotion rather than data.
If your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle and you're cheering shit that annoys and (critically) distracts motorists you might have a death wish.
Yeah, the occupants of the car won't be dying, I'm pretty sure every collision is survivable with seatbelts on with modern cars that have a meter of crumple zone in every direction and look like bloated whales. But pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists are gonna die on impact with them.
Let me guess: You get your groceries delivered by some underpaid sucker? While I enjoy biking it's impractical many times (if you don't live a sheltered life with people doing all the annoying stuff for you).
We have those inner city bike extremists here, too. There's proposals like banning all motorized traffic from the city because you "can walk to your bakery duh". But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
To be fair it depends so much on the city. Oxford is a great example, driving there is a hellish experience because it's a historic place with notable buildings which too important to knock down, especially in order to replace them with roads and car parks. They try to cram cars in anyway and it's just miserable. In reality the whole city centre should be pedestrianised because that's what the city is actually supposed to be designed around. Remove the private cars and buses, taxis, and yes of course delivery drivers will have plenty of room.
This perfectly legitimate argument for Oxford would be silly to make about say Milton Keynes.
Exactly. Amsterdam has been trying to get as many cars as possible out of the city center, and the city is that much better for it. Use your car to leave the city, but not to get to the center. There's bikes and trams for that.
Depends on where they live. Groceries don’t have to be a weekly run to a far flung place to get a truck bed full of stuff. It can be a daily visit to a neighborhood supermarket on your way home. If zoning laws allow those can exist.
That’s nice in principle, but it really is not the same budget around here, even though the shops are here. Small neighbourhood supermarkets and corner shops are significantly more expensive than the big supermarket that’s a 10-minute drive away.
We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.
> But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
You can allow transport for business (speed-limited to 30 km/h or ~20 mph) and ban individual's cars. There are busses, trams and subway and there is no need to have a car.
WTF? In inner cities, bikes are the sensible option for 90% of traffic. Not for emergency services and larger freight of course, but it's possible to aim for a sensible mix.
Oh, the good old cars are freedom cliché? Thank you, I feel perfectly free when I don't have to worry about parking, gas, maintenance, taxes, inadvertently killing anyone, polluting...
you choose to limit your freedom on the public transportation, others don't. The freedom lies in the alternatives, people could choose different lifestyles, that's freedom.
They can demand anything and suicide you in anything from a cell to a mass grave but that's not a reason to remove any freedoms you have.
Oh no, they can demand I unlock my phone! Better remove encryption and give them permanent remote access!
Oh no, they can close off all border-crossing roads via checkpoints and stop me from leaving the country by car! Better remove cars!
Oh no, they can stop public transport! Better remove public transport!
Oh no, they can suicide me! Better remove myself!
In the case of shit hitting the fan you take what you can get and any options are welcome. I have family who died during the communist revolution and they literally went willingly to their death because if they'd run their entire families would have gotten killed, which then led to many immediate family members of the killed ones to be put in prison on bs charges out of fear of retaliation. My grandfather was literally found guilty of assisting in the murder of a national hero who died before he was born and causing one of the largest recent wars, which also happened before he was born, because his father was an intellectual that ended in a mass grave. When things get unstable all rules are out the window. Throwing your family in the car and booking it for the border would have been an option worth considering. There wasn't one though and you can't really escape by horse cart in winter with the borders of the time. Now it's all very open. Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
Edit: Even without my schizo take, there's just a sort of freedom in that I can decide on the weekend that I wanna see castle, find one in a 400km radius and just beeline to it. With a bicycle that radius is 100km maybe. For me more like 70. With public transport there's a lot you can't reach and it's often more expensive.
> Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
At least here in the US, literally every single border crossing is already guarded by armed men. They can already close them on a whim whenever they want.
Straw man aside, I find the notion of cars being used as a tool to escape from or even to overthrow an authoritarian regime extremely funny... Even without a big brother: cars are heavily regulated and controlled; current cars are a privacy nightmare; cars are (as yet) mostly dependent on fossil fuels (that you can't produce yourself, and are heavily regulated and taxed).
If anything in an authoritarian regime, cars would be (and were) an instrument of control.
The extra funny part is that all the car-brained ex-communist people that had to be good little comrades during the 20-year waiting list period they had to endure are now big on the 'cars = freedom' mindset... No my guy, if cars were freedom, you can be damn sure only the communist nomenclature would be allowed to have them. Instead you were humiliated with spending half your life on a waiting list, and then the only freedom you got was to continue being a subservient communist subject under the party boot. How else would you afford gasoline after all? Not that that was enough... For context, I live in a former communist country, parents and grandparents waited for 10+ years to be graced with the permission to buy a car. Then proceeded not be able to afford petrol until the early 2000s...
It's truly hilarious to me that people forget cars need roads, roads are owned by governments, and governments can block roads whenever they want.
I bike most places but keep my car for the odd road trip or run to Ikea. But when ICE decides to shut down the interstates and round up all us commies, my car is not going to magically smuggle me 500 miles to Canada, and i can't believe people think it will
Wasn't meant in that way. I just have very detailed examples I can provide with the communist regime due to where I'm from. I can't argue about all authoritarian regimes since someone's bound to come with some exception or example I do not know enough about.
Solidarity. Cars belong in the rubbish bin of history. The Soviet Union had the right idea, as usual--make cars unbearable to drive to encourage public transportation.
The Soviet Union never had such a goal. Passenger cars universalization was actually a long term goal of the system, but the soviet system prioritized heavy industry, infrastructure and defense over consumer goods.
That was the reason while Ukraine, before the war, was a huge net exporter of electricity. They never got too many or really good cars, but they do sure had plenty of electric generation plants.
The Chinese apparently learned with this, and used and export oriented economy to have the necessary scale to invest both in heavy industry as well as consumer goods.
Yeah, people don't seem to understand that in SU a very small well connected elite gained control over the means of production and abused it for their own purposes.
Public transport in communist Poland was horrible because it was severely underfunded. Remember that Poland bankrupted in the 1981 (when the West put sanctions on the country after the Jaruzelski's "coup", and sanctions kiled the economy) the whole decade was kind of surreal in terms of state's lack of funds and decrease of living standards.
The bankrupcy was over foreign debt in foreign currencies, obviously you can't print those. The government borrowed those monies in the first place a decade ago to buy some technologies (patents, licences etc.) from Western companies in an attempt to modernize the economy.
And here we come to the crux of the train issue - elitism. You both find it below your level to use public transport, and you don't want to mix with the 'unwashed masses' - again, doing so would be below your level.
Why would you care what the guy was thinking writing that comment? Do you know him? He might as well just be a stochastic parrot.
Just like with other media (movie, book, etc), the product is the end product, in this case a joke or a thought-provoking view. You shouldn't care about the creator's actual views or consider them while engaging with his comment.
I had a prius and every time I started it up, it would display a big warning prompt that blocked out the rear view camera. So you had to tap ok before backing up. Every time.
My current car shows this once per driver. I always thought toyota engineers were stupid for designing such a system.
Toyota is terrible at this. Various Toyota's we've had required you to either agree to obey traffic rules, warned about data costs when connecting your phone, or a variety of other things. Super annoying and distracting. As soon as the car starts moving, all the parts should be doing their job. That's no time to nag the driver.
Do you know if the law prevents you from modifying the car to disable these devices? Caveat to anyone considering this: Modifying could be used against you in a liability case. Additionally if your insurance contract has some stipulation about not removing these safety "features" and they find out, I would think you could be dropped.
Does soaking the beeper with water trigger a modification clause?
Annoying alarms trigger driver distresss which has equally negative effect on attention while driving.
We had a replacement Yaris that had the speed alarms but one could lower the volume to the point where it didn't matter much. Much better design than the older Toyotas which would beep incessantly and louder if you didn't put belts on, back seats included.
> if you didn't put belts on, back seats included.
I don't drive/don't have a car, but it drives me mad when I take an Uber, I go into the back seat and put my backpack beside me and the car keeps beeping because of it (I obviously put my seatbelt on). For some time I didn't understand what was that beeping until a driver told me, now when I hear it I know to put the seatbelt in my backpack seat, and remove it when I get off the car.
We carry the dog in a crate fastened with straps. This is the safest way to transport a dog in a car. The seatbelt was not practical to fasten the crate. The crate sits in the trunk of our hatchback crossover with the seat in front of it collapsed, so I can visually keep it in check and the dog gets AC. There are also dog "seatbelts" if you carry it on the back seat. It's like a leash with a seatbelt buckle at the end.
The mods to disable the thing have to be cleanly reversible.
What if you disconnect the speakers? Do they have a sensor for that? If so, replace them by an 8 ohm impedance.
An alternative amplifier can be connected to the speakers then. Or just use portable bluetooth speakers.
If driving alone, for music, I would then listen on headphones. That's illegal in many places but at that point, having had to disconnect the speakers, I'd be acting out of spite.
> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
Where do you live?
In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways).
This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.
In Germany, we love our signs (not really). We have so many of them though and specific rules and lots of exceptions on where to put them.
For example, typical city road speed is 50kmh, but residential side streets are 30kmh. If you cross an intersection there usually should be a sign telling you the speed limit because people turning onto other roads need to know how fast they're going. Except there sometimes isn't. So you're coming from a 30kmh road and turn onto a 50kmh without a sign. Your car now thinks you're still in a 30kmh road. What about GPS positioning? Sure, that works, until cities have started deciding that actually their main city roads should be 30 instead of 50. (Something I agree with btw) Except no signs and if you don't pay for your cars subscription service to get the newest updates, good luck getting that info.
Beyond that, construction zones with shittily placed signs or signs that are placed not in optimal locations. Driving on the highway but there's an offramp for an interchange with a 60kmh speed limit for the offramp? Guess your highway speed is set to 60 now. Enjoy the car beeping at you.
> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating!
No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone.
I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey.
I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
Can't you just snip/disconnect the speaker/bell wire? I did this back when I had a truck and often had to maneuver with open doors (at very slow speeds) - the "door open warning bell" was so annoying that I just pulled its wires.
