I rented a car that had this feature and instantly hated it. I forget the make, but if it detected you were not looking at the road for a period of time, it would slam on the brakes and release. A way to jolt you awake.
The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.
I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 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)
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.
> 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.
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
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 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…?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
>[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."
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms.
The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.
So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?
But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.
P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
My parents’ ‘80s Chrysler New Yorker would talk instead of beep. ‘A door is ajar,” it would say, and we would giggle, ‘no, a door is a door!’ After Kitt in Nightrider, car companies wanted to be cool.
> But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
I with my car had an accessible log of these notices. Another example, my car gives you a safety score at the end of every drive, out of 100. When I get less than 100, there's no information about what I might do to improve my score, and ostensibly, drive more safely.
Wow that’s like such an obvious thing that makes so much sense. I have no doubt something like “Hands on, Hands on, Hands on” will start chirping in near future
Class D amplifiers use that same trick, just at much higher switching frequencies (pushing quantization noise ultrasonic, where it can be filtered). Since transistors are most efficient when fully on/off, very little power is wasted as heat. That's what made the modern revolution in tiny amps possible.
Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.
You're talking about an industry that gives you a generic "check engine" light and allows dealerships to charge you $100 just to read you the error message.
I don't have any faith that they have the wherewithal to make any common sense design choices about error states.
Feels like it'd be easier to differentiate jingles compared to different words of a language you don't know. You can vary intonations etc, but by that point you're back to jingles.
Ford has had that since Blue Cruise 2.0, or thereabouts. It really shocked me how often it catches my attention being diverted. Things like talking to my passengers, adjusting the climate controls, or eating- I'm not even talking about 'advanced distractions' like my phone.
It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea.
The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".
I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score.
Impossible to measure, many other uncontrolled variables - esp. significant improvements to infrastructure in Europe, and regulations. Take NL, where a crash involving a pedestrian or a cyclist effectively forces the driver to prove their innocence. I can walk across a Dutch town blindfolded with the biggest risk to my wellbeing being cyclists (well, and the canals). I'd guess the impact of those intervention dwarfs the "i will beep at you until i make you deaf if you don't put your seatbelt over your grocery bag" innovations.
I grew up in/with cars which would score 0 (more like -3 to -5) and made it to adulthood, so I have a feeling that these features are not strictly neccesary.
At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)
Everyone dies eventually, so that means very little by itself. Did they die young? How much younger than their peers? Did they gain enough enjoyment from drinking and smoking to offset the fewer years of life (subjective, of course, but important to consider)?
Every intervention has a cost. Not all results will be worth the cost we pay for them. I think we are well past the point in Western society where we are giving up too much in order for too small a return, personally. With cars, but also just in general, people have lost the ability to do cost-benefit analysis and act as though every safety improvement is an unalloyed good. But they aren't, and I think that this thinking is making all of our lives significantly worse.
Given that its society that invests in them during development and has to pick them up when they're broken its only fair to also nudge towards a preemptive solution. The economics of people dying needlessly in their 20s is worth the intervention.
I have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.
Sounds about right for Volvo, sadly. I’ve owned four over the years, all great, but my most recent one has such dogshit software that I’ll never buy another Volvo.
My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction. Other people say the same about the diverted driving detector, and I imagine others said the same about the seatbelt sensor.
The intersection of personal freedom and personal safety is an interesting topic, I don't think there's a right answer and it's ultimately pretty subjective.
> I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
> Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction.
Congress already passed a law in 2021 to start the process of requiring alcohol impairment detection in new cars around 2030 - the HALT Drunk Driving Act. It had broad, bipartisan support. I would say "most people agree" does not appear to be the case.
The first link is a propaganda website so not really much use, and for the second one, pretty much all fatalities on bikes are the result of being killed by distracted drivers.
>The US has eight times as many pedestrian deaths per mile as Germany.
Clearly the US is unusually bad for distracted driving.
Regarding "distracted driving" causing cyclist fatalities, my point was more that bicyclists have a higher risk rate. If we're already going down this path for safety, banning bicycling would have a higher impact than reducing fatalities ~10% which is what the EU claimed it could prevent.
Regarding the claim that "pretty much all fatalities on bikes are the result of being killed by drivers", that's simply not true. It also largely depends on laws and location.
Did a quick research and saw that in 2024 there were around 12k deaths in which one or more drunk drivers were involved. Doesn’t seem like much for a country with around 350 million people. In comparison, drug causes 7x those deaths. Cancer and heart diseases even more.
I feel like we have the technology to prevent a car from starting if the driver is significantly impared, but "solving" addiction, cancer, and heart disease are much harder problems.
Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.
That being said I know it would never be implemented in a sane way in the US, and you would probably have situations like your car insurance automatically increasing due to a faulty sensor, so I'm ultimately against it unless a lot of other stuff changes.
But it's still much more possible than "preventing drug addiction"
I think I'd consider this kind of technology at the intersection of personal freedom and _public_ safety. Drunk or distracted driving puts others at risk, not just you.
Owned a Ford Mustang Mach-e with BkueCruise for about 3 years now. No obvious false alarms about missing attention. Interestingly, it doesn't get confused by my sunglasses and still catches me looking aside for too long. I think it is a rather good implementation overall.
It gives me false positives when I'm holding the wheel at the top and my wrist is blocking line of sight from the camera. On the other hand, sunglasses have never tripped it all.
> It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
This is the exact opposite of my experience! The one time I tried BlueCruise, it went into "panic mode" every time I turned my head to check my blindspots.
The truck I was driving had physical buttons for all the climate control functions, and for volume/on-off too. It wouldn't have been surprising to me if I was distracted fiddling with the screen, but it would give me the alert because I was playing with the buttons for an extended period of time.
Thank you! I often feel like I’m in the minority on this site, it is nice to hear someone else articulate my feelings. Driving is a privilege not a right. But since America decided to decimate public transit in the early 20th century (and stick with it) we’re stuck with cars. So I’m in favor of anything that makes it safer. Hopefully this crosses the pond.
I don't doubt your experience but I've had the exact opposite experience with a Subaru where there were so many false positives it was worse than useless and was instead an active distraction.
Given the general state of auto manufacturer software I would fully expect something like this to be janky and unreliable. It might work in some conditions on some faces but also perform abysmally in many other scenarios.
Interesting perspective. In my experience the risk is actually that it results in alert fatigue, which means that drivers that would otherwise pay attention to such an alert no longer do.
In NZ we have to identify hazards. Distractions would be interesting. "Send a text to someone and include that obscure emoji". Or perhaps more vogue - go thru EV charging app registration including verifying your email address and entering credit card details, while driving.
good way to get notification fatigue and tunnel vision. look ahead, ignore everything else and have a shocked pikachu face when you sideswipe someone because you're well trained to not check your blind spots
I need to call bullshit on this. I own the same system and it totally allows looking around for normal driving. Stare to the side or the center console for more than a few seconds and it will alert you - exactly at the point where it becomes recklessly unsafe to do so.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
Probable especially if it gets drunk drivers off the road but I, for one, would be deeply uncomfortable driving knowing my every twitch is recorded and _more importantly_ open to misinterpretation in case of a claim. I could easily believe otherwise averagely fine drivers being negatively affected by this if the surveillance takes up headspace.
Observation affects systems but not always for the better.
I also wonder how well this fares under night driving conditions where the inside of the car has poor exposure.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
It’s also totally plausible that insurance companies will use this data to try and find every single tiny, irrelevant detail to not pay you. Sorry, you blinked before crashing into this other car, we won’t pay for that.
Law enforcement could also use that data to create a nice profile of yourself and how “distracted” you are while driving, and maybe suspend your license forever, why not? And wait till you find how unreliable these sensors are.
Just another surveillance tool in disguise, this is what the EU does best.
The Kia Niro EVs I drive at work have something that apparently detects driver fatigue. I don't know what sets it off but it starts beeping at fire alarm levels and makes the huge LCD constantly flash up warnings, usually before I've even left the yard. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn it off or stop it, so you just have to put up with a constant "BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING" for the whole journey.
New cars are UX nightmares. I'm driving an electric Toyota bz4x. Lovely mechanics, but the general UX (some are because of Android Auto) is terrible.
The remote's lock/unlock don't do anything when the car is on. Example: I'm by the trunk and it won't open unless I go back to the driver's door and unlock the doors. App's remote function has too many conditions to do anything. For instance, I'm resting in the back seat and want to turn on the car for some air conditioning, but it says: the doors should be locked, the key fab should be out of the car to start the car.
I'm listening to an audio through a webpage, as soon as I change the volume it starts my last music. This is really annoying. I should guess the right volume, unlock my phone, resume my audio. Old physical volume knobs only changed the volume, not start one of the few apps they know about.
Oh and if I've been listening to loud music and now someone's in the car, I can't lower the volume without starting the music. I want to start with a low volume and then increase it.
These are some of the many stupid UX decisions.
I would still not drive an old car. Especially ICE. But would pray that the equivalent of Frame.work appears, I can get an open source car with an open source infotainment.
With Chevrolet starting to sell DIY EV packages and the general simplification of the mechanics of EV cars, I believe such a thing would eventually happen.
Disagree. I have been driving Kia for 2.5 years. I think the UX is quite good.
I would assume that most people who live in a city would want to know when the Kia is unlocked at home. I think your dislike of that feature may reflect your residence type or garage type.
My experience of Tesla UX was poor, given how few manual controls were available, and the extensive touchscreen reliance required while driving.
Plus the app is an actual usable thing. Not a crap one that sends notifications about doors being unlocked in a garage that never updates.
Last year I had to take my kia to the dealer just to have connectivity work. Verizon had a change and you couldn't even fix it without going in. Antiquated dealer software updates as well.
I also have the same combo of makes, and it's totally wild that people think the two are comparable technologically. The Kia is like owning a locked-down carrier dumbphone from 2007 and the Tesla is like owning an iPhone. Still a walled garden, not exactly an unlocked Android, but at least one that works and is built by developers who care.
It is ridiculous. I'm back at parents driving Kona EV. I swear at that piece of shit every day. Other than reliability issues - I painted myself into a corner last week.
Started a DC charger using card reader, which means you can't stop the charge session on the charger itself (only via app which I wasn't bothered to set up). Turns out car doesn't have a feature to stop DC charging. Had to wait for it to top up to 80%.
Ha, mine's not an EV so I haven't hit that, but it absolutely tracks. Every part of the app feels like something that was built by a consultancy to fulfill a set of Jira tickets by people who have never and will never actually drive one of the cars.
if it makes you feel better you are supporting American automakers and American workers when you buy tesla - has helped a lot of people swallow the musk pill when buying one
You mean the bZ4X. It wasn't enough that the name is incomprehensible, they also capitalized it incomprehensibly. I think the primary goal of that car was to see how few they could sell, so they could go back to hybrid and hydrogen.
Why are car companies other than Tesla and BYD so dumb with their EV naming strategy, but perfectly fine at naming gasoline cars? Really curious because it seems like you have to put in effort to be this silly at naming. Reminds me of how Microsoft names anything.
That's because you bought a car from a company which places UX at the bottom of their list. On top of that, even if they place it high on their list, they are simply incompetent at it.
All of the things you described work perfectly as you'd expect from good UX pov on a Tesla. And Rivian should not be far behind either.
New Teslas are not a UX nightmare... go test drive a Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, GM, etc, then lastly a Tesla. Come back and tell me which car has the best software.
My Hyundai likes to auto slam on the brakes when cars in front of me turn off the road, even when I definitely won't hit them. It's almost caused collisions with cars behind me.
What I hate about my new Toyota's volume knob is that there is no indication of volume level in the UI, and the knob itself doesn't ratchet. So I have absolutely no feedback about how much louder or quieter it's going to get when I turn the knob. If I have no music going, but I'm waiting to hear the next GPS instructions, how can I make sure I'm going to hear them? If I'm not sure where the volume is at right now, I can't, unless I turn it and then try and trigger some sound effect or something. It's needlessly complicated.
I think part of this acceptance of the "well if it saves one [usually child's] life..." - it's extremely powerful but is deceptive as it devalues the value of freedom (or some similar trait).
I hired a Chinese Haval Car for a weekend last year (Australia). It started beeping at me for being distracted because I was checking for traffic in the other lanes - which is crucial when driving in a 4 lane highway.
Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.
Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.
Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.
It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.
After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.
> The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
That is definitely not the point of a turning signal. The car that's already in the lane has right of way and it's your responsibility not to plow into them. If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
If you can't see the car in your blindspot when changing lanes, you're not doing a proper shoulder check, hence the blindspot warning.
> would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.
Disagree. The purpose of the indicator is to signal your intention to others. Indicate first, then shoulder check. If you then discover a car in your blind spot, abort the manoeuvre if necessary or slow down to let them pass you first.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
Uh oh! Your vehicle subscription level doesn't include [BRAND]. Please tap the brake pedal twice to upgrade your subscription to Silverpremium for an additional $14.99 per month.
God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down.
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
If I hate anything about the EU, its the morons writing regulations for cars. My car constantly distracts me with some beeps, sometimes loud enough to be dangerous. Its surely one of the reasons far right is on the rise -- with things like 'drivers party' in some European countries winning serious votes. I spend 1-2hrs in the car each day, and I hate what those regulations did to driving.
(Worst offenders: Japanese cars since they seem to take the regulations most seriously. Least annoying: generally BMW, Volvo, though they are both getting worse each year).
forcing citizens to buy goods which are adversarial to them with their own money is rarely a good idea.
paradoxically, citizens expect the government to be adversarial towards them in big things (see America) but it's the 'little' things which breed true contempt.
sooner or later something will happen which will test the revealed preference of the population and everyone will suddenly discover that contempt is all that's left.
Yes. Absolutely yes. And I think this is why people vote for things like brexit, or really-obviously-bad-politicians. This is the only way in which they can pay back the many things the reasonable, progressive governments "gave" them. Stupid beeps included. I swear to god, I hate right wing populists, but I'd at least be inclined to vote for a party that promised to fight back those stupid systems.
More than once did my lane assistant try to run me into the barrier in a construction zone.
You can turn it off, however its on again after on the next start...
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
Once on a rental car brake assist decided I'm about to hit something on a kerb in a curve on a wet highway. I was using maybe 50% tire grip to corner and sudden braking took it over 100%. 1/10 would not recommend.
Sure this sort of systems might reduce overall death toll by addressing worst suspects like drunk or distracted drivers but I'm pretty sure they makes it worse for diligent ones.
Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments.
More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
This stuff is a nightmare for new manufacturers and is usually lobbied-for by large OEMs or to keep startups out of the market or as a patent trap
The most recent regulatory disaster that blew up a bunch of startups was mandatory lane keep assist for trucks in overseas western markets, which meant all new startups needed fancy steering racks which are very much not off-the-shelf, and it virtually tripled the cost of the software stack too
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
but also:
"ADDW systems use cameras and sensors to track a driver’s head position, eye movements, and gaze direction"
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
>Regulators are responding to a real problem: EU-funded research estimates driver distraction plays a role in 5% to 25% of car crashes
>Article 6(3) of the GSR states that the system should be designed in such a way that it does not continuously record or retain data other than what is necessary for its purpose
I get that there are problems, but it doesn't sound that bad to me? Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people every year in Europe. If we can improve this 25% (more realistically, 10%) it's a huge step forward.
All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light).
Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
I was recently in the Uk and one of the cars I was in would alert the driver if he was over the speed limit. Fair enough. But the alert itself is distracting. Are we to review every single alert from these cameras? Is that not just another distraction?
There’s usually some kind of short cut action to disable that for the car. In a Mercedes you hold the volume down button in the steering wheel for 3 seconds and it “updates settings” which is basically disabling that annoying feature.
Recently rented BMW had the same, disable speed warnings by holding down "Options" button or something on the steering wheel. Annoyingly though, it didn't remember the selected driving profile after being turned off, but not sure if that's because I wasn't logged in to a BMW account, it was a rental, because the profile was the sport profile, or whatever, so had to tap around on an annoying touchscreen to select that every time I used the car.
This is alarming. Very soon there will be no point driving because insurance is going to jump in and mandate strict rules around how to sit, hold the steering wheel and how I should be looking and the fun of driving will be gone. This is all converging towards autonomous driving without a steering wheel.
That you are aware such rules about correct driver position exists makes me wonder how (if?) you are driving legally, as you certainly seem to lack the familiarity with the laws concerning it.
I have a manual 2003 Golf TDI (purchased in 2003; has a tape deck!) that's slowly rusting, and I'm not looking forward to when I have to replace it.
I don't have a garage/drive way, and so have to park on the street, which makes me leans towards another short [1] vehicle: currently thinking about VW Golf, Mazda 3, Mazda CX-30, Kia Niro.
From what I've seen from almost all cars, lots more screens and lots fewer buttons.
Yeah I have 2002 Honda accord and I’m dreading the day I need to get a modern car. My wife has a 2021 car and there is not a single feature it has that is necessary. In fact, many of them are actively bad. I’ve been driving every day, accident free, for 20 years and have never once needed lane assist, attention tracking or whatever the fuck. I wish there was a car that just had no additional ‘features’ beyond actual mechanical/efficiency improvements.
The overregulation and the constant attempt to destroy any notion of privacy has really pushed me towards being anti EU. I wonder if ressources are spent seeding that sentiment.
To be clear, this will also happen in the USA. The destruction of privacy is perhaps the only issue with full throated support across the political spectrum.
I have a 2012 Skoda Yeti, 170000 miles. Serviced every year, never had anything go wrong with it yet. If it starts costing me money I will buy a 2012 Skoda Yeti from Autotrader with 50000 miles on the clock. At my age that should just about do me :)
I'm 21 years old, I'm driving a 2010 car with the intention to keep driving it for at least another few years (well over 200,000km).
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though.
I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
I’ve got 2017 Yeti (last year they were made) with 80k miles on it, will probably keep it for another decade. I wish I could buy an electric yeti but everything else about it staying the same.
It's bad though because glancing at your side-view mirrors is good, but this will train drivers out of it by beeping at them because their eyes aren't perfectly forwards-facing.
It's an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, that also coincidentally helps advance the surveillance state more than it does help prevent distracted driving.
I imagine the ideal situation would be a hybrid. Trains for the bulk of transport and self driving cars for the large tail of odd trips. When you want to get home from your friends house at 1AM there is no traffic on the roads, and taking PT is a 1+ hour trip while uber is 10 minutes. There will never be super fast PT connecting every odd route that runs frequently all through the night.
Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
Why not? Public transport follows static routes, but there’s nothing to stop personalised routes based on whose on the public transport, especially while off peak.
Personalised routes is not really much different than uber pool. Maybe the government should run a public version of this. But I think there will always be some trips that are so low volume (particularly late at night) that it makes sense to just have a single occupant car rather than a whole bus moving one person.
And you can bypass a seatbelt warning by just plugging in a buckle without the belt, but most people don't bother. It's not worth the inconvenience to circumvent, so it still has a positive impact on safety.
> I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to ~fifty years of aging of the belt material. It's not as if the very first time we'd ever designed and installed an operator-safety belt was in the 1970s... so it'd be very surprising if the designers chose to make them stiff blades. Your description is also at odds with how I've seen people handle and use seatbelts in motion pictures from the era... from what I've seen, those belts look to me to be reasonably flexible.
Toyota... When we look after a dog for a few days for a friend, it beeps. When I put shopping on the back seat, it beeps. Drives me wild. It "beep... beep... beep..." for a minute then "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP".
I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
I once made the mistake of renting one of those cars, putting my backpack and some groceries behind me, and driving straight onto a freeway. This absolute sh*tbox was beeping so loud I was afraid for my hearing. I drove some 10 miles like this before I could pull over and move the things. I'd not set foot in one of those cars ever again (same goes for Lexus). I was dreaming of really bad things happening to people who thought it was a good idea to emit series of very loud beeps while the car is driving.
I once rented a VW which beeped the seat belt warning at me from the weight of my phone in the passenger seat. It was absolutely insane. Seat belt nags are an utterly terrible feature.
Uh, oh! That's great. Need to get an Arnold Rimmer or Captain Kirk one.
Of course, one wonders what the car does if the camera is blocked with a post-it. Will it just not work, or fall back on something else, like pressure at the steering wheel, like Tesla does ?
Those are the same insane morons who came up with the cookie consent. Cottage industry of lawyers that push for those regulations and then collect lucrative retainers from companies wishing to not be fined. One of the reasons EU is so hopelessly behind on any innovation.
Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
Under the GDPR provisions, strictly necessary cookies are exempt from the consent screen. But the way the exemptions read prompts all the lawyers to "well, maybe it's sort of necessary for you to have a session_id, but its so, so much safer to have the damn consent screen, so please...".
I worked in technical roles at large companies that had completely honest-to-god private, strictly necessary cookies - where compliance people forced the cookie consent screens, there was no space for a discusion. At my latest company, despite being a CTO, I could not convince our legal team that going without the consent screen as we are really only using "strictly necessary" cookies was fine. Its "mate, you may even be right, but really, nobody is skipping the consent screen, and we won't risk a compliance issue on your say-so.".
Sure, lots of companies - maybe even most - do shit things, and of course the real tagging of people and fingerprinting happens in sophisticated ways that actually defy GDPR, require no cookies whatsoever and so on - and thats another problem. Those moronic consent screens server exactly no real benefit for a while now.
My Hyundai Ioniq 6's "safety" systems have caused several near accidents and scary and distracting moments, as soon as I forget to turn them off. I have to disable these every time I start the car.
I find my Nissan Leaf similar. The A-pillars are so thick to keep me safe but I can't see pedestrians very well. So now I have to move my head around like a party parrot. Then the regen brake sort of has a dead spot where I feel pressure on my foot but it doesn't actually brake making it hard to stop quickly and smoothly. On a purely hydraulic brake what you feel is what you get. Then the camera doesn't see people as well as it sees bigger cars. I've nearly hit some people because of these factors.
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.
I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.
I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.
Maybe I drive more defensively than most but I almost never drive in the center of the lane unless I am in a ‘middle’ lane with lanes on either side. I drive with my tire riding the correct side of the solid line demarcating the shoulder, people (especially pickups hauling trailers, pro semi drivers are usually good) are really bad at staying in their lanes so I sometimes drive onto the shoulder to prevent an accident in the case of another driver lane drifting and overcorrecting.
I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.
Generally the cars with better lane warning/centering use camera or radar to see other vehicles.
We have been moving from pretty crude centering, to adaptive based on other vehicles, to intelligent enough to avoid potholes and cross lane markings deliberately (eg, passing a cyclist on an empty road).
The problem is all these options exist simultaneously, with the same marketing, and same ancap bonus points; even when the actual capability of the car varies massively.
Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.
That's the trouble with automating cars - being quite accurate is not really that great over 100k miles. On Tesla's specifically I find the "hands on wheel" attention detection a bit iffy.
For FSD, at least in the US they long dropped the hands on the wheel thing, unless the attention monitoring isn't functioning. At least the folks I know that have it, they absolutely love it.
The current docs still say issues with the camera detection results in the hands on wheel prompts https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GU... but yes, it was nice when they removed the requirement to have the hands on the wheel even when the camera was working right.
I liked the Tesla progress & road trips but my real bar for joy is the Waymo style promise/start of delivery. There's no fallback to wait for improvement there, either it does everything it promises or it doesn't do anything!
It varies so much by brand, too. Some brands are too aggressive and end up ping-ponging you in the lane if you let them, and then there's my new Mazda where it doesn't seem to work in any case where I want it to work, but will fight me as hard as it can if I try to take a highway exit.
lane assist is fundamentally an unsolvable problem with just a cheap camera, it's in the same category as autonomous driving, that's what these stupid legislation do not get.
Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.
Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.
Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.
It seems like you are being downvoted but I've had the exact issue you mention where there is heavy over-banding on the road surface. Or where you try to move out to overtake a cyclist and it decides to correct you back into lane.
Cars are becoming shittier in Europe, dumb regulations and people building cars are clearly NOT driving them.
My wife got a new Volvo recently:
1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?
2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.
3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.
4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.
Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.
It is fascinating that you look at design choices that Chinese Volvo copied from American Tesla (except for the speed limit) and declare that European cars are the problem.
I like a fair bit of what the EU does, and in the past they've been behind some significant advances in vehicle safety, but boy do I hate most of what's coming out of there lately as far as driving . All these driver "assistance" features that arguably do more harm than good for competent drivers and are forced to be enabled by default on every drive. And now this. Bleh.
This feels like a regulation whose effectiveness will expire in the next couple of years (as driverless cars become the norm), but which will set a precedent that this is the norm. This with the EU chat control coming up really set a tone.
It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it.
And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.
This is already in Teslas for supervised self driving, not sure what the big deal is. People can be very distracted while driving and the Tesla OS makes sure to let them know.
According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted.
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
It won’t be long until someone finds a way to flash the firmware or install a bootleg sensor or something else. You can already get a lot “chipped” on VAG and BMW cars.
Chances are most manufacturers are going to use a cheap USB camera. Can a raspberry pi emulate webcam? Just place the same video of you diligently staring out of the window on repeat.
As a rule, I do my own maintenance or take the car to an independent mechanic. I wouldn't trust a dealer given how misaligned their incentives are with my interests.
Don't know if that's detectable or if there's some other gotcha like filing insurance claims after a crash. I'm not in the EU, my cars are pre-modem, and seems like everyone else is guessing too. Is there anyone here who actually disables the modem in the EU and isn't a mechanic?
It's so incredible the difference in mindset across the Atlantic.
In the US, it is MY job and no one else's to make sure I don't fall asleep driving my own car. In the same way it's my job to make sure I don't leave my stove on and burn down the apartment building. Should we also install cameras on every stove in every apartment?
If the US government tried to force-install cameras into our cars to watch us, there'd be a revolution.
The US passed a law in 2021 to require new cars to monitor driver alertness. The implementing regulations are being finished and it could apply to new cars as soon as 2027.
can you point to this law please? I can find news articles referencing that something may or may not happen but I can't find that this actually went into practice
Gadget Idea: Small display with a lens that can be mounted over the camera that hooks into the material around it, plays an AI generated video of $RANDOM_CELEBRITY singing karaoke off-key and driving very carefully.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
> Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.[1]
Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
If they make cars irritating enough, people might give up the joy of driving and pivot to more economical transit modes. I have mixed feelings about this, and I doubt the car companies are thoughtfully doing this, but I do wonder sometimes.
If you read that article and check the latest status, the NHTSA was supposed to make a rule by 2024 and it's 2026 now. [1]
In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2]
I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule."
I read a paper a while ago (which I have failed to locate) which used around binary masks, each in front of a single photodiode, as input to a neural network, which estimated the number of people in front of this effectively ~9-pixel "camera". The binary masks and NN weights were trained at the same time. Presumably, something like this could be used to detect lack of driver focus in a far less invasive manner.
I love the warning about not having hands on the steering wheel.
It goes off all the time. And each time, my hands are on the steering wheel.
It doesn't actually detect contact - it checks to see if you're actively adjusting the steering wheel.
Except I don't need to! The lane keep assist is so good that it's rare I have to give it additional help.
So - I kid you not - I've gotten used to giving a nudge to the steering wheel every so many seconds to prevent that warning (you cannot disable it).
Imagine a car gave you cruise control, and then checked if you were paying attention by requiring you to press down on the accelerator every so many seconds. Does that make sense?
My Nissan does check both hands are contacting the steering wheel making lane centering basically useless if I want to do anything with one hand like adjust my glasses, change the audio etc.
I have the same issue in my 2020 AMG. With lane assit on, the way it detects that your hands are on the steering wheel is by sensing your inputs to counter its inputs to the steering wheel position. It even seems to deliberately steer you off the center of the lane to see if you react.
That is a seriously broken control system. It should be keeping you in the center of the lane and not make you fight against the car.
i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more.
-its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone
-its a good security feature
-the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more.
-in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.
This is why I like modern Renaults/Dacias. They all come with a single button to turn all of this stuff off, or to a preset of your choosing. No need to fiddle with a screen, nothing you cannot disable. Bliss.
Expect an error but this will depend on the brand.
"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
Not sure about the systems on cars in the EU, but I got a loaner 2025 Hyundai Tuscon when my EV was in the shop. It had some driver attention monitoring feature with a camera above the steering wheel staring me in the eyes. I covered it with a piece of black electrical tape. It popped a little warning on the main display (IIRC, a crossed out eye, but maybe I'm confusing with Subaru Eyesight) when the car first started up, showing that the camera wasn't working, then proceeded to be silent for the rest of the drive.
I dunno if that'll fly going forward. I know I'll test it in every new car with this feature that I test drive though!
