I personally like those features in my Infinity Q50 and always keep them on. As these features get better I suspect most people would prefer to keep them enabled.
The same goes for the milder forms of lane keeping assist; that only gets problematic if the system does enough steering that the driver can get away with taking their hands off the wheel entirely when traveling on a typical interstate highway. The assist systems that give the wheel a minor nudge and audibly alert the driver are an obvious net safety gain, especially for the innocent bystanders in the next lane over.
Many of the more advanced safety features that are being rolled out to the market these days can be done wrong and become a danger of their own. But when implemented properly, complaints against them are no more valid than complaints about anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control overriding the driver's intentions.
Example for lane following: I veer left a bit to avoid a bit of scrap wood with nails sticking out. The car counters this, steering me back toward the debris.
Then again, I do share your concern about hackability. Just a single grand catastrophe would turn the scales over for a long time. And nothing suggests that car software is of high quality currently.
>Do you drive while text messaging
Amazingly many people do, even after being told that it's about as dangerous as driving drunk.
Can we all trust the car companies to do their due diligence and have all their software audited. Do we trust their proprietary algorithms?
At least when i am driving myself i know what is going on in my head. Yes it might sound a little conceded, but who do you really trust.
Also as a side mark (to get me downvoted :) ), i can understand automatic braking and some of the other things, but if you need the machine just to help maintain your lane for you...you probably should not be driving (i seriously work with someone who praises their car for helping them not drift out of their lane).
This is not actually an argument against putting lane keeping assist functionality into cars. Yes, distracted driving is bad. But there's no way to completely prevent it, so the auto industry should do everything they can to mitigate the harm.
If you hold peoples hands on stuff they start slacking, they become dependent and cannot do something without assistance. My kid plays a FPS online on his xbox one, he started off doing ok and getting better. He found out you can turn on aim assist and got really good. If he turns off the aim assistance, he is worse than he ever was.
I am not disagreeing with you that lane assist, now that is exists, might not be useful. I just feel we are moving to a world like the people on the ship in the movie Wall-e.
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
> Do you drive while text messaging, commenting on Hacker News, or watching video?
No. But distractions happen. Pretending otherwise is hubris.
> Are you perfectly fine with your whereabouts and driving style being known and sold, for example to insurance companies or toll collectors or the police?
These are addons that don't come with the car. With this, I've lowered my insurance costs, and now going through tolls is much easier and less dangerous.
> Are you using the features to compensate for any kind of disability?
Being human and knowing that I'm not perfect.
> Would you be fine with a car like HAL 9000, saying "I'm sorry muzika, I'm afraid I can't do that" to you?
That doesn't happen.
> This is alien to me.
That is clear. Judging by your questions, you have absolutely no idea what is in these cars. It's good thought that you are aware of your ignorance, admit to it, and seek to learn more. Hopefully the information I provide can help you.
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
The problem with software is that you can't look at it to see if it's worn, you can't hear if it's about to fail, and it's not regularly inspected by experts to see how it is behaving. Also as programmers we are aware of hidden bugs that can only show up under certain circumstances. It's only a matter of time until an overflow or off-by-one error kills people.
Car makers and engineers have a very good idea how dangerous certain parts of cars are, and they have been built over many years to mitigate those weaknesses. So you wouldn't expect, for example, the five nuts holding a wheel on to all fail at once.
We programmers know that there can be far less certainty with software.
Even worse, others here have posted about the terrible software practices that were exposed at some manufacturers, and the reluctance by Jeep to react until the ability to crash their cars remotely was exposed at Blackhat.
I think it all comes down to how much trust you have and where that trust lies.
In my hubris, I'm going to have as analog a car as I can, and hold out without as many these features as I can until all the beta software bugs are ironed out. For mechanical failures, it took us many painful years to get to where we are now.
I guess what I'm saying is that I trust myself to pay attention and stay in the lane using the steering wheel more than I trust our current technology not to get confused and kill me by steering wrong. The reward just seems much less than the risk to me for that (and other) features. I don't trust automatic emergency braking to not slam the brakes on at a time when it will kill me either.
What scares me most is the perverse incentives the car manufacturers have to cover up their shortcomings. They have shown exactly how little they can be trusted to be honest with things such as VW cheating on emissions, exploding tires, faulty airbags and many many coverups to avoid recalls, etc, etc.
Also the remote access that is more and more prevalent in cars today. Hackers gaining access to the drivetrain functions of cars remotely is super scary to me. And when that happens, it will happen for every one of those cars on the road.
A DDOS of the morning rush would be very interesting at best. At worst, as bad as any terrorist attack.
Would you trust your life to the stability and security of even a major company's servers? I wouldn't either. There needs to be a LOT of regulation around these things, I believe, and we as a society should be able to decide exactly what we will accept and what we won't.
At the very least there should be rules about exactly how the systems in cars can be networked, and the security around those connections. The jeep hack was through a remote firmware update to the radio unit I believe. There are no important enough reasons to have a remotely-accessible radio directly networked to the drivetrain computer in my opinion.
It can't just be move fast and break things when lives are at stake. Everything I've heard sounds like it's the wild west at the moment.