AFAIK the warning tones don't come from the car's stereo speakers but have its own speaker.
What happens if you bypass these systems? Does it have a separate speaker or does it use the infotainment?
If the former, you can bypass it electronically. If the latter, I'm sure you can mess with the software of the multimedia head unit to silence the chimes.
You can switch them off but only until the engine is turned off again. Most manufacturers have a shortcut on the dashboard or steering wheel though. Eventually you just get used to doing that every time you start driving.
Modern electric Volkswagens (and some other brands) have this amazingly awful feature where lifting your ass off the driver's seat turns off the "ignition". The car just shuts off immediately, AC turns off, CarPlay disconnects, those driver settings reset. Even if I sit back one second later.
Fairly sure that it won't turn off while the wheels are spinning at any speed -- with the engine off, you also lose power steering in most cases and can trivially cause an accident. Car manufacturers are not this dumb.
Depends on the car (and the regulatory regime, I'd imagine). My fancy pants 2025 car is happy to leave driver alertness detection disabled, which is handy because it's not good. Of course my ultra base model 1981 van doesn't have any features... it's a lot more fun to drive, other than the engine noise is pretty oppressive on a drive any significant length oh and the floor is missing where the accelerator pedal should mount :P
"Download NoBeepPro for Android Auto now! It silences all unwanted warning sound, and totally doesn't surreptitiously enroll your car into a residential proxy service or mine crypto currency using your main power or hybrid battery!"
That hasn't broadly happened yet, and it's even less likely to happen in the future with encrypted comms and locked-down firmware increasingly becoming the rule instead of the exception.
That works. I already got so used to disabling ESC on start that I do it unconsciously at this point, can't even recall afterwards that I did it. (My car is old and has a glitchy ESC)
Yeah, there are ways if you figure out the manufacturer specifics. Thought it'd be fun to try capturing and replaying CAN messages, gave up cause whatever cheapo CAN to USB adapter I got wasn't working with my Linux laptop. Probably could've figured it out but decided it wasn't worth risking my 2005 Quattroporte with something that was feeling increasingly jank. Autel scanner already gave me all the read-only access I needed, including clutch wear.
In my experience, rental cars are the worst. They are configured to make so much noise. My kids sleep in rentals more than daily driving too (longer commutes when traveling). My 2022 Volvo treats me like a adult and makes very little noise. Heads up display shows things that might be important.
If it makes someone put their phone down, or pull over when they are too tired to drive, perhaps the bigger question is if it prevents you all ending up in an accident - a lot worse of a situation than the beeping, in my opinion
I think it was clear that the poster was distracted by all the useless bongs and beeps and that was what caused the extra distracted driving bong or beep
We did an 8 hour ride on a rental recently in Central Europe, mostly through major motorways. The car dashboard disagreed with (apple) maps which disagreed with the road signage so often. The beeping was infuriating.
I wonder if these things are designed by people who do not drive. So they just implement to spec without thinking through whether the change produces the desired impact.
So to play devil's advocate... were you taking your eyes off the road for too long?
There are many many poor drivers and many many distracted drivers out there. I'm not accusing you of one, but maybe a little bit of self-introspection may be necessary.
My in-laws Kia did this for me. It got really shitty when it got darker and presumably had to use an IR camera. And I am tall so the angle might have been bad. It flagged me every minute. Even when I intentionally focused right ahead.
Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.
There we maybe need some regulation that the system should be working, and the manufacturers of the cars should be forced to recall and
fix the system if it doesn’t work!
The solution to bad implementation can’t be to just throw our hands in the air and say that Kia produces bad cars so therefore we cannot introduce safety regulation
> Each year road crashes generate about 120,000 fatalities and 2.4 million injuries in the European region of the World Health Organization. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults.
Whatever it is we are doing today, it is not working.
And from having used these system and having them almost cause crashes? And with the increase in traffic fatalities roughly corresponding with their increased adoption?
Traffic fatalities and accidents have been going down, constantly. There is no increase in fatalities from adoption of these systems, at least not in the EU.
EU statistics show a continuous downward trend over the last 25+ years with pretty much the only thing sticking out being the Covid lockdowns. And all thanks to safety regulations!
The fact is hundreds of thousands of people are alive today thanks to traffic safety improvements, and probably millions have been spared from a life of suffering with major injuries.
Okay, but then I don’t understand your comment in the context of ”Every new car sold in the European Union must include ..” - the European Union has very clearly been introducing successful regulations since our fatalities and injuries keep going down all the time.
I have a car with a full suite of safety systems, the automatic braking for example have helped me avoid 2 serious accidents where other drivers blew straight through yield signs right in front of me.
And in my Toyota, I have never ever been negatively affected by any safety system, I also of course test drove it to make sure that they haven’t implemented the regulations in the worst way possible.. which I would suggest that everyone does with their next car. Shitty implementations of the regulations definitely do exist, but manufacturers would make sh*t cars whether these existed or not..
And I have been rear ended by a tiktok-watcher, so I have very good reason to believe (at least hope) that this will be yet another success.
At least it’s extremely hard for it to get worse than the state on the road today, where every other driver is staring at their phone..
We can also do nothing, continue to have hundreds of thousands killed every year and millions receive life changing injuries. I think that’s a terrible idea, though, since we have been able to (in the EU at least) cut road deaths massively over the last 25 years. So I think continuing a successful strategy is what we should do.
I had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads.
The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner.
Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!
I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers.
They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.
They can trivially determine if their tech is effective.
Can they? How many people real world test, and are they of all different heights and weights and face shapes too?
Besides that, when I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old movies on late night TV. Often these movies had car chases, and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason. I was always flummoxed, for we had no cliffs anywhere I'd ever been, and wondered where they were, and why people were always driving on them.
When I visited California I suddenly realised "oh, they're everywhere here, just driving home".
Another poster pointed out the alarm went off, if he looked to the corner he was driving towards. People dogfooding won't notice issues with that, if the local environment doesn't have such features.
Could you test for all these things? Maybe, after realising what to test for. You'd then need a sort of regression test, too. All with people.
These laws are not driven by masses. The masses do not want this crap. These laws are driven by busybodies who think they know what's best for the masses. The politicians and their advisors think they can get "free" (statistically nobody ever voted for the other guy over something so little) turnout from these busybodies in their favor by promising/doing this stuff. It's a sick numbers game and we all lose. Just like everything else these days.
I don’t think that this is true at all. These regulations are driven to reduce deaths and severe injuries that we have absolute and definitive statistics on - and do target the things we also know are the biggest drivers of accidents and outcomes such as high speed and lack of attention from drivers.
I can see there being lots of valid complaints about implementation, but acting as if traffic injuries is not a major problem to be addressed and is just in the interest of busybodies is a completely unreasonable take.
Why would the manufacturers care though? You will still buy a car and now the barrier to foreign competition is higher, increasing profit, and the price goes up to pay for the dooo dads which increases financing kickbacks even if margin is same.
They aren’t for some weird reason being pressured to make systems that work. Even in this thread I see wild shit like people telling how the system completely doesn’t work for them, but no indication that they are pushing the manufacturer to fix it?? How can we have the kind of attitude that we let the manufacturers just get away with it if it’s a safety system? If the radio didn’t work, we’d be at the dealership bothering the service staff every day - but important safety tech? Blame the EU…?
I don't think any complaint I've filed with a company has ever led to the situation being fixed. I still do it because I like futile exercises, but I know it won't change anything.
I don’t disagree with you there, and I do wish that legislators were also interested in that. How well the safety systems actually work in the real world should also be enforced by the law, not just their existence. With all the horror stories in this thread, it seems clear that manufacturers feel like they are able to get away with building the worst possible implementation of the system and then pointing the finger at the EU..
I rented a car with driver monitoring and it made me take my eyes off the road instead. Every beep and warning is a distraction and it these systems don't work. Even if you are looking at the road and driving correctly it is flashing a warning up.
IMO most features are annoying and contribute to alarm fatigue and driver irritation, but are not directly dangerous.
Lane keep assist though? I often drive on narrow country roads barely wide enough for two cars, with a white line on each side but no center line. To avoid large oncoming cars, I need to drive on the white line to my right. When I do, lane keep assist activates motors in my steering wheel which try to force the car into the oncoming traffic.
Easy to turn on in the modern car I sometimes drive, but oh my god, that was scary the first few times it happened. Beeping at me is bad enough but messing with the steering wheel??? This should be illegal, not required!
I'm mostly pro EU but this crap is genuinely making me resent them.
I almost slammed bicycles in Paris on a few occasions because of that crap. Shift a bit to the left to overtake them, get lane assist slam me back right. Thankfully those were close calls, but only thanks to the cyclist being used to traffic in Paris and having good reflexes.
Any dangerous machine (like a car) must not do anything unexpected out of the driver's control. A lane assist that resists the wheel when trying to get out? Why not, but dangerous. A lane assist that slam you back in the lane? Criminal. (same with anti-collision braking that triggers too strong too early and surprises drivers behind you)
I'm definitely of the opinion that all those features reduce security. The alarm fatigue is real, because the car always finds something to beep at you. Heck, even your hands not being a perfect 10-2 o'clock on the wheel is reason enough on some cars. You quickly ignore the beeps because there are so many reasons for the car to beep it's hard to even understand why.
I agree, and I don't remember whether I had the blinker. I, however, also respectfully disagree as in all fairness we should drive 100% perfectly 100% of the time, but we're humans. Expecting 100% driving all the times is the worst as it puts strain on the driver (I say that as someone that's pretty strict on blinkers).
What is special is one time it was a one way lane next to the tram with a concrete stub down. I wouldn't be surprised if the anti-collision kicked in and applied lane assist even with the blinker.
At any rate, the principle of least surprise still applies: heavy machinery must not jerk unexpectedly to the side. Never ever ever.
Also lane assist typically activates after 50-60 km/h (35 mph). I like the feature because it helped me develop the habit of always using blinkers. Most modern cars also have cyclist detection and crash prevention. So I believe these feature are still much safer than a typical driver looking at his phone.
