For what it’s worth, I actually appreciate most of the safety features on my 2021 Toyota Alphard.
The power sliding doors and rear gate move slowly, but not to the point I’ve ever found it annoying. With kids getting in and out, I wouldn’t want it to be any faster. And unlike in the article, they don’t stop until they actually encounter resistance - which worked fine the one time my kid closed the door on me when I was fetching something out of the back seat.
The proximity sensors do beep pretty loudly every time I get near an obstacle - which is frankly more often than not when parking, and my wife does find it pretty annoying. But it’s a large car, and visibility around the front and rear corners is not great - so I appreciate having an extra audio cue when I’m approaching an obstacle. Often my goal is to get as close as possible to said obstacle when parking (wall, fence, etc) - so my cue to stop is when it finally plays the long sustained beep to let me know that impact is imminent.
I’ve only had automatic breaking engage a few times. Mostly when I back into a parking space too fast and it thinks I’m going to crash - which is easy enough to avoid by going a bit slower. Once it engaged while I was stopped at a traffic light due to a massive downpour which I guess confused the proximity sensor. That was annoying, and could have been worse if I were actually moving, but I just turned it off with a button on the dashboard and carried on.
I find lane keeping assistance (which engages automatically with cruise control) to be incredibly useful on highways, and while it does get wonky sometimes in heavy snow or around construction sites, the car is pretty good about disengaging the feature automatically when it gets confused and makes a ding to let me know. At that point I’ll usually just turn it off manually with a button on the steering wheel until conditions improve. The article mentions needing to keep applying force to the steering wheel even when stopped, but my car doesn't require that.
There’s also a lane departure warning that engages if I cross over a lane divider without signaling first, which plays two short beeps and applies some force to the steering wheel. But easy enough to override if I continue applying force, and most of the time it’s my fault for not signaling properly anyway.
Doors do automatically lock themselves again after a while, but it’s nowhere close to 15 seconds like in the article. It’s maybe happened once or twice and no big deal to unlock again. On the other hand there have been times when I have unlocked my car because I wanted to grab something, and then got distracted and never actually visited it. In these cases I’m glad to have it lock itself again vs. remaining unlocked for several hours.
My car does play a chime at startup, but it’s not unpleasant, and I’m so used to my now that I have stopped noticing it.
I don't have tire pressure sensors - but my mother had a car with this feature many years ago and they were indeed prone to false alarms. She took it to the dealer several times to fix it, and the dealer pretty much acknowleged that they were garbage. Not sure if she ever got it fixed permanently or just learned to ignore it.
Anyway - I know that a lot of this stuff varies by manufacturer and model, so I’m not saying my experience is universal. But for anyone asking who actually appreciates this stuff - I do. Staying safe is really important to me, and whatever annoyance the safety systems in my car cause is easily offset by their benefit. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back in time to before safety assistance features existed.