Maybe you'll be able to buy a box to plug into the CAN bus and simulate pressing the button to deactivate it. Sorta like the auto-stop eliminator for that horrid feature (which saves less than 5 gallons of gas per year in my dad's Subaru - thankfully mine is one year too old for that).
Those nudges are gentle and totally safe in every car I've ever had. And no "random" nudges outside road construction work with dubious lane markings where you need to have a grip on the wheel anyway. A regular firm grip always overrides lane keeping.
I mostly agree in my 2024 Ioniq 5, but not in my 2019 Subaru Outback. You can definitely override the lane keep if you have a firm grip and are ready for it, but it tries to throw me off the road often enough that I don't use it anymore.
The scariest was when I had to swerve into another lane to avoid some trash that was sticking into the road from the highway. It tried to force me back into it twice! Luckily I was ready but it gave me a fright for sure.
What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ? 0.1€ cost, can be removed in case of control otherwise you can pretend the camera wasn't working.
End of story...
Honestly, I'm all for more automated system while driving because I drive but I also bike and walk. Some people are complete nuts that shouldn't have their license and the least you can do is hold their hand, with as much algorithm as you can, like they are toddlers driving a 3 Tonne car.
That sounds like a hardware issue that might be soluble in "wire cutters and a bad attitude", or at minimum "hot air resoldering station, microscope, and a bad attitude". I wonder what their software stack is like, too.
Until you realize these aren't isolated systems. This is one of the 30 different sensors used to monitor drivers.
If you cut a wire, expect the car company + insurance company to become aware of the "mod" you did. Expect the car to simply not start anymore. Expect the local authorities to be notified.
We need to stop this nonsense at the legislation level, not after the fact.
It's completely idiotic. Technology should be assisting in performing the attention itself, not nannying the driver.
Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
True, but there are quite lightweight cars and heavy motorcycles.
Lower damage potential of small and light cars compared to SUVs does not seem to give them a free pass to skip the sprawling driver assistance regulations.
I don't know about other countries, but public transport buses in Australia don't have seat belts on them. Even as a kid, I remember wondering why there was such a fuss made around seat belts in cars when you couldn't use one if you wanted to on the bus.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
Buses in America don't have seatbelts either. They're just so big and heavy relatively to cars that you're very unlikely to be seriously injured. (It does happen of course, and that usually makes the news.)
because when crashing on a motorcycle, it's only the cyclists face that's turned inside out and in such a way that it's not a burden on society to treat a vegetable.
So, 1. yet another beep/boop in the car contributing to alert-fatigue, and 2. another stream of data inevitably sent off-device and monetized in god knows what ways by god knows which third party "partners".
Good. The amount of people I see looking at their smartphone while driving, completely oblivious to what’s happening on the road is concerning. I don’t see why that footage needs to be transferred anywhere and GDPR should ensure it won’t be, so no need to spin this as a privacy nightmare cars have tons of sensors already and there’s probably little commercial interest in filming people’s faces while they’re driving so I don’t see what’s so controversial about this.
Who knew that my decision to not own a car would turn out to be so prescient. That I can still be killed by a driver distracted by the anti-distraction feature is just the usual irony of existence.
I test drove a Subaru (in America) with this feature and absolutely hated it. The amount of false positives was ridiculous. Often I was literally staring straight ahead, driving on a straight road, and getting beeped at to pay attention.
It felt like total security theater, which a huge surveillance tech vector as well. I will do my damnedest to never ever buy a car with this anti-feature. If I ever have to I'm sure those beeps will either get disabled one way or another, or eventually be completely filtered out by my brain like other predictably useless sounds are.
A mandatory camera and a mandatory modem in every car is a privacy nightmare. The EU does not care about privacy of it's subjects, it cares about control. The US is not much different. It's over for freedom in the west. The frogs are boiling.
Orwellian. What an absolute nightmare of government control. Advancing technology is giving too much power to the government, do not let them have it or you will never get your rights back.
I purchased a new a hybrid car a year ago. It is impossible to deactivate permanently speed limit and lane alerts. They are useless, dumb and dangerous if you ask me. Detecting a 40km/h on the highway from a road sign on a near by road it's not safety. It's been a year of touching and correcting touches for disabling these two alerts, of course you have to do more clicks no way of accessing it from a quick menu or from quick actions on the steering wheel. The car works perfectly but this thing is so annoying to me that I'm seriously thinking of selling it. The touch screen is slooooow, when the internal temperature is higher is even more slooow for a ui that should be 1200fps for what it does even on a underpowered throttled by heat waves board chip. I either sell the car of take my time and find a way to hack that damn firmware. This is not the way to go, the way to go is autonomous driving not all this annoying BS
The speed limit detection exists on my US Toyota vehicle, but it doesn’t beep or nag, just tells me what it thinks the speed limit is on the HUD, which is nice. Although when I drove through Georgia the interstate has all these minimum speed signs that look close enough to speed limit signs that fully half the time through Georgia it thought the speed limit was 40mph instead of 80mph. It would have been an absolute nightmare drive if it had beeped intermittently for 6 hours.
Note that they must be sold with this feature. It does not say you have to keep this feature, you can aftermarket remove it or disconnect it just fine.
I'll keep my 2014 golf mk7 thank you. Euro5, no adblue bullshit. Still gets good mileage, is still cheap to maintain even after 260k km (the biggest expense has been the dual mass flywheel with a clutchpack) and the only high tech feature is a radar based adaptive cruise control.
Considering how many mk7 golfs were made over the years it'll be easy to just get another one for the next decade. I'd also consider the Hyundai ioniq 5 or 6 which have a shortcut on the steering wheel to just disable all the nanny crap.
> On the positive side, the regulations require the ADDW system to work on a "closed loop" without the use of biometric data.
lmfao, the regulations required antipollution systems too didn't they ?
Even if by some miracle this is the case for all manufacturers I'm betting my first son the software can helpfully be updated to be cloud enabled once insurances companies catch up or regulations are updated for more safety.
Hope you like walking a lot.
I would rather die in a car crash than get nagged like this. Europe is the nanniest of nanny states, its inconceivable that people actually want to live like this.
ouf yeah, I agree. I had a lot more to say about this but the ICE checkpoint found my smuggled kinder egg and now they're sending me off to alligator alcatraz.
It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
Ok I'm a citizen of EU country. I don't consent, I don't agree. I want a car without inside cameras, without systems beeping, blinking, nor vibrating at me. Don't you ever move the steering wheel under my hands. Why I'm screaming into the void?
In many EU jurisdictions (like Germany) continuously recording dashcams are banned. Mandating a potentially continuously recording camera pointed at you at the same time is ridiculous.
And I triple hate that we've helped develop the technology that powers it.
In hindsight, it was inevitable.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
My car would start beeping randomly and one day it wouldn't stop beeping. Turns out it was because we have a baby seat in the back on a window seat but it would slightly touch the edge of the middle seat. The solution was to clip in the seatbelt on the middle seat even through there was nobody sitting there.
One of the very dangerous side effect of this is it pushes a lot of people out of the ability to own a decent car legally. The camera, AI chip and all supporting electronic supporting it will raise the price of the entry level Dacia (a Dacia Spring is already more than 15k euros). So people will keep old cars as long as they can.
You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?
If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.
In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars.
On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.
I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.
The headline is wrong. The article and the headline seems to be written in a way to cause outrage by giving the impression that the EU requires cameras which should be recording your face all the time and storing/sending it to authorities or something but what the EU actually requires is "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System" which may be implemented using cameras and no recording or transmitting is required, in fact actually recording and transmitting would be a problem with GDPR.
"New government mandate paves way for additional government mandate" is about as straightforward a slippery slope argument as you can get.
Slippery slope arguments don't require the eventual fear (e.g. cameras recording you) to be present in the current form, otherwise it wouldn't be a slope.
There are no camera requirements and if cameras are used they are prohibited from using them for the stuff the article implies because the privacy is protected by GDPR. Remember how US corporations really hate EU regulations? Yes that's the regulation preventing them from processing your face even if the system is implemented with a camera.
GDPR doesn't protect privacy of data, it regulates how any collected data is stored and used and requires consent of the person.
As a US-based developer, all it does is make it more irritating to build anything that europeans might use because I have to gather consent 100 times. Nothing else changes about the system, you just decide whether to use it or not -- which, by the way, is already a feature of all software right out of the box. So GDPR achieves nothing except annoying all developers and users everywhere.
Now they can simply write consent into the purchase agreement for a new vehicle. No consent = no purchase. It's really simple.
If you really want to believe that if a light shines on a CCD chip the only way forward is to record that and send that to corporations and the governments that keep believing it. We are in an age of extremism, everything must be extreme and detached from reality.
You either didn't read my comment, or aren't groking it.
Whether there are cameras mandated now is irrelevant. The framework that accepts government-mandated ADDW is now in place. Most makers are fulfilling it by using cameras, whether required to or not.
Future enhancements to how ADDW is enforced (such as mandatory cameras), is now a much smaller hurdle for them to overcome.
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, you don't understand GDPR (or at least, how it affects US companies).
and what sensor do you propose using to make sure people appear awake and alert? a magic device that can evaluate posture, demeanor, facial expression, wakefulness, etc but somehow definitely is not a camera?
yes you've read the text accurately, now it's time to use your brain and consider what it means.
If you want to be pedantic you can choose to be pedantic about the fact that the text literally does not require a camera. If we can pass that, then let's stick with the reality and understand that processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean that it is being recorded and handed over to the police. Since we are allowed to use our brains, we can understand that recording and transmitting would require extra hardware over what's required to process the data from CCD sensor and discard it right away.
> processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean
and I'm the one being pedantic. ok bro. There's a thing called common sense, thinking for yourself, using your own brain to perform inference. Try it some time.
Nope, the laws require Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System and does not require cameras aimed at your face.
Also, cameras are receivers. Nothing happens when cameras are aimed at your face, it is only significant when you are interested with the received image and it actually nothing happens, it is processed on device to see if you are tired/distracted/asleep.
I remember the brief period when they told us that the self service checkout weren't recording video. Then they just said oh actually they do now and nobody battered an eye lid
If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
Modern HN is all about the nanny state. If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide ... right? It's not like a future government might decide that just existing as a certain race or accessing health care as a certain gender is a crime...
Many of these warnings are hazardous, especially in an unfamiliar vehicle. They are extremely annoying and often incorrect. They result in extended periods of distracted driving trying to figure out how to turn off the warning.
I was in a rental car recently that was filled with random chimes going off. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was sure a nuisance and took my mind off the road.
Very different threat model though. Commercial aircraft aren't sensitive to keep-your-eyes-on-the-road failures with seconds-scale latencies, airlines require autopilot use, there is a copilot present at all times, the FAA very strictly regulates work hours and substance use, etc...
Sure, don't nag a pilot who is already very well backstopped by the existing solutions. Your uncle coming back from the bar at 2am doesn't have any of that.
Repeated nuisance alarms have the same effect on all humans, not just on pilots - it trains them to ignore the alarms. Eventually this will lead to non-nuisance alarms being ignored and lives being lost.
That depends on "repeated" and "nuisance". My experience in a Tesla is that the attention monitoring never has false positive alarms at all. And it 100% has caught situations where I'm head down in the cockpit on autopilot in ways that, honestly, I probably shouldn't have been. So there's a single data point saying you're wrong.
This kind of counter-intuitive/smarter-than-the-obvious pontification is a HN smell to me. Most of the time the obvious solution is correct. Driver attention management is one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) contributors to accident rate, and IMHO probably deserves some assistive technology attention. If the reverse is true, it needs actual evidence and not an attempt to reason from aviation evidence (a regime where inattention is NOT a major problem!).
Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons:
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
Designing this machine vision system is insurmountable. It will never be actually good at its stated purpose, because how much you can look through some window or glance back at your kids is decided by the outside environment and it will be impossible to fit accurate judgement of it in the computers in the car.
Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the same place as well, and in relation to the marked edges of the road, which often isn't the natural placing in curves and so on. As a consequence roads likely need maintenance more often, and as a proficient driver that does not let the car have opinions about placement on the road one commonly has much smaller margins when placing the car in the nice trajectory through a curve due to the sunken lanes from the assisted cars.
I have news for you: those systems already exist and they work. The "insurmountable" development work has already been done. How long you can safely look away from the road is determined mostly by physics and has hard bounds. More than ~5 seconds is never OK while the vehicle is on a public road. At speed, a single second can be a second too long. The problem isn't that the road looks clear now. The problem is that this can change instantly, without warning and in the most surprising ways at any moment. A kid running into the road from behind a car, an object falling onto the road, an animal jumping onto the road from the brush/ditch/tree-line... the list goes on. Forcing the driver to pay attention is good. There is no massive situational leeway.
For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system:
The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.
Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.
In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.
I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:
>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
I actually suggested a solution like this 2 years ago, because so many drivers are bad at signaling. I wanted a camera that used machine learning to learn a driver's cues when they're making a turn, and eventually it would be able to activate the signals for the driver.
I'm sick and tired of standing on the side of the road with my dog and waiting for a car just for it to make a turn. FOAD
I am rarely in a rush, if a car signals I will allow it to turn, I will stand back and wait, no problem. But 80% of them are really bad at this.
For all the people complaining about driver distraction alerts… have you considered that perhaps you were in fact distracted? Looking at a passenger to talk instead of at the road, etc?
It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.
I rented a car that had this feature and instantly hated it. I forget the make, but if it detected you were not looking at the road for a period of time, it would slam on the brakes and release. A way to jolt you awake.
The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.
I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.
What the hell. I had my last rental just beep at me, and was astonished. But this... sounds literally unsafe.
All new cars.
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.
Maybe that's part of why VW had to fire 100k employees? They've been lately doing a subpar job designing cars.
I think it’s a legal requirement, because it’s the same for Tesla.
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.
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.
At least with Tesla you have massive ecosystem of third party add-ons, including defeat devices.
I do wish it was even quieter tho. It's kinda of a shame you got a quiet EV but then add annoying bingbongs.
> 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 suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds like one of those situations where you just keep turning up the radio until the beeping goes away
They have thought of that. The radio volume is reduced during the Beep.
I'm deaf so they better shine lasers into my eyeballs
Hehe
I'm also blind so they can stuff those lasers where it doesn't shine.
I wasnt blind till they shone those lasers in my eyes.