The lane asist totally annoyed me in my replacement car (2022 VW Golf) -jerking the steering around when it felt like it. I eventually bought a OBD2 dongle with associated app and managed to change the setting to 'remember last setting'. I recently rented a Renault Clio in France and that was always beeping at me about the speed limit. I was very grateful to the rental lady for pointing out how to disable the lane assist when starting the car!
> IIRC, veering from the lane is the cause of most collisions, so it makes sense to have this.
My dad's Toyota has this. The issue is it seems to have a hard time actually centering itself in the lane, so it'll just sway from side to side like a drunk driver if the lane is somewhat narrow.
And you can forget about driving on secondary roads, which usually don't have markings on the sides. It'll keep trying to drive in the middle of the road. It's also extremely dangerous to try to correct your trajectory when there's an oncoming car on one of these roads where two cars barely fit, and you have to basically drive on the shoulder.
Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Bonus points for it just beeping whenever it's unhappy about something, without having any kind of "log". So if you don't look at the instrument cluster at the exact moment it beeps, you'll have no idea what it wanted. I know about the "imminent collision" one because I saw the dashboard turn red from the corner of my eye and immediately complained to my dad about it. Apparently it does it pretty often when he's maneuvering in and out of the garage.
Now, I know many people drive without paying any kind of attention to traffic, which is obviously very dangerous. But I'm not convinced these systems are that useful if people get used to ignoring them.
> Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Some of my worst driving experiences have been with collision detection + auto brake.
You try to enter a narrow steep hill driveway and it slams on the brakes with half your car hanging out into [potentially] oncoming traffic. Thanks, car
Or you try to speed up across a wide open intersection because the light is about to turn and it slams on the brakes because there's cars on the other side waiting for the next light down the block. Plenty of room to stop after you've cleared the intersection mind you, but hte car really really doesn't like that you sped up from 25mph to 31mph when it thinks you should be slowly coasting to a stop.
On the other hand, driving a motorcycle, I love other people's auto brake. Makes lane splitting (at reasonable speed deltas) easier because every Tesla will tap the brakes when you cut into its lane.
Anyway, I wish driving assists had rush our mode. They're pretty decent in average conditions but ho boy tightly packed aggressive rush hour traffic is hell in a modern car. So much beeping and constantly fighting with the assists.
You really shouldn’t make speeding up to make the light a habit but, I get it, there are certainly times where that’s the safer option than slamming on the brakes.
> You really shouldn’t make speeding up to make the light a habit
I agree! In this particular case we were dealing with bumper-to-bumper traffic, a light that takes many minutes, and very few cars making every green light. It took us 20 minutes to wait our turn. I really didn't want to wait for another cycle. 2 more cars rushed behind me.
> You really shouldn’t make speeding up to make the light a habit but,
I was restraining myself from saying exactly this :-)
I can't remember where, but I recently drove somewhere and they had posted signs informing drivers that they ticket people who accelerate on yellow lights.
> My dad's Toyota has this. The issue is it seems to have a hard time actually centering itself in the lane, so it'll just sway from side to side like a drunk driver if the lane is somewhat narrow.
Newer cars (or other cars) do a better job of this. Mine doesn't do the ping pong - it really does keep it centered.
However, the point is that it should direct you back into the lane and you're supposed to take over. If it's ping ponging, it's because you as the driver are letting it.
> Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Is this detecting at the corners and not the front? For example, my old 2016 car has collision detection, but it will only detect if something is in front of you head on. With my newer car, it's checking the corners. Still, I get the warning only when parking. And I can turn it off.
> But I'm not convinced these systems are that useful if people get used to ignoring them.
Agreed. I think some manufacturers do a better job than others, though.
The person you're replying to mentioned a Toyota, which I also drive a newer model of. It has two modes: lane assist (which works like you have described) and lane centering (which automatically is enabled when you switch on cruise control). The centering will continuously nudge you towards what it decides is the center of your lane.
It's awful and I've trained myself to automatically long press the button on the steering wheel to disable the entire system every time I get behind the wheel.
> The centering will continuously nudge you towards what it decides is the center of your lane.
This. It's not just beeping; if it thinks you're moving too close to the edge of the lane, it will steer the car to the other side. The only way for me to prevent doing it is by gripping the steering wheel like crazy. Who the hell drives like that?!
No, having to fight the car just to stay put is a failure of the tech.
IIRC, this is a 2022 model, so hopefully the tech has improved since.
Most highway exits in Ontario, Canada and some part of the US have highway exit ramps where the right lane widens into two, one exiting and one continuing. The two lanes are not marked until the buffer before the exit. What you have is essentially one widening lane.
The cruise control in my Hyundai is tied to the lane centering feature and this keeps forcing me onto exit ramps i do not intend to take. One time, it was quite aggressive during rain. The lane keep feature does not handle off-ramps in Ontario well at all.
The problem with these "safety" features is that they do not work reliably and do not handle edge cases well.
To be clear, I'm not talking about auto lane centering. That's something else. The Nissan has this too, but it has to be manually enabled and although it seems to work alright, I just feel like as a driver, it's my responsibility to control the wheel.
What I'm talking about is lane keep assist, which is a "safety" feature which beeps at you and jerks the wheel when the car thinks you're veering out of your lane.
Mine can be turned off. Three menu items deep, at each and every start of the car. No preferences.
I simply disabled the camera and radar. The car was unsafe. Did I mention it emergency braked all the time, for no reason? No, it wasn't me, and almost getting rear ended all the time gets old fast.
Yikes. I can't stand the fad to remove physical buttons. While Kia does a decent job (all of these controls I mentioned are on the steering wheel), they have gotten bad about the center dash having touch buttons.
I remember driving a Ford rental I was given when my car was being repaired that had the same issue with emergency stopping when it absolutely shouldn't be.
You can't turn it off, you can temporarily disable it but it gets enabled again the next time you get in the car.
Regardless, I feel like maybe "suddenly automatically jerk the steering wheel to drive into oncoming traffic" mode should maybe be off by default? Although it would definitely make me less angry if it could be turned off.
So you happen to be a rare example of someone that buys a new car recently, and you live on a narrow road, and you like to do a semi rare act when wide cars approach. And that has shown you a bit of the EU insanity.
Now imagine just how many rules/regulations like this there actually are that you just aren't the aware of. It's insane.
I wonder if you could successfully sue if that "safety" feature actively crashed you into an oncoming vehicle. Seems like that ought to be treated as entirely the fault of the manufacturer.
In the EU surely not worth it. You probably at most get the money back for a new car. Just like when somehow it turns out someone was mistakenly put in jail and later it is found out, they only get money they would have earned working back, and their freedom and their forever tarnished reputation is valued at zero.
iirc there was an incident not too long ago where a van crashed head on when trying to pass another truck on a 2 way road. The lane assist put the van back into the passing lane when he tried to get back into right lane, causing the collision.
The most comfortable path around a curve in the road starts on the outside of the lane, peaks at the inside of the lane, and returns to the outside. This is similar to a racing line. Using the shoulder enables an even better path. The lane-centered path is less comfortable and, honestly, less natural.
>IMO most features are annoying and contribute to alarm fatigue and driver irritation, but are not directly dangerous.
I agree but the "standard" for car/transportation discussions as set by the screeching morons is that indirect Nth order consequences count, so by their own rules it's dangerous even if only barely noticeable at the statistical level by torturing the data.
>IMO most features are annoying and contribute to alarm fatigue and driver irritation, but are not directly dangerous.
I agree but the "standard" for car/transportation discussions as set by the screeching morons is that 3rd and 4th order consequences count, so by their own rules it's dangerous even if only barely noticeable at the statistical level by torturing the data.
Isn't that just cultural? Go to a German or French website and you'll be met with a big popover with a bunch of options, half a page of legalese, and some buttons. Pick a Japanese site and you'll get a maximal amount of information packed together. Pick an American site and you'll get the heavy on the whitespace layout. Seems to be the cultural aesthetic choice.
But they make it less safe in a hard to measure poorly defined way whereas they make it safer in a measured easy to take credit for way.
The safety industry (or whoever, not really sure exactly who's benefitting here) destroying $2 of value to put $1 in their pockets. Textbook example of economic broken windows.
My toyota has one that when you're in a narrow road with parked cars that you must drive around, it constantly thinks it's going to do a frontal collision. Except it detects it like half a second too late, when I've already avoided the parked car (this happens at rather slow speeds).
I can answer this, since I have a new car with this camera and polarized sunglasses.
MOST of the time it's good about telling when I'm looking and when I'm not, out of maybe... 5 alerts over the previous 8 months all, but one occurred when I was in fact looking away for one reason or another. Likewise when it's correct my lane-keeping it's been right about me drifting.
Given how inattentive I see other drivers being, on their phones for example, and taking into account that I'm (based on my record) a good driver who is attentive... I appreciate these additions. I doubt that they make us less safe, we just dislike anyone or anything telling us how to drive, because "we already know what we're doing." The subjective experience of being distracted however isn't usually so clear-cut, it FEELS like you're paying attention.
Note: This is a new model Lexus, so I expect this represents that brand as well as Toyota, but beyond that I don't know.
There is no way that training people not to worry is making us all safer. I don't even like how new cars have this thing where they will automatically hold the brake once stopped even if you let go. There is no way it's a net good to train people that running cars just stay where you put them like an inert object does.
The result for me has been pretty predictable, I'm getting a kind of corrective feedback so I drive in a way that prevents that feedback. The practical result is that imo I'm a better driver, I'm more aware of my lapses in attention, my tendency to overcorrect to the right, and so on.
I'm yet to experience a downside, this isn't like using "Autopilot" or some other situation where a machine is taking over for me. I don't see why our skills or caution would be lessened by exposure to realtime feedback.
Cars have had that feature ("hill hold assist") for 20+ years now. Even longer for high-end models. There can't be all that many vehicles left on the road that don't have it.
Besides, you could make such an argument for any safety feature: "I don't like how new cars have ABS brakes. We shouldn't be training people that you can just slam on the brakes on a slippery surface and expect the wheels to not lock up..."
