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Comment by FerretFred | Hacker News Reader

Actually, we hired a £32K/$43K Nissan Qashquai for a week, and came across numerous idiosyncrasies. The "best" one was when we attempted to park against a low hedge, and the car set off all sorts of warning alarms. It then refused to lock the doors, so we had to move to a different part of the car park.

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The refusal to lock was probably that you'd not fully switched off the engine. I've had this on my Qashqai. The fuel-saving system that automatically turns off the engine when you're stopped and out-of-gear can be confusing. This behaviour often happens when parking but it seems you still need to press the stop-start button to "completely" turn it off in order to lock the car.

This is the first car I've owned with "modern" driver aids and it is true that they are somewhat temperamental. For example, the auto full-beam headlights get very confused in fog (which can be dangerous!), whilst I often get a warning noise when approaching sharp bends at a perfectly safe speed.

Ah, that sounds interesting - we only had it for a while so didn't get chance to get to know all the quirks... we found the motorway lane wandering feature handy, but we had great fun when we tried to lock the damn thing and didn't move away from the car quick enough: it sensed the key was nearby and "helpfully" unlocked again. After the hire period we were glad to get rid of it!

> we found the motorway lane wandering feature handy

Honest curiosity, but as someone who drives quite a lot (A, B & C licenses) I don't understand why people need help staying in their lane. Flippantly I'd suggest that piloting the car and looking at the road is the absolute bare minimum of 'due care and attention' when driving, though obviously the prevalence of this feature would suggest otherwise.

Any thoughts gratefully appreciated.

Depending on the implementation, it trains/forces you to actually signal before changing lanes (I see people getting lazy with that). But while that's good for everyone overall, it's not exactly an explanation why people buy cars with these features.

> piloting the car and looking at the road is the absolute bare minimum of 'due care and attention' when driving

I agree! In this case it was novel to see how it worked (because the facility was there and new to us) but I'm more keen on using my eyes and mirrors. I could see how it could be useful in dense fog though, given many drivers don't bother with lights...

I assumed the intention is to alert a driver who really needs to take a break. I don't see what other use it has, other than to annoy me when overtaking a cyclist.

Of course, all of these cars are chock full of computers, speakers and monitors, but none of them ever tell you what's wrong in a more intelligible way than wild screeching.

I spent half an hour outside in the cold at 2am with a borrowed Nissan Leaf. It only made a loud beeping noise when I tried to lock it. Apparently, this noise means that the trunk isn't properly closed and that it therefore won't lock the car for you.

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