Do they come with a sticker reading "Don't look into laser with remaining eye"
Do you drive often, then? :-)
probably better than most people staring at their device
Bring another radio, or bluetooth speakers.
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.
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.
Anyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
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.
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.
It won't work for everyone, but I have a bicycle trailer for food shopping. 20 minutes ride each way. I go about once a week.
giving up your freedom to limit others in the name of safety seems unwise.
too much control creates a generation behave like the kids.
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.
While not in the SU directly, I got to enjoy public transport in communist Poland for a few years and yeah, you don't want that.
That works for people in cities, if cities were made to by usable by cyclists and pedestrians. Not so much for people that live in rural areas.
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.
I feel compelled to mention that the vast majority of cyclists are part of a household which owns a car, as well.
Wait until they mandate a panel of warning LEDs on your bike or a cam on your bike recording your face.
Wait until manual bikes are banned and only gps tracked e-bikes exist for citizen safety!
I legit can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
That's what so great about it, isn't it?
> 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.
I gave up and just ignore all the blips. It also sometimes invents speed limit signs.
Imagine driving thru night with kids sleeping and suddenly car starts beeping.
Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?
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
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.
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
There'll be firmware hacks to force that mode soon enough.
You wouldn’t download a bookmarklet on your car
"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 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)
I saw a mod where there was an arduino/lcd setup on the dash of an Audi to turn off the ESC and other annoyances on startup.
I turn mine off quite often. On dirt roads and snow.
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.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you are not looking at the road in the first place.
The kids will wake up a few times, then just get used and grow up to ignore all the annoying beeps.
My boss sometimes drives without a belt while the car keeps beeping and he succesfully ignores it.
> 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.
ngl i think people should just read their car's manual
ngl I think you should and then try to say that again
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
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 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…?
"might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation."
Nah, you just get knee-jerk, feel-good laws because the masses never dig deeper and the elected only care about being reelected.
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.
If the masses were against this'll, the reps would be voted out or recalled.
It'd be a bold strategy, cause in the meantime everyone says "never buy a Kia!" (or whatever brand, but Kia is the usual suspect)
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.
> and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason
Obviously, you're not familiar with Toonces, the Driving Cat.
That takes me back, thanks.
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.
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.
yeah, my car doesn't like it when I look more than 2 cars ahead, or if I am looking uphill (because I am driving uphill)
EU driving assists are obtrusive to the point of making driving less safe in my experience. Great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-S76WEl25k
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.
Can't you turn that feature off?
I often complain about the lack of buttons, but my car actually has a dedicated button to turn this safety feature off.
IIRC, veering from the lane is the cause of most collisions, so it makes sense to have this.
> 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.
Fun when your car makes you do both at once.
> 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.
Like I said: We need rush hour mode
> 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.
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.
A "feature" like this can easily kill someone in some of the sketchy mountain roads I've been on in Crete.
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.
These systems are far too immature for use.
What car? My Kia has dedicated buttons. It's three presses.
It's a Ford, with almost no physical buttons.
(I edited my comment adding the word deep, to indicate it is 3 clicks deep. Very annoying.)
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.
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.
That's like the jurisdictions that put rumble strips on the white line and not further into the shoulder. Very frustrating for ordinary cornering.
Why would ordinary cornering need to use the shoulder?
It may be possible to change the default with an OBD programmer.
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.
> to the point of making driving less safe...
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).
How many bells would sound if SUNGLASSES hid your eyes?!
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.
Wow, I did not know that! Thanks for the clarification, that is actually decently well thought out.
It's a matter of time before someone invents sunglasses with eyes painted on the lenses.
https://holographer.com/product/hologram-eye-sunglasses/
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.
Just because it's available in a Lexus does not mean it's available in a Corolla
In Europe it does. ADDW is required in all new vehicles, including Corollas.
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.
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"...
The GP seems to be describing "auto hold", which is a different feature from hill start assist, and is newer and less prevalent.
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.
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.
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.
BC stopped emission testing 10ish years ago because new cars almost never fail so there wasn't much value continuing the program.
Dunno why these programs never took a sampling approach and data-mined which makes/models/years to target the next year/cycle.
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.
Mass (low-value) testing is only more affordable if you value people’s time at $0/hr
It's not going to keep old cars on the road if you mandate expensive tests to do so, when new cars don't need the tests.
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.
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.
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.
Same in Lisbon, nobody cares.
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.
I live in California, only drive mid 2000s cars, and haven't noticed any of the restrictions getting tighter.
Last year, or the year before, Texas dropped emissions testing, except in its most populous counties.
The emissions tests only test to the level that the car was first registered (or produced) doesn't it?
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.
Must be close to actually worthless if they’re not shipping them out-of-state, no?
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.
That’s a good thing, yes?
It does promote some catalytic converter theft.
It's good thing if you like not having cancer.
Cash for Clunkers was not mandatory
Not being mandatory and not having an effect are different claims.
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.
If you keep a population poor enough, almost anything can be functionally mandatory.
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 wish I had fixed the Honda!
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
Are you talking about an old Honda or some issue with new Hondas?
They had a 2008 Honda which was damaged and bought a new Toyota which has modern issues. Did you read their comment at all?
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!
1. https://www.austockphoto.com.au/image/40-when-lights-flash-s...
> 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/Ira28fgSF7M?si=-GrsTTGemLY1LwLw
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?
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.
Are they not rain-sensing wipers?
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.
> Then there's the incessant beeping at you
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.
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.
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.
Same here.
I drive a 1991 Honda Prelude and I don't think I'll want to drive anything else probably ever.
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.
93 Honda Civic here. 100% agree. I don't appreciate anything on a car that does stuff on its own without my direct input.
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.
That sounds good in theory but the first time you get into a dirty one with a weird smell will be the last time you use it.
You presumably live in or near a city.
>2008
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).
> 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.
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).
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".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_production_car_speed_r...
>>The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit
is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?
It's one of the travel assist features where the cars try to stick to the changing speed limits, slow down for corners etc... .
> 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
I would assume all such cars have an option to turn this off.
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.
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 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.
The older I get, the more I pick the last option.
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.
But you do have to keep an eye on those things. It can make the adjustments but you can't take your eye off them.
I just drive my car because you have to pay attention anyways. No cruise control, nothing.
> A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
What is preventing car owners to cover it with electrical tape and move on?
> I find them very annoying
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?
Legislation isn't for your personal benefit, silly. It's for the corporations.
It's for the benefit of everyone else around you so you don't kill them while flying down a street scrolling instagram reels.
Presumptuous busybodying as a service.
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?
> on a curve
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.
> If your a safe driver
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.
The intrusiveness of these systems varies significantly between manufacturers. Don't buy one with an annoying, intrusive system.
There is a minimum intrusiveness required by law, though. One could even say it's intrusive by design, depending on your perspective
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.
Same place (and only place) I've driven one. Easy stick shift, a bit underpowered for the more mountainous highways, but it was a good ride.
> 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.
Ah, did your car pick up the speed limit sign on the French auto-route for… motorcycles filtering between lanes too?
> 2008
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
When I loved in Guam we had a joke bout this:
How do you tell if someone is driving drunk?
They are driving straight!
With the unspoken part being anyone NOT drunk was weaving to dodge debris, potholes, etc.
Same joke in the rust (aka pothole) belt
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.
I have a highway 98 near me. My car reads it as a speed limit.
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.
> 2008 Governments will tax older cars out of existence.
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.
That sounds like the kind of feature where there's a setting buried in the menus for it.
> lane assist
I prefer the term "lane insist"
some might even say "lame insist"
What came into effect in 2009?
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.
> looking at you, Volkswagen
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.
> 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.
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 absolutely hate it.
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.
But to be honest I bought a VW Polo this year, in february, it's amazing, it's invasive, but full of optionals, sensors, and comforts
I was a bit scared by reading on internet people complaining about cars full of electronics, it's been a bless for me, for real
useful context, I live in Naples, Italy, it's a city made for horses
yes I can't understand how anyone buys these
Because there is nothing else left to buy.
I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
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.
You had a point until
> to force people out of cars.
All that stuff following is also nonsense.
“They” don’t want people out of cars, the companies want that sweet sweet revenue stream from vacuuming up data. That’s all this is
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.
Lol no they don't, governments still think automotive industry is great, and of course so do the owners of these industries.
Who is "they"?
What is their motive for wanting to "force people out of cars"?
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.
"the environment" wants to "force people out of cars"? are you hearing yourself?
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.
>Because the green movement is largely made up of socialists
Okay, and where are they getting their political clout and funding? I believe in following the money. Where does the money come from?
>I don’t think it’s accurate to assume auto manufacturers have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels.
Auto manufacturers certainly have a financial interest in private automobile ownership, don't you think?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-socialism
I'm not going to respond to your sealioning. Either do the bare minimum research, or stop participating in this manner.
Who desires the control? Can you name a member of this nebulous conspiracy? Nobody I've spoken to about this topic has been able to.
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.
"Trust me bro, I can't point to them but they exist" is also all the evidence we have of Aliens, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Why don’t you just google ecosocialism? Read the wiki entry? Is that too difficult?
Here:
Elmar Altvater
Ian Angus
Rudolph Bahro
Adam Bandt
Hugo Blanco
Murray Bookchin
Jabari Brisport
Walt Brown
Paul Burkett
Max Chandler-Mather
Barry Commoner
Jeremy Corbyn
Pat Devine
Jutta Ditfurth
Sabrina Fernandes
John Bellamy Foster
Alberto Garzón
André Gorz
Ramachandra Guha
Donna Haraway
Howie Hawkins
Jason Hickel
Joan Herrera i Torres
Naomi Klein
Mark Carney
Joel Kovel
Dimitri Lascaris
Enrique Leff
Michael Löwy
Caroline Lucas
Andreas Malm
David McReynolds
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Steven Guilbeault
Chico Mendes
Luka Mesec
George Monbiot
William Morris
Abdullah Öcalan
James O'Connor
David Orton
Simon Pirani
Zack Polanski
Lee Rhiannon
Raül Romeva
Manuel Sacristán
Ariel Salleh
Joan Saura
Pernille Skipper
Jill Stein
Chlöe Swarbrick
Alan Thornett
Peter Tatchell
Alex Tyrrell
Derek Wall
Raymond Williams
Gerrard Winstanley
Avi Lewis
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?
You do understand that's an incomplete list of prominent eco-socialists, not literally every single believer right?
>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.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Digital_Id...
https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X000005JJGcUAO
https://www.weforum.org/communities/digital-currency-governa...
>[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).
You forgot the bike lanes that take up road space but nobody uses. Every socialist mayor's favorite anti-car policy.
That's the classic. City is not friendly to bikes or peds, they add bike lanes, city is not friendly to bikes peds or cars.
Cars aren't friendly to cities
>You forgot the bike lanes that take up road space but nobody uses.
Where I live (city in the PNW), bike lanes see heavy use year-round.
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."
Where I live there lots of little hills: the city is made of lots of hills. Even with electric bikes, it's really horrible to drive in the city.
But you see bicycles on the bike lanes, lots of bicycles. When it's summer time and when it's not raining.
Otherwise the people are all in their cars.
"Just one more car lane bro it'll fix congestion this time I swear."
Yes, because removing car lanes while car usage is growing (due to demographics and urban development) it totally the right approach.
Some cities really do have enough road for the population
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".
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.
Here's the text describing the system: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
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.
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.
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.
Relevant section:
> 2.3. Privacy and data protection
> 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.
It’s illegal which is why when a government does it they either classify it or farm it out to an ally. Have you read any of what Snowden leaked?
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.
You'd know the bad guys are Eastasia. Or is it Eurasia?
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
if all that happens is the car beeping at them then i would imagine that number will stay at 50%
Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms.
The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.
So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?
But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.
P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
My parents’ ‘80s Chrysler New Yorker would talk instead of beep. ‘A door is ajar,” it would say, and we would giggle, ‘no, a door is a door!’ After Kitt in Nightrider, car companies wanted to be cool.
https://youtube.com/shorts/IhSrmB2qCdY?is=vg47_htvXpXS2ElU
> But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
I'd like to know more about this, actually.
Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
I've gotten beeps and something flashed on the instrument panel, but when I focused my eyes on the instrument panel, it was gone.
Freakin' useless.
A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
I with my car had an accessible log of these notices. Another example, my car gives you a safety score at the end of every drive, out of 100. When I get less than 100, there's no information about what I might do to improve my score, and ostensibly, drive more safely.
Wow that’s like such an obvious thing that makes so much sense. I have no doubt something like “Hands on, Hands on, Hands on” will start chirping in near future
Class D amplifiers use that same trick, just at much higher switching frequencies (pushing quantization noise ultrasonic, where it can be filtered). Since transistors are most efficient when fully on/off, very little power is wasted as heat. That's what made the modern revolution in tiny amps possible.
It's pretty amazing what you can get in terms of power density these days.
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Power-Amplifier-IRS2092S-Chan...
Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
English is the universal aviation language.
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.
You're talking about an industry that gives you a generic "check engine" light and allows dealerships to charge you $100 just to read you the error message.
I don't have any faith that they have the wherewithal to make any common sense design choices about error states.
You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps.
You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.
Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
Feels like it'd be easier to differentiate jingles compared to different words of a language you don't know. You can vary intonations etc, but by that point you're back to jingles.
Ford has had that since Blue Cruise 2.0, or thereabouts. It really shocked me how often it catches my attention being diverted. Things like talking to my passengers, adjusting the climate controls, or eating- I'm not even talking about 'advanced distractions' like my phone.
It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea.
The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".
Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.
I also have an EX30 and while I have many many MANY complaints about this car, driver monitoring isn't one of them.
Also disabling this feature is only 2 taps (because EU says it can't be only one tap), Settings -> toggle Driver Monitoring.
I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score.
And who doesn't want the safest car?
People that have a perfect driving record.
how much have cars safety improved in terms of crashes, airbags, etc, versus the robot will stop the crash?
Impossible to measure, many other uncontrolled variables - esp. significant improvements to infrastructure in Europe, and regulations. Take NL, where a crash involving a pedestrian or a cyclist effectively forces the driver to prove their innocence. I can walk across a Dutch town blindfolded with the biggest risk to my wellbeing being cyclists (well, and the canals). I'd guess the impact of those intervention dwarfs the "i will beep at you until i make you deaf if you don't put your seatbelt over your grocery bag" innovations.
I grew up in/with cars which would score 0 (more like -3 to -5) and made it to adulthood, so I have a feeling that these features are not strictly neccesary.