... "I don't like how new cars have seatbelts. We shouldn't train people that they can just crash into things and not have their face go through the windshield"...
If you had put any thought into either of those, you might have come up with some argument that actually applies. Neither of these equates or relates at all.
OK. But it's essentially the same concept. Just that auto hold will go a step further and apply the park brake to hold the car in position indefinitely rather than just for a few seconds.
There have been many deaths over the years where drivers forgot to engage the park brake, then stepped out and got run over by their own vehicle. Including, sadly, Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin. If his car had had Auto Hold then he would very likely still be alive today.
The only scenario where this could have a negative effect on safety is where you, the driver, were used to driving a car with the feature but got surprised by its absence when driving an old car. But as I facetiously illustrated in the post above, this is not a valid argument against new safety features. Any accidents that this scenario might cause are far outweighed by all the ones that will be prevented in the long run.
Nowadays cars engage the electronic parking brake (and P on the gear selector) when you open the door. Which has caused another crash, there's a video of a lady stuck at a rail crossing who was screaming she couldn't get the car going, she had opened the door and in the panic didn't notice the car did all that.
Anton Yelchin's death was more annoying, it was a design defect that pushing the gear lever all the way to the top didn't put it into P (like cars of the 80s, of even 50s), the gear lever acted more like a 4-way button, and drivers needed to push it twice (or 3x?) to go to park. Unfortunately his car was probably not new enough to have auto-park when driver door is open. His family got a settlement from the manufacturer..
You have not illustrated anything about the validity of any arguments. You have only expressed a feeling and said some things that sound like reason to you.
Which to be clear is all I did myself, but I did say it that way honestly. "there is no way that..." doesn't pretend to supply any proof, just the reasoning.
Neither of your attempted counter-examples actually amounts to the same sort of reasoning.
Except in a way you are also right and that rightness actually supports my point. I would equate you seatbelt nonsense with bicycle helmets, where it is quite up for grabs if they have been a net positive, because both the riders and the drivers are falsely trained to think the cyclists are safer and don't need to worry as much. There are not many real studies, and the few that exist, you can make them say whichever side your emotional belief wants.
But I wasn't quite going there. Operating a vehicle is operating a vehicle. Until such time as the driver, or rather mere user, bears absolutely no responsibility, like riding the bus or a train , or maybe an elevator, then "there is no way" yes a simple assertion, that it's good to train everyone that they are riding in elevators where they only need to maybe press one button to say what they want but beyond that it's out of their control and so out of their responsibility what happens after that, because we do not actually live in that world yet.
In my experience (Tesla), attention monitoring works well even when I'm wearing sunglasses. The camera can still see my eyes even through dark polarised lenses.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
Sometimes I wonder if Tesla also has a much better software stack than most other manufacturers. IIRC, Tesla has had interior cameras in their cars for years now and I haven't heard about major issues stemming from it.
The camera was not actually used initially. With the old Autopilot software, attention monitoring was (and still is?) exclusively done with steering wheel torque sensors. Our camera got enabled when we purchased the FSD upgrade. I do agree the software is good, however: it's both more effective and much less naggy/annoying than the old "hands on wheel" method.
It still falls back on the torque sensor (requiring hands on wheel) if it thinks you're not paying enough attention, or if it can't see your eyes for whatever reason.
And I guess Tesla must have enabled the camera for all new vehicles now, at least in Europe, given that it's required.
Don't rule out another Cash for Clunkers. The 2009 program destroyed 1 in 300 cars on the road. The next one could be bigger. Also, 3 in 4 cars on the road today are now in states requiring emissions tests for your annual registration, which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.
> which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.
At least for my state, the emissions test a car has to pass is whatever it was supposed to have passed when it was fresh off the assembly line. So older cars do not have to pass stricter newer standards that newer cars have to pass.
Now, granted, wear and tear will eventually result in an older car not passing its original standard, but at least the standard it has to pass is fixed, rather than a moving target.
The only way to have affordable, ubiquitous testing stations is to make it universal. At least, in states that do not also require safety inspections. If only 10,000 cars were tested each year, nobody would buy the equipment.
I don't see what the issue is. Pay the people running the test station more per test but less overall.
Extremely rough example numbers: Instead of testing a million cars for $20 each, 10k cars are tested for $200 each. 85% of testing stations shut down, and the rest downsize if they can, but there's still plenty of them around. The total cost of testing drops 90%. The state taxes every car $2 to pay for the randomized testing; being selected means you lose an hour driving to the station, not that you lose $200 of your own money.
The article is about the EU, but since you brought up US emissions testing... I live in California, only drive mid 2000s cars, and haven't noticed any of the restrictions getting tighter. It's the usual check every 2 years at the same place. Seems my cars are grandfathered into old emissions standards too.
And yeah I enjoy having my car shut the hell up and let me drive.
There are some German cities (Munich) where you can’t enter the city center with a diesel car that doesn’t meet the EURO 4 standards. EURO 4 is a low bar but there’s really nothing stopping them from eventually implementing it more widely and upping the requirement to EURO 5, 6, etc.
I've been driving a 1996 VW diesel van in Germany including Munich, and nowhere anyone ever actually cared about the lack of the sticker. And now, at 30 years of age, it turned "oldtimer", so it is officially exempted.
For mid 2000s, the car is self monitoring so an emissions check is just a visual once over to ensure no physical tampering and a computer readout of emission readiness monitors + firmware checksum for digital tampering.
Right, and even the monitors can differ. If a car wasn't made with a certain monitor, that's one less check it has to pass. One of my cars had issues with passing SAI, the other has N/A for that.
I’m imagine that’s coming soon. Most new large cars are getting turbos now to meet federal and state standards, the turbos wear faster and I’m sure there will be a desire to validate them.
Now that my vehicle is approaching 20 years old, I’m so so so happy it has more interior comfort upgrades rather than mechanical ones like 4wd or a turbo.
Yup, a bigger issue for old cars trying to pass emissions is that with prices of precious metals, a worn out catalytic converter (diagnostic code P0420 ) means that most of them are mechanically totaled in California, New York, Colorado since they require either OEM or CARB approved replacements.
Yeah, if it's worth more than 4k registered, it'll either be fixed or shipped. California gives you $1200 to junk it, people will come pick it up for $1500 and a lot of times you'll see it pop back up in state because they illegally resuscitated it with a defouler, a used/EPA cat and put it back into circulation.
Wasn't mandatory to sell your car. Was mandatory to pay taxes that were partially used on those buyouts. You also couldn't opt out of used car prices being higher because of it.
Noticed this with hire cars, we have 'school zones' that only operate within certain times (like 7am - 9am and 2pm - 4pm) and new cars pick up the 40 km/h from the sign but obviously aren't smart enough to read the times and realise it's not in effect, so the car thinks you're speeding by 20 km/h and you get all these beeps and bobs.
I also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!
Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!
I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!
> Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes!
Oh man, the incessant beeps are annoying, but speed limit monitoring in cruise control is hands-down the dumbest default "safety" feature on new cars. When that sort of thing happens on the highway, it feels legitimately dangerous, like any other kind of near-miss incident.
It reminds me of an old article about how often self-driving cars would get rear-ended for abruptly braking on highway on-ramps because they thought there was an obstacle ahead, and naturally the cars behind it were all accelerating and the human drivers in them would never think of stopping as they saw clear road ahead. In many areas, doing a "brake check" is illegal.
I bought a fancy Toyota SUV after my trusty 2008 Honda was damaged in an accident.
The nagging is ridiculous. I’m actually not quite sure what lane assist does, but if I look at my side mirror it chastises me for not being attentive. It also has locked up the brakes and made me think I hit somebody when backing into my driveway.
I've got a fairly new Toyota and I when I found myself needing a 2nd car for my family I ended up buying a 20 year old Honda and I have to say I enjoy driving it much more.
I might also be safer in it - oversensitive security systems nagging me with false positives almost constantly don't pair well with my ADD
Last year, I rented a Kia. I was coasting downhill on a curve and approached a group of bikers. Everything was fine. I was a little below the speed limit, they were in the bike lane, I was in my lane, it was a sunny day. The car detected them as a hazard to avoid and STRAIGHTENED AND LOCKED MY STEERING WHEEL in the middle of the curve turn. I ran into a shallow ditch, but holy shit, what if it took control and over corrected onto an oncoming car?
O yea, that is driver lane assist ... A Toyota rental had the same issue. In a specific steep exit corner (that goes up facing the sun), how many ** times the lane assist tries to force the car to go straight (as in, off the hill! ). The first few times when it happens, scares the ** out of me.
Another fun one is going down a hill in a Rental Opel, roundabout with some cars, no problem. Slowing down naturally, while i see the cars accelerate to enter the roundabout. No need to break as by the time i get close, the cars will have started to accelerate. So my speed will have matched the last vehicles speed by the time i am close. Suddenly, emergency break slam on !!! Because "the car was going to hit the cars in front". Like, wtf!! That created a extreme dangerous situation if there was a car behind.
I really see no benefits for a lot of those new safety features. The old ones like traction controle etc, great, keep them. But all this external monitoring, internal monitoring ... If your a safe driver, those features can make it more dangerous.
That's the issue. So many people are burried in their phone or just simply driving irresponsibly for the conditions, these features may be better for them.
As someone who respects the responsibility of driving a vehicle, they're definitely making things less safe in some situations.
As a Canadian that did a road trip through the balkans over the winter, the rental car was constantly beeping at me for something. It was misreading signs and due to the bad weather (it was during a huge snowstorm in January) the roads weren't very clear and it was constantly confused. I also had some very unhappy drivers (especially in Albania) furiously trying to get around me, causing the car to further slow down to "avoid collisions". I was already stressed enough driving through countries with mixed driving records, but any actual defensive driving caused the car to nag me.
Sorry in advance to any Bulgarians, of which the car had plates from, for probably tarnishing your reputation.
My friend rented a car and he told me that the wheel was moving by itself trying to follow the road. Then he tried taking his hands off and see if the car would follow the line. Nope, it would go straight into a wall (he of course was going slow for the experiment and didn't hit the wall). So it was more like fighting some "smart" feature that distracts you even more from actually pointing the car where you want it to go.