At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)
My father grew up drinking a ton of alcohol and smoking, like his friends. Many of them are dead.
By your logic, we should keep drinking and smoking.
Everyone dies eventually, so that means very little by itself. Did they die young? How much younger than their peers? Did they gain enough enjoyment from drinking and smoking to offset the fewer years of life (subjective, of course, but important to consider)?
Every intervention has a cost. Not all results will be worth the cost we pay for them. I think we are well past the point in Western society where we are giving up too much in order for too small a return, personally. With cars, but also just in general, people have lost the ability to do cost-benefit analysis and act as though every safety improvement is an unalloyed good. But they aren't, and I think that this thinking is making all of our lives significantly worse.
Given that its society that invests in them during development and has to pick them up when they're broken its only fair to also nudge towards a preemptive solution. The economics of people dying needlessly in their 20s is worth the intervention.
We should ban driving by your logic?
I have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.
Is that the regulation that is bad or the way the manufacturer implemented it ?
I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.
Don't buy car that sucks.
Sounds about right for Volvo, sadly. I’ve owned four over the years, all great, but my most recent one has such dogshit software that I’ll never buy another Volvo.
My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
What happens if you wear sunglasses?
Normal sunglasses it sees trough, but if you somehow block it, you can't enable some features anymore (pilot assist).
That was different in the early sw versions, where blocking it would simply do nothing, so I had a 3D printed thing to block the camera.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction. Other people say the same about the diverted driving detector, and I imagine others said the same about the seatbelt sensor.
The intersection of personal freedom and personal safety is an interesting topic, I don't think there's a right answer and it's ultimately pretty subjective.
> I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
> Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction.
Congress already passed a law in 2021 to start the process of requiring alcohol impairment detection in new cars around 2030 - the HALT Drunk Driving Act. It had broad, bipartisan support. I would say "most people agree" does not appear to be the case.
I have a hard time believing that the public at large is gonna be okay with having to blow into a hose anytime they turn on their cars.
The law only specifies the outcome (alcohol detection) not the implementation (hose blowing)
Maybe transdermal alcohol monitor could be put on the wheel
It only sounds like overreach because we have become numb to an incredible amount of killing from distracted drivers.
> incredible amount of killing from distracted drivers
> 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/trumps-transpor...
For reference, fatalities on bikes:
> 9.32 fatalities per 100 million cyclist miles (6 deaths per 100M kilometers)
https://www.calbike.org/urban-transportation-research-bike-f...
The first link is a propaganda website so not really much use, and for the second one, pretty much all fatalities on bikes are the result of being killed by distracted drivers.
>The US has eight times as many pedestrian deaths per mile as Germany.
Clearly the US is unusually bad for distracted driving.
The stats come from the government agency in the US which tracks driver fatalities.
Here's the source document: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Regarding "distracted driving" causing cyclist fatalities, my point was more that bicyclists have a higher risk rate. If we're already going down this path for safety, banning bicycling would have a higher impact than reducing fatalities ~10% which is what the EU claimed it could prevent.
Regarding the claim that "pretty much all fatalities on bikes are the result of being killed by drivers", that's simply not true. It also largely depends on laws and location.
https://www.bikeattorney.com/bike-accident-common-causes.htm...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/05/20/1364622...
Did a quick research and saw that in 2024 there were around 12k deaths in which one or more drunk drivers were involved. Doesn’t seem like much for a country with around 350 million people. In comparison, drug causes 7x those deaths. Cancer and heart diseases even more.
I feel like we have the technology to prevent a car from starting if the driver is significantly impared, but "solving" addiction, cancer, and heart disease are much harder problems.
Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.
That being said I know it would never be implemented in a sane way in the US, and you would probably have situations like your car insurance automatically increasing due to a faulty sensor, so I'm ultimately against it unless a lot of other stuff changes.
But it's still much more possible than "preventing drug addiction"
Every car safety post on HN has "guy who thinks 12k deaths is maybe not too bad." Thanks, guy! You really put things in perspective there.
I was simply suggesting that perhaps this level of overreach isn’t justified. Of course, any road death is regrettable.
Guy probably doesn't personally know any of those 12k...
Cancer & heart disease you're counting basically all natural causes.
That's already a huge number. But it's ignoring the much larger issue of distracted drivers, usually on their phone.
Personal freedom to drive a two tonne battering ram at deadly speeds where others are walking, biking, etc should be heavily regulated.
I think I'd consider this kind of technology at the intersection of personal freedom and _public_ safety. Drunk or distracted driving puts others at risk, not just you.
Owned a Ford Mustang Mach-e with BkueCruise for about 3 years now. No obvious false alarms about missing attention. Interestingly, it doesn't get confused by my sunglasses and still catches me looking aside for too long. I think it is a rather good implementation overall.
It gives me false positives when I'm holding the wheel at the top and my wrist is blocking line of sight from the camera. On the other hand, sunglasses have never tripped it all.
> It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
This is the exact opposite of my experience! The one time I tried BlueCruise, it went into "panic mode" every time I turned my head to check my blindspots.
> adjusting the climate controls,
Well if they hadn't removed climate control buttons, this would not be a concern!
Not being able to easily adjust climate settings is very much a safety concern. And the fact that it beeps at you is them acknowledging it!
The truck I was driving had physical buttons for all the climate control functions, and for volume/on-off too. It wouldn't have been surprising to me if I was distracted fiddling with the screen, but it would give me the alert because I was playing with the buttons for an extended period of time.
Ah - whenever I had a car with physical buttons, I could typically press the ones I wanted without looking. Fairly quickly too.
That's why I hate screens.
Thank you! I often feel like I’m in the minority on this site, it is nice to hear someone else articulate my feelings. Driving is a privilege not a right. But since America decided to decimate public transit in the early 20th century (and stick with it) we’re stuck with cars. So I’m in favor of anything that makes it safer. Hopefully this crosses the pond.
I don't doubt your experience but I've had the exact opposite experience with a Subaru where there were so many false positives it was worse than useless and was instead an active distraction.
Given the general state of auto manufacturer software I would fully expect something like this to be janky and unreliable. It might work in some conditions on some faces but also perform abysmally in many other scenarios.
I would argue that if someone can't safely operate a vehicle without this then maybe they shouldn't have a license
If locks are to keep honest men honest, then driving monitoring cameras are to keep attentive drivers attentive.
Interesting perspective. In my experience the risk is actually that it results in alert fatigue, which means that drivers that would otherwise pay attention to such an alert no longer do.
In this scenario anyone who "should" have their license would never trigger this warning in the first place so it wouldn't be an issue.
In a well implemented system that accounted for every edge case, sure. The systems are not there yet.
What exactly are you arguing for? Changes to the driving test to detect how someone reacts to distractions?
In NZ we have to identify hazards. Distractions would be interesting. "Send a text to someone and include that obscure emoji". Or perhaps more vogue - go thru EV charging app registration including verifying your email address and entering credit card details, while driving.
good way to get notification fatigue and tunnel vision. look ahead, ignore everything else and have a shocked pikachu face when you sideswipe someone because you're well trained to not check your blind spots
I need to call bullshit on this. I own the same system and it totally allows looking around for normal driving. Stare to the side or the center console for more than a few seconds and it will alert you - exactly at the point where it becomes recklessly unsafe to do so.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
Probable especially if it gets drunk drivers off the road but I, for one, would be deeply uncomfortable driving knowing my every twitch is recorded and _more importantly_ open to misinterpretation in case of a claim. I could easily believe otherwise averagely fine drivers being negatively affected by this if the surveillance takes up headspace.
Observation affects systems but not always for the better.
I also wonder how well this fares under night driving conditions where the inside of the car has poor exposure.
Related: https://petapixel.com/2025/07/11/dutch-woman-fined-500-after...
> It also seemed really accurate.
It's really not. When I'm cruising on the highway I like to rest my right wrist on the top of the wheel, which blocks the sensor.
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
> When I'm cruising on the highway I like to rest my right wrist on the top of the wheel, which blocks the sensor.
Won't this shatter your wrist if your airbag deploys? I remember being taught to hold the sides of the wheel in driving class.
There's theory and there's practice. In theory you're supposed to maintain 10 and 2 at all times. In practice, that gets fatiguing over long trips.
Hello from the 80s! It is now 9 and 3. This changed due to airbags and too many people learning what 'degloving' means.
NHTSA now recommends "8 and 4" hand position. Did see the memo about this?
I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/steeringtechniqu...
So what you’re saying is we need pressure sensors on the wheel to verify you’re holding it correctly?
My Subaru Solterra / Toyota bz4X is the same way.
I wear some pretty thick glasses and my parents' car CONSTANTLY beeped at me to pay attention to the road.
Eye tracking
But killing innocent bystanders is freedom!
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
It’s also totally plausible that insurance companies will use this data to try and find every single tiny, irrelevant detail to not pay you. Sorry, you blinked before crashing into this other car, we won’t pay for that.
Law enforcement could also use that data to create a nice profile of yourself and how “distracted” you are while driving, and maybe suspend your license forever, why not? And wait till you find how unreliable these sensors are.
Just another surveillance tool in disguise, this is what the EU does best.
The Kia Niro EVs I drive at work have something that apparently detects driver fatigue. I don't know what sets it off but it starts beeping at fire alarm levels and makes the huge LCD constantly flash up warnings, usually before I've even left the yard. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn it off or stop it, so you just have to put up with a constant "BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING" for the whole journey.
New cars are UX nightmares. I'm driving an electric Toyota bz4x. Lovely mechanics, but the general UX (some are because of Android Auto) is terrible. The remote's lock/unlock don't do anything when the car is on. Example: I'm by the trunk and it won't open unless I go back to the driver's door and unlock the doors. App's remote function has too many conditions to do anything. For instance, I'm resting in the back seat and want to turn on the car for some air conditioning, but it says: the doors should be locked, the key fab should be out of the car to start the car.
I'm listening to an audio through a webpage, as soon as I change the volume it starts my last music. This is really annoying. I should guess the right volume, unlock my phone, resume my audio. Old physical volume knobs only changed the volume, not start one of the few apps they know about.
Oh and if I've been listening to loud music and now someone's in the car, I can't lower the volume without starting the music. I want to start with a low volume and then increase it.
These are some of the many stupid UX decisions. I would still not drive an old car. Especially ICE. But would pray that the equivalent of Frame.work appears, I can get an open source car with an open source infotainment.
With Chevrolet starting to sell DIY EV packages and the general simplification of the mechanics of EV cars, I believe such a thing would eventually happen.
After seeing kia evs and having a Tesla. Its the only good EV brand because the software from everywhere else is a complete joke.
Kia will tell me my doors are unlocked when I'm at home.
Tesla has a set home feature. Plus the 50 other annoyances.
Regen doesn't even persist with kia. You have to press the paddle to add it every time you start the car.
All this to say, the only good ux car anymore is tesla. Too bad they leak all recordings and have privacy problems too.
Disagree. I have been driving Kia for 2.5 years. I think the UX is quite good.
I would assume that most people who live in a city would want to know when the Kia is unlocked at home. I think your dislike of that feature may reflect your residence type or garage type.
My experience of Tesla UX was poor, given how few manual controls were available, and the extensive touchscreen reliance required while driving.
A Tesla can choose to auto lock. Or not lock.
Or not lock in a certain area.
Plus the app is an actual usable thing. Not a crap one that sends notifications about doors being unlocked in a garage that never updates.
Last year I had to take my kia to the dealer just to have connectivity work. Verizon had a change and you couldn't even fix it without going in. Antiquated dealer software updates as well.
I also have the same combo of makes, and it's totally wild that people think the two are comparable technologically. The Kia is like owning a locked-down carrier dumbphone from 2007 and the Tesla is like owning an iPhone. Still a walled garden, not exactly an unlocked Android, but at least one that works and is built by developers who care.
It is ridiculous. I'm back at parents driving Kona EV. I swear at that piece of shit every day. Other than reliability issues - I painted myself into a corner last week.
Started a DC charger using card reader, which means you can't stop the charge session on the charger itself (only via app which I wasn't bothered to set up). Turns out car doesn't have a feature to stop DC charging. Had to wait for it to top up to 80%.
Ha, mine's not an EV so I haven't hit that, but it absolutely tracks. Every part of the app feels like something that was built by a consultancy to fulfill a set of Jira tickets by people who have never and will never actually drive one of the cars.
> touchscreen reliance required while driving.
Give us an example lol
Sigh, I’m so afraid you’re right, since I don’t want to buy a Tesla for values reasons. I wonder if Rivian will be competitive on the software front?
if it makes you feel better you are supporting American automakers and American workers when you buy tesla - has helped a lot of people swallow the musk pill when buying one
Wow so you prefer to purchase a worse product to appease your leftist views? (or is it just typical virtue signaling?)
You mean the bZ4X. It wasn't enough that the name is incomprehensible, they also capitalized it incomprehensibly. I think the primary goal of that car was to see how few they could sell, so they could go back to hybrid and hydrogen.
The VW eUp! has a similar naming consistency issue. Is it an electric VW Up? VW eUP!? VW e•Up!? VW e-Up!? Who knows...
Why are car companies other than Tesla and BYD so dumb with their EV naming strategy, but perfectly fine at naming gasoline cars? Really curious because it seems like you have to put in effort to be this silly at naming. Reminds me of how Microsoft names anything.
I forgot to mention, it's stylized as: ᵇZ4X
> New cars are UX nightmares.
It's amazing that china might be the one stepping up and regulating sanity by returning good turn signals and gear selectors:
https://www.notateslaapp.com//news/3593/tesla-likely-to-make...
(on some models tesla has turn signals as buttons on the wheel/yoke and gear selection on the ...touchscreen... yikes)
That's because you bought a car from a company which places UX at the bottom of their list. On top of that, even if they place it high on their list, they are simply incompetent at it.
All of the things you described work perfectly as you'd expect from good UX pov on a Tesla. And Rivian should not be far behind either.
New Teslas are not a UX nightmare... go test drive a Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, GM, etc, then lastly a Tesla. Come back and tell me which car has the best software.
2026 hyundai is fine but is nothing special. Hyundai kona actually has an insane amount of physical buttons, around 50
My Hyundai likes to auto slam on the brakes when cars in front of me turn off the road, even when I definitely won't hit them. It's almost caused collisions with cars behind me.
What I hate about my new Toyota's volume knob is that there is no indication of volume level in the UI, and the knob itself doesn't ratchet. So I have absolutely no feedback about how much louder or quieter it's going to get when I turn the knob. If I have no music going, but I'm waiting to hear the next GPS instructions, how can I make sure I'm going to hear them? If I'm not sure where the volume is at right now, I can't, unless I turn it and then try and trigger some sound effect or something. It's needlessly complicated.
"The cars have all have cameras checking for bad behavior, why shouldn't your phone and laptop?" said the esteemed lawmaker.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
I think part of this acceptance of the "well if it saves one [usually child's] life..." - it's extremely powerful but is deceptive as it devalues the value of freedom (or some similar trait).
Another variant of this is: "What, you don't want to catch the pedophiles?"
Yeah, "think of the children" is a rhetorical technique but also a logical fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
I think they forgot about children safety!
I hired a Chinese Haval Car for a weekend last year (Australia). It started beeping at me for being distracted because I was checking for traffic in the other lanes - which is crucial when driving in a 4 lane highway.
Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.
Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.
Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.
It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.
After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.
> The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
That is definitely not the point of a turning signal. The car that's already in the lane has right of way and it's your responsibility not to plow into them. If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
If you can't see the car in your blindspot when changing lanes, you're not doing a proper shoulder check, hence the blindspot warning.
But if you do a shoulder check, the car will beep for tacking your eyes off the road!
Third base!
> would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.
Disagree. The purpose of the indicator is to signal your intention to others. Indicate first, then shoulder check. If you then discover a car in your blind spot, abort the manoeuvre if necessary or slow down to let them pass you first.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
To start your car please look into camera and repeat: "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
Don’t forget to drink a verification can.
Yep... gets a little less funny every year as it comes closer to reality.
Brawndo is what your body craves. It's got electrolytes!
You mean that it's got what plants crave.
Yes of course. What else would you give plants, water out the toilet!?
This one goes in your mouth. This one goes in your butt.
Or was it the other way around?
"Doritos™ just Dew™ it™!"
This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
I'm going to Taco Bell for some fine dining. Let them know I want a chilled bottle of Baja Blast waiting upon arrival.
Uh oh! Your vehicle subscription level doesn't include [BRAND]. Please tap the brake pedal twice to upgrade your subscription to Silverpremium for an additional $14.99 per month.
God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down.
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
If I hate anything about the EU, its the morons writing regulations for cars. My car constantly distracts me with some beeps, sometimes loud enough to be dangerous. Its surely one of the reasons far right is on the rise -- with things like 'drivers party' in some European countries winning serious votes. I spend 1-2hrs in the car each day, and I hate what those regulations did to driving.
(Worst offenders: Japanese cars since they seem to take the regulations most seriously. Least annoying: generally BMW, Volvo, though they are both getting worse each year).
forcing citizens to buy goods which are adversarial to them with their own money is rarely a good idea.
paradoxically, citizens expect the government to be adversarial towards them in big things (see America) but it's the 'little' things which breed true contempt.
sooner or later something will happen which will test the revealed preference of the population and everyone will suddenly discover that contempt is all that's left.
Yes. Absolutely yes. And I think this is why people vote for things like brexit, or really-obviously-bad-politicians. This is the only way in which they can pay back the many things the reasonable, progressive governments "gave" them. Stupid beeps included. I swear to god, I hate right wing populists, but I'd at least be inclined to vote for a party that promised to fight back those stupid systems.
More than once did my lane assistant try to run me into the barrier in a construction zone. You can turn it off, however its on again after on the next start...
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
Once on a rental car brake assist decided I'm about to hit something on a kerb in a curve on a wet highway. I was using maybe 50% tire grip to corner and sudden braking took it over 100%. 1/10 would not recommend.
Sure this sort of systems might reduce overall death toll by addressing worst suspects like drunk or distracted drivers but I'm pretty sure they makes it worse for diligent ones.
Totally insane that they enshrine this stuff in law without a reference design and corresponding data to validate its effectiveness.
Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments.
More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
Maybe those who write the regulations have drivers, and don’t experience the downsides to their own regulations
This stuff is a nightmare for new manufacturers and is usually lobbied-for by large OEMs or to keep startups out of the market or as a patent trap
The most recent regulatory disaster that blew up a bunch of startups was mandatory lane keep assist for trucks in overseas western markets, which meant all new startups needed fancy steering racks which are very much not off-the-shelf, and it virtually tripled the cost of the software stack too
I found this useful: https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-advanced-driver-dis...
From that article:
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
but also: "ADDW systems use cameras and sensors to track a driver’s head position, eye movements, and gaze direction"
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
> Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function
It's quite difficult to know what happened in the previous frame without any kind of retention.
>Regulators are responding to a real problem: EU-funded research estimates driver distraction plays a role in 5% to 25% of car crashes
>Article 6(3) of the GSR states that the system should be designed in such a way that it does not continuously record or retain data other than what is necessary for its purpose
I get that there are problems, but it doesn't sound that bad to me? Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people every year in Europe. If we can improve this 25% (more realistically, 10%) it's a huge step forward.
All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light). Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
I was recently in the Uk and one of the cars I was in would alert the driver if he was over the speed limit. Fair enough. But the alert itself is distracting. Are we to review every single alert from these cameras? Is that not just another distraction?
if you watch European car enthusiast review videos, they nearly all start by showing what's required to disable all of the nannies.
There’s usually some kind of short cut action to disable that for the car. In a Mercedes you hold the volume down button in the steering wheel for 3 seconds and it “updates settings” which is basically disabling that annoying feature.
Recently rented BMW had the same, disable speed warnings by holding down "Options" button or something on the steering wheel. Annoyingly though, it didn't remember the selected driving profile after being turned off, but not sure if that's because I wasn't logged in to a BMW account, it was a rental, because the profile was the sport profile, or whatever, so had to tap around on an annoying touchscreen to select that every time I used the car.
There’s a way to make a profile the default. I personally appreciate that it reverts back to it when turned off.
It's a strict legal requirement for all cars
They’re almost always wrong too, so they just beep at you for going over 50 when you’re in a 90 zone
This is alarming. Very soon there will be no point driving because insurance is going to jump in and mandate strict rules around how to sit, hold the steering wheel and how I should be looking and the fun of driving will be gone. This is all converging towards autonomous driving without a steering wheel.
That you are aware such rules about correct driver position exists makes me wonder how (if?) you are driving legally, as you certainly seem to lack the familiarity with the laws concerning it.
> alarming
Literally. It’s the windows visa-ification of cars. I hate it.
I have a manual 2003 Golf TDI (purchased in 2003; has a tape deck!) that's slowly rusting, and I'm not looking forward to when I have to replace it.
I don't have a garage/drive way, and so have to park on the street, which makes me leans towards another short [1] vehicle: currently thinking about VW Golf, Mazda 3, Mazda CX-30, Kia Niro.
From what I've seen from almost all cars, lots more screens and lots fewer buttons.
[1] https://www.carsized.com/en/
Yeah I have 2002 Honda accord and I’m dreading the day I need to get a modern car. My wife has a 2021 car and there is not a single feature it has that is necessary. In fact, many of them are actively bad. I’ve been driving every day, accident free, for 20 years and have never once needed lane assist, attention tracking or whatever the fuck. I wish there was a car that just had no additional ‘features’ beyond actual mechanical/efficiency improvements.
thankfully most of the mid-2010's I've driven haven't been bad
Then these features are not for you.
They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
Now that's a spurious "Won't somebody think of the children!" cry right there...
Just get a golf 6 or 7 (can be had without any of the nanny features).
Does it at least have more cupholders for your verification cans?
"Mountain Dew is for me and you!"
The overregulation and the constant attempt to destroy any notion of privacy has really pushed me towards being anti EU. I wonder if ressources are spent seeding that sentiment.
To be clear, this will also happen in the USA. The destruction of privacy is perhaps the only issue with full throated support across the political spectrum.
The destruction of privacy by technological and regulatory means is unfortunately a world-wide phenomenon.
I have a 2012 Skoda Yeti, 170000 miles. Serviced every year, never had anything go wrong with it yet. If it starts costing me money I will buy a 2012 Skoda Yeti from Autotrader with 50000 miles on the clock. At my age that should just about do me :)
I'm 21 years old, I'm driving a 2010 car with the intention to keep driving it for at least another few years (well over 200,000km).
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though. I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
and who would take care of your BMW when you're not around anymore ?
I’ve got 2017 Yeti (last year they were made) with 80k miles on it, will probably keep it for another decade. I wish I could buy an electric yeti but everything else about it staying the same.
I have nothing to add other than those are cool vehicles.
I have no idea how well such a system works, but, I found these lines pretty jarring:
> They found it fires on ordinary driving, not just distracted driving.
> Glance away from an empty highway to take in the scenery, or look at the infotainment screen to change a song, and the warning goes off anyway.
Like, isn't that the point, that if you aren't looking at the road it should go off?
It's bad though because glancing at your side-view mirrors is good, but this will train drivers out of it by beeping at them because their eyes aren't perfectly forwards-facing.
It's an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, that also coincidentally helps advance the surveillance state more than it does help prevent distracted driving.
Goal - make driving so annoying that customers will be begging for fully self driving cars!
Good, hopefully in 10-15 years we will have mostly self-driving cars for most ground transportation requirements.
If we're allowed to dream, make it public transit, as private cars, regardless of how they are driven, are a climate disaster we can not afford.
I imagine the ideal situation would be a hybrid. Trains for the bulk of transport and self driving cars for the large tail of odd trips. When you want to get home from your friends house at 1AM there is no traffic on the roads, and taking PT is a 1+ hour trip while uber is 10 minutes. There will never be super fast PT connecting every odd route that runs frequently all through the night.
Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
Why not? Public transport follows static routes, but there’s nothing to stop personalised routes based on whose on the public transport, especially while off peak.
Personalised routes is not really much different than uber pool. Maybe the government should run a public version of this. But I think there will always be some trips that are so low volume (particularly late at night) that it makes sense to just have a single occupant car rather than a whole bus moving one person.
I guess we can use a bit of 44 petawatts of solar energy reaching Earth in electric cars.
"self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads" https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads...
And you can bypass a seatbelt warning by just plugging in a buckle without the belt, but most people don't bother. It's not worth the inconvenience to circumvent, so it still has a positive impact on safety.
Go in a car from 1970 and try the seatbelts.
I can see why people didn't want them.
I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
By comparison today we have luxurious silk strands that don't pinch anywhere.
I have a car from that era. The seatbelts feel like those in any other newer car I've been in, although perhaps a bit thicker.
> I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to ~fifty years of aging of the belt material. It's not as if the very first time we'd ever designed and installed an operator-safety belt was in the 1970s... so it'd be very surprising if the designers chose to make them stiff blades. Your description is also at odds with how I've seen people handle and use seatbelts in motion pictures from the era... from what I've seen, those belts look to me to be reasonably flexible.
Apparently they were nylon instead of polyester. So less comfortable, yes. Plastic blade, maybe not.
A shocking fraction of people will simply ignore the seatbelt beeping for the entire drive
Seatbelts are actually heavily enforced around the EU, most people would rather just belt up than pay the fine.
Toyota... When we look after a dog for a few days for a friend, it beeps. When I put shopping on the back seat, it beeps. Drives me wild. It "beep... beep... beep..." for a minute then "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP".
I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
I once made the mistake of renting one of those cars, putting my backpack and some groceries behind me, and driving straight onto a freeway. This absolute sh*tbox was beeping so loud I was afraid for my hearing. I drove some 10 miles like this before I could pull over and move the things. I'd not set foot in one of those cars ever again (same goes for Lexus). I was dreaming of really bad things happening to people who thought it was a good idea to emit series of very loud beeps while the car is driving.
This is how you get many people to just keep the belts fastened permanently and not bother putting them around themselves.
I once rented a VW which beeped the seat belt warning at me from the weight of my phone in the passenger seat. It was absolutely insane. Seat belt nags are an utterly terrible feature.
In the event of a serious accident police will likely check to see if it was tampered with and so sentence will be more severe
That's not how courts function.
Why are you mentioning how courts function?
It’s the police who decide what are lines of enquiries to be followed and then present that evidence to the prosecutor.
If the defence want to file to exclude any exhibits that’s a decision for them, the ‘courts function’ by deciding on the evidence before them.
Uh, oh! That's great. Need to get an Arnold Rimmer or Captain Kirk one.
Of course, one wonders what the car does if the camera is blocked with a post-it. Will it just not work, or fall back on something else, like pressure at the steering wheel, like Tesla does ?
Weird dark surveillance state stuff. I thought EU was trying to champion privacy?
The EU wants to be the only one who spies on its citizens.
Those are the same insane morons who came up with the cookie consent. Cottage industry of lawyers that push for those regulations and then collect lucrative retainers from companies wishing to not be fined. One of the reasons EU is so hopelessly behind on any innovation.
Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
This is a bit more nuanced than that.
Under the GDPR provisions, strictly necessary cookies are exempt from the consent screen. But the way the exemptions read prompts all the lawyers to "well, maybe it's sort of necessary for you to have a session_id, but its so, so much safer to have the damn consent screen, so please...".
I worked in technical roles at large companies that had completely honest-to-god private, strictly necessary cookies - where compliance people forced the cookie consent screens, there was no space for a discusion. At my latest company, despite being a CTO, I could not convince our legal team that going without the consent screen as we are really only using "strictly necessary" cookies was fine. Its "mate, you may even be right, but really, nobody is skipping the consent screen, and we won't risk a compliance issue on your say-so.".
Sure, lots of companies - maybe even most - do shit things, and of course the real tagging of people and fingerprinting happens in sophisticated ways that actually defy GDPR, require no cookies whatsoever and so on - and thats another problem. Those moronic consent screens server exactly no real benefit for a while now.
My Hyundai Ioniq 6's "safety" systems have caused several near accidents and scary and distracting moments, as soon as I forget to turn them off. I have to disable these every time I start the car.
I find my Nissan Leaf similar. The A-pillars are so thick to keep me safe but I can't see pedestrians very well. So now I have to move my head around like a party parrot. Then the regen brake sort of has a dead spot where I feel pressure on my foot but it doesn't actually brake making it hard to stop quickly and smoothly. On a purely hydraulic brake what you feel is what you get. Then the camera doesn't see people as well as it sees bigger cars. I've nearly hit some people because of these factors.
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.
I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.
I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.