I moved to Bulgaria last year, and while I love the country and its... rugged and quaint people, let me assure you, tarnishing their driver's reputation is impossible.
On an unrelated note, studying Bulgarian brought me a lot of joy.
2016-2017 seems peek car from a car owner/driving perspective. Before the beeps, bongs, giant screens started and button removal took over.
Currently driving a 2010 euro hot hatch, when that dies will be looking at a 2016-2017 vintage.
I watched a very interesting video over the weekend, the lost discipline of the alarm. It goes in to the research of alarms and alarm fatigue negative consequences.
Seems very relevant to the latest generation vehicles.
If I ever buy a “modern” car I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features. The only safety features I care about are traction control, abs, parking sensors and maybe blind spot mirrors. Blind spot mirrors are a double edged sword as it means people now stop doing shoulder checks relying on the blind spot mirror light only.
> I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features.
I wonder if this will remain possible. To kill my car's annoying beeps, all I had to do was cut some wires. That implies it was just an optional "feature" that they tacked on. What happens when they start deeply integrating this nonsense?
Lane assist is also genuinely dangerous when there's men at work on the road and they change the lanes, yet the car tries to stick to the painted ones and I have to fight the car to do what it has to do we don't kill nobody.
Also happens it gets confused with freshly painted white/yellow lines when older are still visible.
I have a dodge ram (work provided truck) with lane assist. I had it completely disabled for two years because it was awful and possibly dangerous as you mentioned, though I’d enable it on rare really long multi-hour drives across states. Fortunately the button to turn it off stayed that way instead of having to set it every start.
This year I never turned it off. I’m guessing they updated the algorithm because it seems a lot more subtle, I don’t feel it being aggressive like before. When I deliberately cross the line (which happens a lot right now, lots of summer road fixing going on) I don’t notice it fighting me.
Tell me you live in a civilised country without telling me you live in a civilised country.
Over here, in Greece, whenever you try to avoid a pothole, a double-parked car, a cyclist, a pedestrian, a stray, ANYTHING, lane assist always tries its best to make you hit whatever you're trying to avoid.
Earlier this year, I rented a new Toyota Camry (US model). It had lane assist, but it was very easy to override it. I didn't really have to fight it. (And that was nice. I've drive other cars where it was more of a battle.)
So, yeah, it's done badly some of the time. But it at least can be done well.
I don't know, even if it's not that forceful, sometimes I have a light touch on the wheel and I'm going straight, I don't want to suddenly have to fight the car swerving me onto oncoming traffic.
For those interested or forced to buy a new car — I recently picked up a brand new Hyundai and was impressed the new tech does not get in the way. ‘Driver attention warning’ does not have a face camera, it just uses the front sensor to confirm you’re not all over the place. It can also be disabled. Lane assist can be disabled with one button on the wheel. Almost all important controls are real (non capacitive) buttons. Warnings can be customized. Smart cruise control can be customized. As someone who really liked his 90s Toyota, I’m impressed.
We have two new Hyunadai's. My experience is mixed. For one, I get the "consider taking a break" warning constantly - possibly my sleepy eyes? In the Sante Fe, the cruise control disengages constantly b/c it can't see my face when I drive with left hand (my default) - this does not happen in our Ioniq though. Rear view camera + warning has been helpful on one occasion, but both rear and side cameras have fully disengaged my ability to drive many (30+) times when it was safe to do so. Basically in a city where you need to pull out and weave into traffic, if you begin moving too early it'll stop the car and also prevent the gas pedal from working (even if you let off and press many times). My most favorite is it would do this in my kids school drop off (cars are close and all moving at 5mph). The traffic helper knew this would happen to me and we had many laughs about it, after the first few times of them waving me a bit aggressively (why aren't you moving yet?). "Did you forget something in backseat" alarm goes off every time I park, I suppose from kid's car seats. Lane assist is nice when helpful, but very annoying when not (~10% helpful, 90% FP). My general read on the lane assist warning is its simply too sensitive. I disable the lane assist on cruise control, otherwise the adaptive cruise control is 90% good (it only can't seem to figure out to speed up when passing a semi, and will slow down instead).
Very generally speaking, if I could disable all of the safety features I definitely would, they are almost exclusively false positives in my case and occur every time I drive. Yet its only two specific ones that are genuinely a nuisance (rather than annoying): The face detection on cruise control, and the car-disabling when I'm pulling out (which at times is out right dangerous).
Interesting. From the hyundai manual, driver attention monitoring only uses front sensor with no face recognition in the vehicle as far as I can tell. Are you sure your cruise control issue isn’t because of hand sensors?
Also, I think the issue with it stopping the car sounds like ‘collision avoidance forward safety’ which can be disabled according to the manual. I haven’t had any issues so far though.
I also disable lane assist but largely just because I prefer to have full control. The highway driving assist is really neat though.
Similarly, I have a 2026 Civic: the driver attention doesn't have a camera and ships disabled. Lane departure warnings are toggleable in settings, and it sticks between starts. This is different from lane keeping assist, which is part of the adaptive cruise control and fully steers for you. (Both steering and speed and controlled from buttons on the wheel.)
Climate controls are fully physical controls, but realistically I just leave it on Auto, because it's the 21st century.
The hybrid drive train also makes it feel like an electric car, and it makes older vehicles look like a joke.
I'm not sure if Genesis is vastly different, but the wife's G70 is my own personal layer of hell. The tech constantly gets in the way and pisses me off. They can't even figure out how to do interval settings on a windshield wiper. It's awful.
I have a BYD Seal I bought last year, and it doesn't have a face camera. My mom's new BYD Dolphin does, so maybe it's just very recent.
I have to disable the traffic sign warnings and lane keeping assistance every time I start the car. It's a swipe and three taps, but still annoying. I wish it could at least stay disabled for some time.
The "steering assist" feature in new cars is terrifying, and has almost severely injured or killed me once.
When my car was last receiving service, I was given a loaner vehicle with this new feature. I was driving home in the rain, and an aggressive driver passed me very closely, triggering the collision avoidance system - this forced the steering wheel to turn away from the car, made the car hydroplane and nearly flung me into a ditch at 55MPH. I had to force back against the steering and creatively spin my vehicle against the turn.
Renault have nailed this. In their latest cars (the EVs, at least) you set up which features you do and don’t want, then a single button press when you get in the car makes it so.
Some of their implementations, such as lane keeping, are good enough to keep. Others, such as speed limit detection, aren’t (though it’s much better at French speed limits than UK ones, which I suppose makes sense).
I like 90s cars, but crash safety has come a long way since then. In my opinion late 2000s / early 2010s are the sweet spot between reliability, safety, and simplicity.
I drove an '89 Prelude (with a carburetor!) that had been used hard before I acquired it, until it left me stranded by the side of the road one too many times. I am happy to report that a 2000 Acura Integra is a very reasonable upgrade. Basically the same car, except better (fuel injection, ABS brakes, airbags, etc.). The only thing I miss is that the Prelude had a tighter turning radius.
I suspect owning a car will become increasingly rare as self driving improves. You'd take public transport for the bulk of trips with self driving cars for odd routes / late night trips PT doesn't cover.
I bought a 2017 Kia Forte S recently.. ($4000 for 137K miles) no touch screen, but many safety features that are not too bad like radar collision detection and blindspot warning. 2019 they started with the touchscreen, and in 2023 they added "Kia Connect" with OTA updates. Anyway definitely check the year.
Problem with 2008 is some cars didn't even have Bluetooth audio or backup camera yet (like my 2010 VW CC- I had to add an aftermarket radio).
Also don't get direct inject only engine. At least for Kias, the non-turbo engines are much more reliable (but underpowered for sure).
I just took delivery on a new European made car (DS no 8) last week and it’s been great. The driver assist features are useful, automatic lane switching works perfectly, and the driver awareness nags are very modest.
I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me.
It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).
> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.
At this point I'm contemplating finding a a late 60s/early 70s Beetle - or some other car with no more complex electronics in it than headlight switches and dizzy/points type ignition. Nobody is gonna be able to sewt that to remote brick itself when it thinks I'm ignoring it's incessant beeping.
Unless you're going to be staying within a small city with almost entirely short trips, you probably want a bigger and less primitive car from that era than a Beetle.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I drove a '72 Superbug reasonably regularly from Sydney to Brisbane and Melbourne, even Adelaide a few times. They're 800-1000km trips each way and 1600km for Adelaide.
Admittedly my muscles and bones ache and complain more now than when I was in my late teens and early 20s. And I'd almost certainly regret not having air con and working heating if I owned one now.
But realistically? 98+% of all my driving is trips or 5-15km or so. And probably still 95% of my driving (at least by trip count if not by km travelled) would be less than 50km trips. I think a "suitable for around town" car supplemented by taxis or rentals at airports because I choose to fly most of my 800+km trips these days would work out just fine for me.
The last 5 or 6 years the only long trips I've driven have been in a campervan borrowed from a friend to go to music festivals in Queensland - partly because a camper van is really nice compared to a tent (especially if the weather goes bad) and partly because that friend really likes lending it out (at leat to people he trusts).
OP said after 2008. There are many cars made after 2008 that do not have intrusive systems. For example, my 2018 Camaro has none of that. The only proximity sensors it has are side vehicle indicators and all they do is turn on a light.
New cars with intrusive driver monitoring alerts are obviously going to be terrible but you can still buy vehicles made prior to this change.
Most of the rentals around my neck of the woods are VWs or entry-level Mercedes. The two seem approximately equally bad; they both have the exact same problems with cruise control, lane assist beeps, speed limit beeps, "take a break!" beeps, and so on.
I've heard that Dacia has some models that are like 2008 throwbacks, with "modern" annoyances kept to a bare minimum, but they're considered too low-market for the rental companies, I suppose. I'd consider that sort of thing if I were looking to buy a new car, money no object.
But really a well-maintained vehicle that's ~15-20 years old suits me just fine.