Maybe I drive more defensively than most but I almost never drive in the center of the lane unless I am in a ‘middle’ lane with lanes on either side. I drive with my tire riding the correct side of the solid line demarcating the shoulder, people (especially pickups hauling trailers, pro semi drivers are usually good) are really bad at staying in their lanes so I sometimes drive onto the shoulder to prevent an accident in the case of another driver lane drifting and overcorrecting.
I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.
Generally the cars with better lane warning/centering use camera or radar to see other vehicles.
We have been moving from pretty crude centering, to adaptive based on other vehicles, to intelligent enough to avoid potholes and cross lane markings deliberately (eg, passing a cyclist on an empty road).
The problem is all these options exist simultaneously, with the same marketing, and same ancap bonus points; even when the actual capability of the car varies massively.
My Tesla is quite accurate about whether I'm looking at the road or not. What car specifically had this issue?
Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.
That's the trouble with automating cars - being quite accurate is not really that great over 100k miles. On Tesla's specifically I find the "hands on wheel" attention detection a bit iffy.
For FSD, at least in the US they long dropped the hands on the wheel thing, unless the attention monitoring isn't functioning. At least the folks I know that have it, they absolutely love it.
The current docs still say issues with the camera detection results in the hands on wheel prompts https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GU... but yes, it was nice when they removed the requirement to have the hands on the wheel even when the camera was working right.
I liked the Tesla progress & road trips but my real bar for joy is the Waymo style promise/start of delivery. There's no fallback to wait for improvement there, either it does everything it promises or it doesn't do anything!
It varies so much by brand, too. Some brands are too aggressive and end up ping-ponging you in the lane if you let them, and then there's my new Mazda where it doesn't seem to work in any case where I want it to work, but will fight me as hard as it can if I try to take a highway exit.
How are they great?
lane assist is fundamentally an unsolvable problem with just a cheap camera, it's in the same category as autonomous driving, that's what these stupid legislation do not get.
Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.
Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.
Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.
It seems like you are being downvoted but I've had the exact issue you mention where there is heavy over-banding on the road surface. Or where you try to move out to overtake a cyclist and it decides to correct you back into lane.
Cars are becoming shittier in Europe, dumb regulations and people building cars are clearly NOT driving them.
My wife got a new Volvo recently:
1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?
2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.
3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.
4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.
Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.
It is fascinating that you look at design choices that Chinese Volvo copied from American Tesla (except for the speed limit) and declare that European cars are the problem.
Smart cars are the new Smart TVs
I like a fair bit of what the EU does, and in the past they've been behind some significant advances in vehicle safety, but boy do I hate most of what's coming out of there lately as far as driving . All these driver "assistance" features that arguably do more harm than good for competent drivers and are forced to be enabled by default on every drive. And now this. Bleh.
This is the part I hate, enabled for every drive? What kind of hostile cockroach UX is that?
This feels like a regulation whose effectiveness will expire in the next couple of years (as driverless cars become the norm), but which will set a precedent that this is the norm. This with the EU chat control coming up really set a tone.
It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it.
And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.
This is already in Teslas for supervised self driving, not sure what the big deal is. People can be very distracted while driving and the Tesla OS makes sure to let them know.
According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted.
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
1) Unplug the cellular modem.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
2.5) Your car doesn’t start
3) Enjoy
I will start now but I think not for long. “For your own safety we disabled your car”.
> I will start now but I think not for long. “For your own safety we disabled your car”.
This is precisely why you should not want an Internet-connected car. It isn't truly yours if it can be "upgraded" behind your back through a backdoor.
It won’t be long until someone finds a way to flash the firmware or install a bootleg sensor or something else. You can already get a lot “chipped” on VAG and BMW cars.
2.75) Test this during the test drive
3) Do not buy car
3.5) Buy a different car
3.75) There are no different cars
4) Buy an old car from 2014 and maintain it carefully
4.25) Give up driving
4.5) Become a hermit
Chances are most manufacturers are going to use a cheap USB camera. Can a raspberry pi emulate webcam? Just place the same video of you diligently staring out of the window on repeat.
> “For your own safety we disabled your car”
Drive onto freeway, `sneeze` directly at camera, car "disabled for safety", causes chaos on freeway (hopefully no one dies), sue car maker, retire
And remember to format the car before you take it in for a service.
As a rule, I do my own maintenance or take the car to an independent mechanic. I wouldn't trust a dealer given how misaligned their incentives are with my interests.
Both are illegal.
It's illegal to disconnect the modem? Where?
Ecall is mandatory, you'll eventually fail road safety inspections.
Ok, it's basically illegal then, and also enforced. So guess that "just disconnect the modem" advice is wrong.
Just reconnect it before the inspection?
Don't know if that's detectable or if there's some other gotcha like filing insurance claims after a crash. I'm not in the EU, my cars are pre-modem, and seems like everyone else is guessing too. Is there anyone here who actually disables the modem in the EU and isn't a mechanic?
Under which juridiction? I doubt it is in any country of the EU.
You absolutely cannot do it with rented or leased cars e.g.
In general tampering with safety equipment is not legal, enforcement is another thing.
I'm not a fan of people giving poor advice online.
Not really, it will still be fully road legal, at least in my EU member state.
The EU is quickly becoming the surveillance capital of the world.
Didn't Russia ban and block all messenging apps that aren't the backdoored government-approved Max messenger?
EU has a while to go to become the surveillance capital I think.
For not letting people snooze off behind the wheel?
It's so incredible the difference in mindset across the Atlantic.
In the US, it is MY job and no one else's to make sure I don't fall asleep driving my own car. In the same way it's my job to make sure I don't leave my stove on and burn down the apartment building. Should we also install cameras on every stove in every apartment?
If the US government tried to force-install cameras into our cars to watch us, there'd be a revolution.
The US passed a law in 2021 to require new cars to monitor driver alertness. The implementing regulations are being finished and it could apply to new cars as soon as 2027.
can you point to this law please? I can find news articles referencing that something may or may not happen but I can't find that this actually went into practice
Death by a thousand cuts. It never stops at just one thing.
Car: You look tired. There's a motel in 3 miles.
Car: You appear to be suffering from acne. Try Zit-away, available at the convenience store in 2.4 kilometers.
Car: Facial recognition failed. Car is now disabled. Contact your car dealer to reenable vehicle.
Car: You are politically active for the wrong party. Doors locked. Battery will now catch fire.
That third one sounds like it would be fun trying to explain to your boss.
if I'm that tired I don't think a beep mixed with road noise and radio would wake me up anyway
Do you... not understand what the ADAS system does and how it works?
You have a camera aimed at your face when typing this nonsense post.
That camera isn’t on all the time scanning your face. God knows what sort of sketchy implementations car companies will come up with.
It's funny how assumptions betray us.
Not everyone is on their phone, or a laptop.
On a site for tech enthusiasts, there are a shocking amount of folks with very "tech is what you get at the Apple Store" mindsets about.
> Not everyone is on their phone, or a laptop.
Nor does everyone leave front-facing cameras (or any device camera) uncovered.
Gadget Idea: Small display with a lens that can be mounted over the camera that hooks into the material around it, plays an AI generated video of $RANDOM_CELEBRITY singing karaoke off-key and driving very carefully.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
Modern cars are user hostile
> Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.[1]
Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
If they make cars irritating enough, people might give up the joy of driving and pivot to more economical transit modes. I have mixed feelings about this, and I doubt the car companies are thoughtfully doing this, but I do wonder sometimes.
Driver monitoring systems will be required in all 2027 vehicles in the US as well.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
If you read that article and check the latest status, the NHTSA was supposed to make a rule by 2024 and it's 2026 now. [1]
In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2]
I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule."
[1] https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NHTSA-2022-0079
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
I read a paper a while ago (which I have failed to locate) which used around binary masks, each in front of a single photodiode, as input to a neural network, which estimated the number of people in front of this effectively ~9-pixel "camera". The binary masks and NN weights were trained at the same time. Presumably, something like this could be used to detect lack of driver focus in a far less invasive manner.
I love the warning about not having hands on the steering wheel.
It goes off all the time. And each time, my hands are on the steering wheel.
It doesn't actually detect contact - it checks to see if you're actively adjusting the steering wheel.
Except I don't need to! The lane keep assist is so good that it's rare I have to give it additional help.
So - I kid you not - I've gotten used to giving a nudge to the steering wheel every so many seconds to prevent that warning (you cannot disable it).
Imagine a car gave you cruise control, and then checked if you were paying attention by requiring you to press down on the accelerator every so many seconds. Does that make sense?
My Nissan does check both hands are contacting the steering wheel making lane centering basically useless if I want to do anything with one hand like adjust my glasses, change the audio etc.
I do this too. Want to get a comma.ai device just so I don’t have to wiggle the steering wheel.
comma.ai will not disable the warning. This is a warning that's on all the time.
I have the same issue in my 2020 AMG. With lane assit on, the way it detects that your hands are on the steering wheel is by sensing your inputs to counter its inputs to the steering wheel position. It even seems to deliberately steer you off the center of the lane to see if you react.
That is a seriously broken control system. It should be keeping you in the center of the lane and not make you fight against the car.
You should buy a dumber car
i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more. -its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone -its a good security feature -the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more. -in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.
Black vinyl tape over the camera?
You need to splice in a looped recorded video like in a heist movie, otherwise the camera detects blockage from the tape and incessantly beeps
Disconnect the beep
You’ll fail the mandatory inspection
This is why I like modern Renaults/Dacias. They all come with a single button to turn all of this stuff off, or to a preset of your choosing. No need to fiddle with a screen, nothing you cannot disable. Bliss.
Good thing we have those cookie banners warning us about websites tracking us.
Any one knows what happens when duck tape is being used to cover the camera?
Expect an error but this will depend on the brand.
"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
Not sure about the systems on cars in the EU, but I got a loaner 2025 Hyundai Tuscon when my EV was in the shop. It had some driver attention monitoring feature with a camera above the steering wheel staring me in the eyes. I covered it with a piece of black electrical tape. It popped a little warning on the main display (IIRC, a crossed out eye, but maybe I'm confusing with Subaru Eyesight) when the car first started up, showing that the camera wasn't working, then proceeded to be silent for the rest of the drive.
I dunno if that'll fly going forward. I know I'll test it in every new car with this feature that I test drive though!
You can deactivate it, but has to be on every car start. It's so annoying having to tur off all that crap every single trip.
Sometimes i forget the lane assist ON and get nudged randomly at high speeds, so so scary.
Maybe you'll be able to buy a box to plug into the CAN bus and simulate pressing the button to deactivate it. Sorta like the auto-stop eliminator for that horrid feature (which saves less than 5 gallons of gas per year in my dad's Subaru - thankfully mine is one year too old for that).
Time to start jailbreaking car software
Those nudges are gentle and totally safe in every car I've ever had. And no "random" nudges outside road construction work with dubious lane markings where you need to have a grip on the wheel anyway. A regular firm grip always overrides lane keeping.
I mostly agree in my 2024 Ioniq 5, but not in my 2019 Subaru Outback. You can definitely override the lane keep if you have a firm grip and are ready for it, but it tries to throw me off the road often enough that I don't use it anymore.
The scariest was when I had to swerve into another lane to avoid some trash that was sticking into the road from the highway. It tried to force me back into it twice! Luckily I was ready but it gave me a fright for sure.
Car starts quacking at you
I'm so happy I don't need a car anymore. It sounds like hell driving these days with when the car second-guessing you the whole time.
Phone use whilst driving is a huge problem so not surprised.
Funny how that became the solution instead of I don't know, banning massive tablets on the dashboard and enforcing buttons.
What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ? 0.1€ cost, can be removed in case of control otherwise you can pretend the camera wasn't working.
End of story...
Honestly, I'm all for more automated system while driving because I drive but I also bike and walk. Some people are complete nuts that shouldn't have their license and the least you can do is hold their hand, with as much algorithm as you can, like they are toddlers driving a 3 Tonne car.
> What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ?
Because it'll beep.
That sounds like a hardware issue that might be soluble in "wire cutters and a bad attitude", or at minimum "hot air resoldering station, microscope, and a bad attitude". I wonder what their software stack is like, too.
Until you realize these aren't isolated systems. This is one of the 30 different sensors used to monitor drivers.
If you cut a wire, expect the car company + insurance company to become aware of the "mod" you did. Expect the car to simply not start anymore. Expect the local authorities to be notified.
We need to stop this nonsense at the legislation level, not after the fact.
I love driving.
But my 12 lb bucket of brain cells guiding itself, and other lives, is the wrong tool for the job of staying in between the two bright lines.
Self-driving, here we come.
All these years we heard Germans are anal about privacy.
Is that only when mass hysteria is pushed against internet companies? How are they okay with this?
I guess I’ll keep walking, biking and using public transport.
Europe gave us cookie popups on every website, and now... in Europe you get a camera watching you in your own car while driving.
It's completely idiotic. Technology should be assisting in performing the attention itself, not nannying the driver.
Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
What is the car’s reaction if you just block the camera. Will it still drive?
Wonder what the regulations have to say about a small, strategically placed piece of sticky tape.
Every year it feels more surprising how motorcycling is still allowed. No seatbelt, no ABS, no problem...
Motorcyclists don't usually kill an entire generation of people when they T-bone a mid-sized sedan in an intersection. That's the problem.
True, but there are quite lightweight cars and heavy motorcycles.
Lower damage potential of small and light cars compared to SUVs does not seem to give them a free pass to skip the sprawling driver assistance regulations.
Wearing a seatbelt or not doesn't also prevent a family getting killed, yet its strict in cars, but not on bikes? What gives?
I don't know about other countries, but public transport buses in Australia don't have seat belts on them. Even as a kid, I remember wondering why there was such a fuss made around seat belts in cars when you couldn't use one if you wanted to on the bus.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
Buses in America don't have seatbelts either. They're just so big and heavy relatively to cars that you're very unlikely to be seriously injured. (It does happen of course, and that usually makes the news.)
because when crashing on a motorcycle, it's only the cyclists face that's turned inside out and in such a way that it's not a burden on society to treat a vegetable.
When FSD actually works 100% (or as close as possible), manual driving will become obsolete, we're 5-10 years away.
how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?
Yeah we were 5-10 years away from full self driving 15 years ago too.
Does that mean every car sold must have Level 1 autonomy? Similar to how ABS, Air Bags and Stability Control are required.
So, 1. yet another beep/boop in the car contributing to alert-fatigue, and 2. another stream of data inevitably sent off-device and monetized in god knows what ways by god knows which third party "partners".
(laughs in American)
No more "making love" in the car. Sorry guys. That'd be left to Hollywood stunts.
We should make an open source one that provably doesn't transmit anything except the distracted driving warning signal.
This is not OK.
That is a good initiative however what ever data is being recorded needs to kept in a responsible and safe manner
It isn't supposed to store any data, just process the real-time feed and output a Boolean signal for whether your eyes are on the road.
Selling it to Flock makes you a criminal who needs to go to prison, but they'll probably find a way around that.
I laughed. Thanks!
Not to worry, Flock, Palantir, and whoever else has use for it will keep it very safe once they buy it from the car company for $1/driver/month.
Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.
[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
Good. The amount of people I see looking at their smartphone while driving, completely oblivious to what’s happening on the road is concerning. I don’t see why that footage needs to be transferred anywhere and GDPR should ensure it won’t be, so no need to spin this as a privacy nightmare cars have tons of sensors already and there’s probably little commercial interest in filming people’s faces while they’re driving so I don’t see what’s so controversial about this.
Who knew that my decision to not own a car would turn out to be so prescient. That I can still be killed by a driver distracted by the anti-distraction feature is just the usual irony of existence.
I wonder if they also have a seeker pointed at my face then, because I don't want that shining into my eyes.
I test drove a Subaru (in America) with this feature and absolutely hated it. The amount of false positives was ridiculous. Often I was literally staring straight ahead, driving on a straight road, and getting beeped at to pay attention.
It felt like total security theater, which a huge surveillance tech vector as well. I will do my damnedest to never ever buy a car with this anti-feature. If I ever have to I'm sure those beeps will either get disabled one way or another, or eventually be completely filtered out by my brain like other predictably useless sounds are.
But the EU still blocks self driving cars which would make this unnecessary.
A mandatory camera and a mandatory modem in every car is a privacy nightmare. The EU does not care about privacy of it's subjects, it cares about control. The US is not much different. It's over for freedom in the west. The frogs are boiling.
fortunately I'm old, I drive a 2007 car, and won't live in this new world for much much longer!
Orwellian. What an absolute nightmare of government control. Advancing technology is giving too much power to the government, do not let them have it or you will never get your rights back.
I purchased a new a hybrid car a year ago. It is impossible to deactivate permanently speed limit and lane alerts. They are useless, dumb and dangerous if you ask me. Detecting a 40km/h on the highway from a road sign on a near by road it's not safety. It's been a year of touching and correcting touches for disabling these two alerts, of course you have to do more clicks no way of accessing it from a quick menu or from quick actions on the steering wheel. The car works perfectly but this thing is so annoying to me that I'm seriously thinking of selling it. The touch screen is slooooow, when the internal temperature is higher is even more slooow for a ui that should be 1200fps for what it does even on a underpowered throttled by heat waves board chip. I either sell the car of take my time and find a way to hack that damn firmware. This is not the way to go, the way to go is autonomous driving not all this annoying BS
The speed limit detection exists on my US Toyota vehicle, but it doesn’t beep or nag, just tells me what it thinks the speed limit is on the HUD, which is nice. Although when I drove through Georgia the interstate has all these minimum speed signs that look close enough to speed limit signs that fully half the time through Georgia it thought the speed limit was 40mph instead of 80mph. It would have been an absolute nightmare drive if it had beeped intermittently for 6 hours.
proud to drive 2002 volkswagen golf in these creepy times
Ditto for 1992 Buick, 1996 Toyota. Also 1961 Sunliner, weather permitting.
That will definitely help their car industry.
Note that they must be sold with this feature. It does not say you have to keep this feature, you can aftermarket remove it or disconnect it just fine.
Maybe I'll get downvoted for being off topic, but when we try to say "EU has too much regulation", this is the kind of shit we're talking about.
Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.
What happens if I cover the camera?
My bmw has this for the traffic jam self-drive (< 40mph) feature.
My eyes wander a bit and it scolds me.
I'll keep my 2014 golf mk7 thank you. Euro5, no adblue bullshit. Still gets good mileage, is still cheap to maintain even after 260k km (the biggest expense has been the dual mass flywheel with a clutchpack) and the only high tech feature is a radar based adaptive cruise control.
Considering how many mk7 golfs were made over the years it'll be easy to just get another one for the next decade. I'd also consider the Hyundai ioniq 5 or 6 which have a shortcut on the steering wheel to just disable all the nanny crap.
> On the positive side, the regulations require the ADDW system to work on a "closed loop" without the use of biometric data. lmfao, the regulations required antipollution systems too didn't they ? Even if by some miracle this is the case for all manufacturers I'm betting my first son the software can helpfully be updated to be cloud enabled once insurances companies catch up or regulations are updated for more safety. Hope you like walking a lot.
I would rather die in a car crash than get nagged like this. Europe is the nanniest of nanny states, its inconceivable that people actually want to live like this.
ouf yeah, I agree. I had a lot more to say about this but the ICE checkpoint found my smuggled kinder egg and now they're sending me off to alligator alcatraz.
It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
It's incredible that comments similar to yours are getting actively downvoted.
People cannot even criticize the surveillance state: we're at that point.
It's "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys, always ever state-loving.
"ChatControl 2.0 ain't that bad because it's not mandatory"
"A camera in every car ain't that bad because the recordings won't necessarily be shared"
It's sickening. I'm tired of you people.
Ok I'm a citizen of EU country. I don't consent, I don't agree. I want a car without inside cameras, without systems beeping, blinking, nor vibrating at me. Don't you ever move the steering wheel under my hands. Why I'm screaming into the void?
Thanksfully there are plenty of vehicles in the second hand market.
This can't be real life
buying a new car gets less attractive every year.
In many EU jurisdictions (like Germany) continuously recording dashcams are banned. Mandating a potentially continuously recording camera pointed at you at the same time is ridiculous.
I hate this new world we find ourselves in.
And I triple hate that we've helped develop the technology that powers it.
In hindsight, it was inevitable.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
All the repeated discussion and warnings about Chat Control in the EU, and this shit just snuck through?
Every new driver in the European Union must include a roll of electrician tape.
My car would start beeping randomly and one day it wouldn't stop beeping. Turns out it was because we have a baby seat in the back on a window seat but it would slightly touch the edge of the middle seat. The solution was to clip in the seatbelt on the middle seat even through there was nobody sitting there.
One of the very dangerous side effect of this is it pushes a lot of people out of the ability to own a decent car legally. The camera, AI chip and all supporting electronic supporting it will raise the price of the entry level Dacia (a Dacia Spring is already more than 15k euros). So people will keep old cars as long as they can.
You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?
If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.
In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars. On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.
I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.
legislate volume knobs
The headline is wrong. The article and the headline seems to be written in a way to cause outrage by giving the impression that the EU requires cameras which should be recording your face all the time and storing/sending it to authorities or something but what the EU actually requires is "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System" which may be implemented using cameras and no recording or transmitting is required, in fact actually recording and transmitting would be a problem with GDPR.
This is what we call a slippery slope
Nope, that's not what we call slippery slope. This system does not require data recording or sharing, does not require cameras.
It absolutely is a slippery slope argument.
"New government mandate paves way for additional government mandate" is about as straightforward a slippery slope argument as you can get.
Slippery slope arguments don't require the eventual fear (e.g. cameras recording you) to be present in the current form, otherwise it wouldn't be a slope.
There are no camera requirements and if cameras are used they are prohibited from using them for the stuff the article implies because the privacy is protected by GDPR. Remember how US corporations really hate EU regulations? Yes that's the regulation preventing them from processing your face even if the system is implemented with a camera.
GDPR doesn't protect privacy of data, it regulates how any collected data is stored and used and requires consent of the person.
As a US-based developer, all it does is make it more irritating to build anything that europeans might use because I have to gather consent 100 times. Nothing else changes about the system, you just decide whether to use it or not -- which, by the way, is already a feature of all software right out of the box. So GDPR achieves nothing except annoying all developers and users everywhere.
Now they can simply write consent into the purchase agreement for a new vehicle. No consent = no purchase. It's really simple.
If you really want to believe that if a light shines on a CCD chip the only way forward is to record that and send that to corporations and the governments that keep believing it. We are in an age of extremism, everything must be extreme and detached from reality.
You either didn't read my comment, or aren't groking it.
Whether there are cameras mandated now is irrelevant. The framework that accepts government-mandated ADDW is now in place. Most makers are fulfilling it by using cameras, whether required to or not.
Future enhancements to how ADDW is enforced (such as mandatory cameras), is now a much smaller hurdle for them to overcome.
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, you don't understand GDPR (or at least, how it affects US companies).
Once the camera is there, the temptation for future governments to use this power for more things than originally required will become irresistible.
also: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+slippery+slope+mea...
That's not slippery slope, no cameras are required. The whole outrage is based on bullshit ragebait.
and what sensor do you propose using to make sure people appear awake and alert? a magic device that can evaluate posture, demeanor, facial expression, wakefulness, etc but somehow definitely is not a camera?
yes you've read the text accurately, now it's time to use your brain and consider what it means.
If you want to be pedantic you can choose to be pedantic about the fact that the text literally does not require a camera. If we can pass that, then let's stick with the reality and understand that processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean that it is being recorded and handed over to the police. Since we are allowed to use our brains, we can understand that recording and transmitting would require extra hardware over what's required to process the data from CCD sensor and discard it right away.
> the fact that the text literally
> processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean
and I'm the one being pedantic. ok bro. There's a thing called common sense, thinking for yourself, using your own brain to perform inference. Try it some time.
Try reducing hallucinations with your inference
I don't think it's misleading at all. Is it a camera that's aimed at your face? It seems like it.
Nope, the laws require Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System and does not require cameras aimed at your face.
Also, cameras are receivers. Nothing happens when cameras are aimed at your face, it is only significant when you are interested with the received image and it actually nothing happens, it is processed on device to see if you are tired/distracted/asleep.
Here is the actual text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
They mention that cameras are required when testing the systems compliance but does not specify how these systems should work.
I remember the brief period when they told us that the self service checkout weren't recording video. Then they just said oh actually they do now and nobody battered an eye lid
If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
I don't know who told you that but maybe it wasn't the EU?
I seriously can't believe all the commenters here advocating for mandated ability to spy on people
Modern HN is all about the nanny state. If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide ... right? It's not like a future government might decide that just existing as a certain race or accessing health care as a certain gender is a crime...
It's weird how the discourse on X is so much more high brow compared to HN these days.
They'll do anything but address the root cause of distractions: the addictive nature of mobile phones/the apps on them
They hate us for our freedom.
Maybe would be the good time to create a company to sell webcam covers for cars...
Wish I could just buy a new car that was a car and not an app with wheels.
Imagine reading this headline in 1999 lol
I'm buying 0 cars with this nonsense. And 0 cars without CarPlay support.
And here we go again :)
It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
Fun fact: there are significantly more heat deaths in Europe than car fatalities.
Interesting priorities...
Many of these warnings are hazardous, especially in an unfamiliar vehicle. They are extremely annoying and often incorrect. They result in extended periods of distracted driving trying to figure out how to turn off the warning.
I was in a rental car recently that was filled with random chimes going off. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was sure a nuisance and took my mind off the road.
And Europeans think they have privacy lol
This sort of nonsense is well studied in aeronautical world, and will lead to too many alerts, which, in turn, lead to predictable outcomes: https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/normalization-of-devian...
Very different threat model though. Commercial aircraft aren't sensitive to keep-your-eyes-on-the-road failures with seconds-scale latencies, airlines require autopilot use, there is a copilot present at all times, the FAA very strictly regulates work hours and substance use, etc...
Sure, don't nag a pilot who is already very well backstopped by the existing solutions. Your uncle coming back from the bar at 2am doesn't have any of that.
Repeated nuisance alarms have the same effect on all humans, not just on pilots - it trains them to ignore the alarms. Eventually this will lead to non-nuisance alarms being ignored and lives being lost.
That depends on "repeated" and "nuisance". My experience in a Tesla is that the attention monitoring never has false positive alarms at all. And it 100% has caught situations where I'm head down in the cockpit on autopilot in ways that, honestly, I probably shouldn't have been. So there's a single data point saying you're wrong.
This kind of counter-intuitive/smarter-than-the-obvious pontification is a HN smell to me. Most of the time the obvious solution is correct. Driver attention management is one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) contributors to accident rate, and IMHO probably deserves some assistive technology attention. If the reverse is true, it needs actual evidence and not an attempt to reason from aviation evidence (a regime where inattention is NOT a major problem!).
Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons:
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
This is just more evidence that the GDPR was just a set of protectionist laws for EU companies.
Designing this machine vision system is insurmountable. It will never be actually good at its stated purpose, because how much you can look through some window or glance back at your kids is decided by the outside environment and it will be impossible to fit accurate judgement of it in the computers in the car.
Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the same place as well, and in relation to the marked edges of the road, which often isn't the natural placing in curves and so on. As a consequence roads likely need maintenance more often, and as a proficient driver that does not let the car have opinions about placement on the road one commonly has much smaller margins when placing the car in the nice trajectory through a curve due to the sunken lanes from the assisted cars.
I have news for you: those systems already exist and they work. The "insurmountable" development work has already been done. How long you can safely look away from the road is determined mostly by physics and has hard bounds. More than ~5 seconds is never OK while the vehicle is on a public road. At speed, a single second can be a second too long. The problem isn't that the road looks clear now. The problem is that this can change instantly, without warning and in the most surprising ways at any moment. A kid running into the road from behind a car, an object falling onto the road, an animal jumping onto the road from the brush/ditch/tree-line... the list goes on. Forcing the driver to pay attention is good. There is no massive situational leeway.
If its closed looped its great. All cars should also come with alcolocks.
For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system:
The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.
Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.
In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.
I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:
>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494
As a pedestrian I love this.
I actually suggested a solution like this 2 years ago, because so many drivers are bad at signaling. I wanted a camera that used machine learning to learn a driver's cues when they're making a turn, and eventually it would be able to activate the signals for the driver.
I'm sick and tired of standing on the side of the road with my dog and waiting for a car just for it to make a turn. FOAD
I am rarely in a rush, if a car signals I will allow it to turn, I will stand back and wait, no problem. But 80% of them are really bad at this.
For all the people complaining about driver distraction alerts… have you considered that perhaps you were in fact distracted? Looking at a passenger to talk instead of at the road, etc?
It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.