I'm the owner of a 2025 Dacia Jogger. It has a physical button to disable all warnings and alarms, which I really appreciate, but I still need to press that button twice (with ~1s of delay between pushes), and I need to do it every time I turn the car on.
I bought the model with no internet connection, so the speed limit is automatically read by the front camera, and it's usually wrong. Although the alarm can be disabled, it still shows a distracting visual warning on the dashboard. I covered mine with duck tape, but now everyone who goes into the car asks me why I'm covering a warning with duck tape, and I have to explain them every time.
I converted the car into a camper, but some digital features are always on, even when the car is off.
For example, the car continuously detects the wireless key, so I bought some Faraday cage wallets to store them while we sleep. However, they don't work, so at the end I had to make my own Faraday cage wallets with aluminum foil and duck tape (yeah, in this project I found that duck tape is really versatile).
Another issue that really bothers me is that the car detects movement, even when it is completely off. Whenever I'm sleeping and I change position, the center screen lights on, some relays start to click, and some fan runs for a couple of seconds. Then, after ~10 seconds everything turns off again. It drives me crazy.
I got this car just because I wanted something shorter than 4.5m (but that could fit a 120 x 190 cm bed), with a reliable engine (this is a 1.6L from 2005, created by Renault & Nissan, without any known issues), and without internet connection. I reviewed hundreds of cars, and this was basically our only option in our country.
Ever driven a Dacia? I had one for a rental in Portugal. Honestly the least comfortable and most irritating vehicle I've ever driven. I'm not just being fussy, we've had plenty of Hyundais, Citroens and the like without a problem.
I guess life would be boring if we were all the same. I found the 1.0 litre turbo in the Sandero to be perfectly adequate in power. I hated almost everything else about the car though. And again, I don't usually have this problem, more often I fall in love with the little rental cars we get and start checking how much they are on the used market before remembering we have no need for a second car.
The speed sign detection can be a bit funny at times. Mine often read signs that are for roads next to the one I'm driving, which occasionally include train tracks. Seeing a maximum speed that is 200 km/h is a bit funny, through less so when the camera catches a small road parallel with the highway with speeds that's 1/4th that of the highway. If the cruise control would follow those, the first one would be very illegal and the second one quite dangerous and possibly illegal if it got stuck like that. It also has detected a 357 km/h (or around that) while driving in the city, possibly by random patterns from a shop's street window.
The lane assist can also become confused by shadows created by a fence next to the road when the sun is just slightly above the horizon. The car thought I was driving between two roads and tried to steer me to the side, but it was a single lane highway. That was the last time I had it enabled.
It also has detected a 357 km/h (or around that) while driving in the city, possibly by random patterns from a shop's street window.
Unless you have one of the very few cars that can even approach that speed[1], it sounds like some software "engineer" most certainly did not understand the meaning of "sanity checking".
automatic speed control in the Toyota Yaris works absolutely terribly. On the highway, it constantly misreads signs and suggests driving at 40 km/h instead of 120 km/h. It can even interpret a 10-ton weight limit sign as a 10 km/h speed limit!
And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.
How vulnerable are road sign cameras to, say, someone sticking a vertical strip of black electrical tape to make the 50 appear as a 150?
Is there any cross-referencing to an onboard GPS database? GPS-based speed alerts are a feature of base-model Hyundais/Kias in Canada, so it doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch for a failsafe.
I don't know about 50 to 150, but someone near me appears to have put up their own speed limit sign and the font is slightly off, so my car sees it as 75 instead of 25 (and fortunately doesn't set itself to it, but helpfully gives me a single-button way to set my cruise control to match).
I cannot tell you how many times I've punched the steering wheel. I want to find that source of beeping and rip its goddamn guts out of the system. Then I want to find who put it there and rip their guts too. I will rip their infernal existence out of this dimension.
And fuck cameras. Blatant privacy violation, how is this getting past legislation?
We have an 80 kph sign about 6m after the autoweg sign (100kph), why they didn't combine them is anyone's guess. My detection system always misses it, and often there are speed checks. Fortunately I can disable sign recognition for the cruise control.
Wait does your cruise control automatically accelerate by default when it thinks it sees a sign..? That sounds terrifying! I've only seen systems which give you a prompt to switch speed which you can accept with a button
Mine did until I turned it off, and on an early software version it would do it at full acceleration of the car - and considering it has over 600 horsepower was really terrifying. It also slowed down violently once, misreading a sign on the motorway.
I've noticed this too! The Nissan's adaptive cruise control doesn't accelerate automatically after a sign, but when it does accelerate automatically, e.g because I accepted the prompt to change target speed or because the slow car in front changed lanes or took an exit, it accelerates so bloody quick. Way quicker than I would've if I'm just driving manually.
People are selling those older cars at a significant discount compared to previous years, because they got banned from low emission zones - you need euro 5 for diesel and euro 4 for petrol to be allowed in centers of many of large EU cities.
I've heard China has something similar where you need an electric vehicle to drive in many city centers. Part of a huge effort to fix air pollution issues.
I have a new Volkswagen and there's an annoying amount of arrogance behind the technology decisions in the vehicle that really sour the experience.
Perhaps the most annoying is that many notifications like "you can't do that while driving" are toast style notifications that disappear before you can notice or read them.
It has 360 degree cameras but it gets to decide when you can activate them. Want to know if you have enough room on the passenger side to go around a vehicle stopped in front of you without scratching up your tires? Too bad, the car doesn't detect a parking spot.
Wireless charger refuses to charge phone and puts up a notification saying it can't charge it any time you place your phone on it. There's a menu setting to disable the wireless charger, and that puts up a persistent notification telling you to re-enable wireless charging.
You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
You adjusted your volume, car readjusts it for you because reasons. You can see some of those reasons buried deep in the menu system, but not all of them. Car will adjust your volume again at a later date without your consent.
The car sends notifications about the status of the car but doesn't update or remove them when they're no longer true. I wake up most mornings to several "Your doors are unlocked" notifications but the doors are locked. Did they unlock? Why did they unlock? How long were they unlocked? Nobody knows...
Walk away car locking? Works 100% of the time when get out of the car at home and walk two feet away from the car. Fails to work the first time you park it downtown and someone rifles through your car and steals your charging adapter.
You got home and are unloading groceries from the trunk, the car is going to honk at you that the trunk is ajar before you can even get inside the house. You'll receive alerts on your phone that the trunk is open as well.
Car honks any time a door is left open or the car isn't locked even if you're standing less than 2 feet from the car holding the key.
You have a charge schedule setup so your car only charges during off-peak times. Want to charge at a pay-charger or outside of that schedule? Sure, just click the button on screen which permanently disables the charge schedule and requires to you go deep into menus to re-enable it.
Similar situation with State of Charge limits. Want to charge to 100% for a road trip? Sure that's the new permanent setting, and we're going to remind you it's bad to charge to 100% all the time.
Tesla gets dumped for so much, but their software is so well tuned compared to this garbage.
I rented a Volkswagen a few months ago and yep, that checks out.
Also it was the first time in my life I had to search online how to reset a car entertainment system, because the screen suddenly didn’t work anymore.
A friend of mine bought a new VW a few years ago. He was so excited about that app it came with alerting him about unlocked doors, open trunk, open window, etc. Well, 100% false alert rate.
Many of the the alerts are technically accurate but do you really need an alert on your phone that your door is open as you're getting in/out of the car?
> You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.
> I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.
That's an incredibly vague and dismissive statement to support lazy engineering.
If the intent is something like preventing CO2 build up in the cabin then they could periodically open the mixing value when the car is set to recirculation to refresh the cabin air.
It doesn't have to be a binary control. I've owned cars with manual mixing valves to let you control the amount of outside air gets circulated into the cabin.
I am aware of a recent youtube video where some guy measured the CO2 ppm scores with recirculation on. The results are (obviously) quite terrible after a while.
But I don't think car manufacturers care about that. I think the switch to fresh air after a while is mainly to prevent the windshield from fogging up.
Which is also absurd because other automakers have other less annoying options. I had Hondas that just vented outside air just to the defroster vents without disabling the re-circulator. The Tesla Model 3 can send heated or AC chilled air to the defroster by tapping the defroster button to cycle options.
Is 2008 a good cut-off? My 2016 BMW doesn't really have any annoying electronics or nannies compared to my 2005 model (other than electronic power steering :))
I drive a 2019 Passat, with lane assist, tempomat, road sign detection etc - it only beeps when there is no more washer fluid (but then it does beep every fcking 5 minutes - easily the most annoying feature of this car).
I recently rented a new car, and just wanted to sit with the windows open while waiting.
After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ minutes. If I locked the doors, the interior lights would shut off, but it would automatically roll up all of the windows. Examples of "features" that are infuriating.
For speed-limits, I believe most of these new cars use multiple sources; so likely information found in the map at your location and cameras to spot signs. For some freak, unknown reason, the map-data is usually more trusted with the car vendors then the camera's it seems. Just don't rely on map-data for speed-limits and this would be a solved problem I think.
I was driving my mom's brand new Mercedes suv on a family road trip (for perspective I have a 2006 diesel van with 300k+ miles on it). Absolutely hated the thing. The worst was I was causing on the highway atb74mph and that auto adjust crap slowed ke down to 30mph! On the highway! Not sure if it was a service bug or what but kinda terrifying.
Not just beeping. I had a rental Nissan recently violently pull me straight off the road when it couldn't read the lines very well in a thick fog. Apparently you can disable that deep in some settings menu through some magic button presses divorced from the main settings menus, but it was frightening. For most manufacturers, almost none of this tech is good enough to even make optional and non-default, much less legislatively mandated, and that supposes I trust you not to sell my daily mood or whatever bullshit to data brokers.
They are trying to make it as unpleasant to drive as possible, and I don't really blame them - cars are a big factor in climate change, smog, etc. I gave up driving in the 90's because it was pretty obvious even back then.
I was looking for a car recently for a 3 month visit in Europe. 2008 is the bottom of the barrel at this point. Basically deciding between scraping and trying to make few more years out of it.
This is why I don't trust self driving cars. It is hard to say when it will make a wrong decision and we are too slow to react as we are not actively engaged in driving.
In the states, buy a manual car if you can get one. I have a manual Subaru crosstrek from 2021 and the only features it has is cruise control and a backup camera.
In Europe semi-truck trailers have stickers on them representing their speed limit. Those speed limits differ by country, so quite often you see a truck with 60,70,80 and 90 sticks on it.
So then you're driving in Germany at 200km/h and the camera picks up the 90km/h and brakes aggressively.
I have a Volkswagen ID3, I love the adaptive cruise control. Yes, it gets it wrong in some spots (signage isn't great here in Asturias, Spain), and it gets it wrong in both directions (too slow at certain locations, too fast in others).
But I still appreciate the convenience of not having to keep an eye on the speed nor the distance between the my car and the vehicles in front of me when driving on the freeway, where it generally doesn't make mistakes.
I have a CRV with adaptive cruise (USA) and while the car reads the speed limit signs it only uses them for display. There are instances where it misreads signs which is understandable because some of the road signs are very similar or the posted speed only applies to trucks ect.
But it does not adjust based on the reading, I manually set the speed but of course it'll slow down if there's a car in front. Automatically adjusting to the speed limit sounds insanely dangerous. It's very common place, at least in the US, to go 10 over the posted limit on controlled access highways, does the EU not operate in a similar mode?
In Germany: Outside of residential areas, about 10 km/h more for speedometer displaying too high + official speed trap tolerance, another 10 if you are willing to accept an occasional minor fine.
Or more or less strictly on the limit to avoid stress and have a safety margin.
I've rented a 2026 Kia minivan this week for vacation and I can set a cruise control offset of -10 to +10 in steps of 5.(which is kind of funny in isolation, "how much do you want to break the law today?")
I drive a Nissan Ariya sometimes, which has adaptive cruise control. It's ... okay, but I'm not sure my own car's "dumb" cruise control is any worse to be honest.
My own car's cruise control is just three large buttons on the steering wheel: one which says "keep going this speed when I take my foot off the gas", one cancel button, and one "go back to the previous speed" button. It works wonders and is quite comfortable to use. Never messes up, I can rely on it 100% to do its one simple job.
The Ariya is much more fancy, but it's so much less reliable. If it's snowing outside it sometimes just randomly turns itself off because sensors got covered in snow, leading to a rapid deceleration until I intervene. Sometimes it refuses to turn on because sensors are covered in snow. And its braking curve is uncomfortable; when the car in front stops (e.g in stop and go traffic), it gets way close to the car in front and brakes hard, instead of slowly coming to a stop at a comfortable distance. Oh and it's connected to the nav system; I've had it just suddenly slow the car down to a crawl because the nav system had chosen a stupid route, it slowed down to take an exit while I stayed on the highway.
I'll take dumb but reliable any day over smart and unreliable. Even if it means I sometimes have to actually adjust speed myself.
Relatedly, I don't actually mind having to drive the car. I like cruise control because my foot gets fatigued when pressing the gas pedal for hours on end, but making manual adjustments to my speed? Changing gears? Listening to the engine to make sure it's at a happy RPM? I feel like that stuff just gives me small stuff to do so I keep paying attention to the driving.
The incessant beeping in modern cars on the other hand is just a distraction. Luckily, the Nissan lets you configure it so that 2 quick button presses on the steering wheel disables all the useless alarms. I'm so happy I don't have to do that manually for each "safety" feature every time I get in.
I hated it on my Toyota, but love it on the Honda Prologue (which is really a Chevy Blazer). On the Toyota it would drift down until I was following someone who I would normally have passed if I saw them coming. It would then race to catch up if I changed lanes. The Prologue gets closer before slowing, so I feel the approach and change lanes. It also has better behavior in traffic.
The stuff BMW ships is great. The ACC that I tried in a normal Toyota a few years ago was way worse. I'm a huge ACC fan but it really woke me up that I need to evaluate the vendors before I purchase the car.
Most of my driving is in and around the city I live in, so by now I've learned which spots it gets wrong, and where I can rely on it.
Knowing I can just keep my eyes on the road and have the car make the speed limit changes for me feels more relaxing and safer, exactly because it's easier to pay attention to traffic if I don't have to look at the dashboard as often.
I dread ending up with a modern car though I know it's inevitable for me some day, exactly for these kinds of things that I know will infuriate me. All I can hope for I guess is that people will find ways of bypassing some of them
I have a 2016 Beetle and a 2014 Mini Countryman and neither have these stupid features, thankfully! Keeping them for as long as I possibly can! In fact, my Beetle doesn't properly support Android Auto so I can't ever plug my phone into it (and the Mini only does bluetooth audio + playlists/song info for my wife's iphone integration), and my Beetle has a button on the steering wheel that I have to pay VW to use (no thanks). So I can concentrate on driving.
I also have a 1972 Beetle which has zero infotainment nonsense to distract me (the engine is deafening anyway), where you actually concentrate on driving.
It seems all this modern nonsense to warn drivers is because they've stuffed the car cockpit with all manner of distractions and giant screens, or non-tactile interfaces that you have to look at instead of feeling, thereby reducing concentration on actually driving. Rather than making new methods to ensure someone is concentrating, just reduce the amount of screens in the cockpit! My sister-in-law's Tesla is horrendous. She can't easily change the temperature whilst driving. There's a reason the space shuttle and airplanes have actual switches to change settings...
Keeping these cars for as long as I possibly can. I went around Iceland in a Fiat van (a "camper", tiny thing to sleep in) and the week was ruined with the incessant beeping of the car as it moved from speed limit to speed limit. I know the speed limits were changing because there were signs in the road, but instead I had to constantly look at the dashboard to try to find out why the stupid thing was beeping, which I presume was the same tone as any other error, thereby masking any real problem. Absolute garbage.
Incidentally, the Fiat also had that annoying "lane assist" feature which wobbles the steering wheel but it did it all the time when there were no lanes (unpaved roads etc) and it felt IDENTICAL to the car skidding to my "untrained"/"used-to-a-proper-car" hands, since the motion of the steering wheel versus car direction didn't match for a split second, and there was no real connection to the rack/pinion steering mechanism. I felt like a passenger even as the driver. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.
Well yeah, that's the point. They want to enshitify cars and make driving as expensive and as annoying as possible to force people out of cars. They know they can't just ban cars outright, so they enshitify this little thing this year, mandate this other thing the next year, add a new tax/fee the next year, add a new restriction the next year, reduce speed limits the next year, etc., etc., all in the name of safety / "save the kids", until decades later they finally get to where they want to be.
Yeah. Whenever someone starts explaining to me that "they" - meaning some vague and undefined cartel - want you to (blank) I immediately flag their reasoning as suspect until proven otherwise. More often than not it's indicative of a lack of serious critical thought.
Examples include some version of "They want us to act like slaves" or "They want to control our minds".
More often than not the simplest explanation is short-sighted profit motive, or institutional dysfunction, or multiple parties with conflicting motivations with no central agenda. It's far less likely to be a grand coordinated conspiracy.
The “green movement” and “the environment” but mostly a desire for control. Why should people be able to own private property like cars, we should all be using government owned means of transportation in our new socialist utopia.
No, you’re not hearing me. The given reason for people wanting to force people out of cars is the environment, it’s not literally the environment wanting to force people out of cars (nonsense statement) and for a lot of people, that given reason isn’t even the real reason.
>Why should people be able to own private property like cars, we should all be using government owned means of transportation in our new socialist utopia.
Given that electric vehicles including cars, busses and trains all exist, can you explain what relationship exists between the notion of private property ownership (notably cars) and "the green movement"? It is not clear to me why a global environmentalist cabal would seek to end private ownership of electric cars, which have more or less the same drawbacks as electric busses or trains.
Furthermore:
As far as I can tell, the following groups are both wealthy and powerful, and have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels and/or the end of private property:
- big oil
- coal
- auto manufacturers
- major banks (because they finance loans, including auto loans)
- the governments of oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Canada (Alberta, mostly), Russia, Iran, etc.
Can you also explain where the "green movement" is getting its funding and lobbying to not only resist but (according to you) completely overcome the influence of the above groups?
Because the green movement is largely made up of socialists. As such, the Venn diagram of the desired end result for socialists and the green movement is nearly a perfect circle. You will find very few right-leaning or libertarian greens. Almost all of them also believe in Marxism or some derivative of it, or at least some form of left-leaning technocracy. Hopefully you don’t need me to explain the relationship between Marxism and private property. And don’t assume I’m right-leaning per-say, I’m probably socially more left than you are, it’s just that I believe in the sanctimony of the individual (which is where my socially left leaning views stem from). I’m not even necessarily opposed to socialism in theory, just in practice.
To answer your second question, I don’t think it’s accurate to assume auto manufacturers have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels.
Sorry, why are their sources of funding relevant? If they’re in power or have influence, it could largely be a grassroots movement and it doesn’t matter?
Financial interest in private automobile ownership sure, but not opposing the end of fossil fuels. I didn’t claim they’re completely aligned, the real world is complex.
>Sorry, why are their sources of funding relevant?
Because money is power, are you new?
You claimed that some unspecified "They" are attempting to force a socialist utopia/dystopia upon us, and that "They" are seeking to end private ownership because socialism. You seem to be unable to articulate who "They" are, from where "They" derive their power, or who is funding "Them".
>If they’re in power or have influence, it could largely be a grassroots movement and it doesn’t matter?
Grassroots movements quite simply do not have power or influence unless either:
1. they're well-funded, in which case see my previous point. Where does that money come from? or
2. they're supported by a significant majority of the public, in which case it makes no sense to refer to "They" in such a way as to insinuate there is a small minority of powerful figures forcing these issues upon an unwitting or unwilling public. If the movement enjoys broad popular support (unlikely!), then there is no conspiracy and you simply have a minority opinion. In that case, deal with it.
I don’t need to know the names of the various lawmakers, lawyers, and politicians to know that they exist and to see the effects of their work. You’re being willfully blind here.
Maybe 6 of those people hold any kind of actual government position. The rest are either not in politics, former, retired from government, or dead. So ~six people control automobile regulation worldwide and are forcing people out of cars.... Right?
Then why didn't you provide a list of the ones who are doing "their work"? Given how many people talk about this, supposedly with hard evidence (that's never, ultimately, presented), someone must have compiled such a list, tied the individuals to the policies they've effected, mapped out their influence, the coalitions and deals… and if you believe this for good reason, then you must have had access to this proof.
> Kovel believes that the forms of 'actually existing socialism' consisted of "public ownership of the means of production", rather than meeting "the true definition" of socialism as "a free association of producers", with the Party-State bureaucracy acting as the "alienating substitute 'public'".[130]
and in general, I cannot find any examples of eco-socialists making the claims, or holding the beliefs, you're attributing to them. Eco-socialists are not, near as I can tell, a fan of the state, nor "government ownership".
Ah yes, we can’t criticize government initiatives and policy unless we have fully mapped out the exact people responsible for every line of law, including a detailed history of all their political views, and probably what they had for breakfast.
I do prefer to criticise government initiatives that actually exist, as opposed to ones that don't. Slotting real facts into a fictional narrative is a common tool of propagandists seeking to subvert potential opposition. If you truly care about the things you're complaining about, you should want to know what's really going on.
The stars exist. We can join them up to form constellations. This does not mean that the stars in constellations are particularly close to each other: in fact, the 50 closest stars to the sun are scattered all around the night sky, and are closer to each other than the stars of Orion's belt. Many of the stars in Draco are nowhere near each other.
Just because you can join facts together to form a narrative, that does not make the narrative true.
The narrative you've presented is not supported by the sources you've cited (e.g. the eco-socialism Wikipedia article, which appears to contradict it). You have not given me any reason to believe it, and I'm not confident that you've ever received a good reason yourself.
>Who desires the control? Can you name a member of this nebulous conspiracy?
Every level of government, the World Economic Forum and every other organization that seeks to mandate digital currencies, mandate digital IDs, impose "chat control" and eliminate all privacy. You have to have your head buried deep, deep in the sand to think this is some sort of conspiracy. It is all happening right out in the open.
Nobody I've spoken to who's name-dropped the World Economic Form in this context knows what the WEF is. (To be fair, neither did I, to begin with – but I wasn't making claims about it.)
Well I'm glad to be the first. I suggest you familiarize yourself with the WEF, which is an annual meeting of heads of state, titans of industry and other various unsavory billionaires and people with far too much power. Going back decades, a lot of the most odious totalitarian policies are hatched and disseminated there. This isn't some sort of conspiracy, most of it happens right out in the open. There are a wide variety of hour(s) long videos from these conferences about various policies they are pushing, and have pushed, going back years, as well as numerous documents laying out their plans.
I have familiarised myself with the WEF. It is a meeting of various "people with far too much power", as you put it – but it is not, as far as I can tell, an organisation with an agenda of populace control that those powerful people suborn themselves to.
>but it is not, as far as I can tell, an organisation with an agenda of populace control that those powerful people suborn themselves to.
They aren't suborning themselves to anyone. The organization is comprised of those powerful people, who are the ones coming up with the agenda and hoisting it upon the rest of us.
This understanding is not obviously wrong, and we have now reached the limit of my understanding. Congratulations: you do indeed appear to be the first. Thank you for rising to the challenge.
>[seeking to] mandate digital currencies, mandate digital IDs, impose "chat control" and eliminate all privacy.
None of this has anything to do with a purported green movement that seeks to end private ownership of cars. Modern cars are easy to track, for starters.
>None of this has anything to do with a purported green movement that seeks to end private ownership of cars.
Modern cars allow autonomy of movement, even if you are tracked (except of course those with the mandatory kill switches which our benevolent overlords have also ordered be installed).
Where I live (also a city in the PNW, with a lot of hills) bike lanes see heavy use during the weekday morning commute, and pretty spotty use every other time of day, and during the weekend.
Amsterdam is a different kettle of fish entirely. That's what I'd call "heavy."
It BS article, no cameras pointed at your face are required. They require "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System", don't specify how it should be implemented.
It specifically mentions that it is illegal to use the cameras from such system to identify the person. It is pretty much the opposite of what people think its going to do.
I am sorry you don't like that its not 1984 law but the discussion is bullshit, which means in that instead of 1984 dystopia we are getting the Brave new world dystopia where bullshit prevails in the brave new world.
I am sick and tired of BS rage bates of the endless entertainment; I would take 1984 dystopia anytime, at least we would know who the bad guys are.
It's like we live in different worlds. The entire arc of technology over the past 30 years has been to centralize, collect, and then monetize. There are tons of systems that shouldn't be doing that, but they all evolve to end up doing that. We need a new version of Zawinski's Law: every company will attempt to monetize until they're selling user data.
That's literally why we have GDPR. This will be very illegal and the law itself specifically bans user identification with camera on top of the stuff protected by GDPR.
The enforcement of GDPR is more or less nonexistent for big companies. Even if they get fined, that is just cost of business for them.
In the text nothing prevents the manufacturer to stream the vide of your face to their servers all over the world and do the image processing there. It would even comply with GDPR if everybody pinky promised they not using that data for anything else.
I get the EU passed a law. A lot like Australia passed a law about banning under-16s from social media. Just like GDPR, enforcement is minimal. Passing laws divorced from reality does little.
In other words, you believe that because they mandate driver attention monitoring the manufacturers will install systems that are equipped wit storage and connectivity and they will process, transmit and sell this, no one will find out and even if they find out nothing will happen to them.
I disagree, that's a recipe for companies to spend more than they need at install time, then pay billions in fines and then pay again to re-call the vehicles to replace these systems.
GDPR is enforced, that's why US tech companies constantly complain about EU regulations.
No, I think the car companies will have telemetry from the sensor aggregated and sent back to them. The number of times it alerts, where the driver was, the nature of the alert, the speed of the vehicle at the time of the alert. There is a huge market from insurance companies to buy data like this so they can adjust premiums accordingly. I've worked at companies that wrote apps that had code in phones that would use the phone's accelerometer to assess driver ability and update risk models accordingly. I worked for a car company at one point, the the amount of financial pressure they were under (unit economics) was enormous, to the point where they were reevaluating the stitching in their seats to see if they could save money. They have access to the data, they need money, and there is a market to sell that data. When incentives line up that way, laws like the GDPR don't carry much weight.
> 2.3.1. The ADDW system shall function without relying on biometric personal data of any vehicle occupants. In this context, the biometric personal data is resulting from specific technical processing relating to the physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of a natural person, which allow or confirm the unique identification of that natural person, such as facial images or dactyloscopic data. This requirement does not forbid the ADDW system to use data from the camera(s) equipped in the vehicle, it forbids the identification of the person by the ADDW system.
> 2.3.2. The ADDW system shall be designed in such a way that it shall only continuously record and retain data necessary for the system to function and operate within a closed-loop system.
> 2.3.3. Any processing of personal data shall be carried out in accordance with Union data protection law.
This doesn't appear to ban identification of the user by, say, the Advanced Driver Distraction Reporting System, which is triggered by and utilizes the same data streams as the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System.
The text you linked mandates, as the first technical requirement, "An ADDW system shall determine when the driver’s visual attention is not directed towards the driving tasks and alert the driver through the vehicle human–machine interface."
Can you describe how you believe the driver's visual attention can be tracked by anything other than a camera pointed at the driver's face?
If no such other system exists, how is this doing anything other than mandating cameras pointed at the driver?
Is it BS if this is the only way to implement such a system? Then it is practically required. Legal or not these cameras will be used to identify you, car companies do all kinds of shady stuff with the data they collect with all their fancy new sensors. Besides, cars have famously lagged in security standards, so this data will be exfiltrated. By comparison, your comment is more hysterical sounding than the article. It is very reasonable to not want even more invasive systems installed in cars, especially when this may bleed into US models and then used against us here where the company can absolutely legally sell your data.
If you want to believe that when light shines on a CCD chip the only option is to record the data and transmit it to the corporations and the governments then keep believing it. Everything needs to be extreme after all, right?
It's not 'extreme' its just extrapolation and common sense. Profit motives dictate this as the only outcome. In what world are you living in where any system exists that collects data and doesn't transmit it to corporations and governments? Yes there are arguably a couple niche E2E encrypted open source programs, but surely that isn't at all comparable with proprietary big corporation vehicle software which have always notoriously been some of the worst privacy violating software around.
That's actually illegal in EU without consent. In this particular case, there's also specific ban on identifying the user with the cameras that the system may use. It's in the text, as a result we may hear from the tech companies how EU regulations are making it hard to do business even.
You need to have the hardware(camera isn't enough, you need storage and way to transmit) in place to do these things. I guess Tesla's and other connected smart cars can do that already but that's not what this regulation requires.
> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.
You might as well stick to horses. What is so specific about eighteen years ago (2026 - 2008 ~= 18)? Does that mean that you will never drive an electric car?
A camera pointed at people’s face is going to have some insanely positive effects targeting one of the absolute biggest problems on the road though.
On my daily commute about 50% of drivers are on their phones at 90 km/h, would be great if their cars were beeping at them since no one else is going to do anything about it.
I find this especially great since one of them rear ended me earlier this year and practically admitted he was fiddling with his phone at the time
I see potential for selling driver distraction data (adjusted with forthcoming studies on real risk impacts thereof) to insurance companies. Ideally, meaningfully risky drivers (phone users, etc) get penalized with their premiums, and the safe drivers may not have to pay as much.
Not that I support mandatory driver cams, just thinking out loud...
I might be naive but I believe that >0 tiktok addicts who can’t put their phone down even while driving, might be persuaded to quit when even their car beeps condescendingly at them
The good news is that by making cars more trouble than they're worth, this may speed us closer to walkable, bikeable neighborhoods that can only be reasonably navigated on foot or by bike, connected by extensive public transit networks (which already do track where you're going).
Nah. It's giving votes to whatever politician promises to put certain regulatory regimes out to pasture. You may find that you like some of their other policies far, far less than "seeks to restrain creeping safetyism".
At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.