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Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

On the "yelling at me" part - I find this an absolutely puzzling design pattern that a number of automakers have adopted. I was driving a Volkswagen ID4 - their mid-size electric car - the other day, and my dog was on the back seat.

She triggered the seat belt alarm, but not straight away, only once we were on the German Autobahn. It showed the icon on the dashboard, then it started beeping. Then it started beeping louder. Finally, it settled into a loud, high pitched beep that continued throughout my drive, designed to force me to obey.

This is directly dangerous. I'm going 130km/h - what the fuck am I supposed to do about the seatbelts now? Not that I even wanted to...

It is this idea of "forcing your customer to obey by inflicting discomfort" that's puzzling me. I can't think of any other industry or product that would think this would be a good idea. Just show me the damn icon and if I decide to ignore it, that's my choice...

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”In 2003, the Transportation Research Board Committee, chaired by two psychologists, reported that "Enhanced SBRs" (ESBRs) could save an additional 1,000 lives a year.[100] Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Ford's ESBR, which provides an intermittent chime for up to five minutes if the driver is unbelted, sounding for 6 seconds then pausing for 30, increased seat belt use by 5 percentage points.[100] Farmer and Wells found that driver fatality rates were 6% lower for vehicles with ESBR compared with otherwise-identical vehicles without.[101]” [1]

Not asking nicely for seat belt makes people actually use the seat belt. It’s saving bunch of people every year vs annoying me. And it sure does annoy me, but truth be told sometimes when I move the car just a bit the only reason I use seat belt is that the car is angry at me.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

That's the driver, but I've had similar problems with the car yelling at me when I put a sufficiently heavy bag of shopping on the passenger seat.

The only seat where the weight is guaranteed to be a human is the drivers seat. By all means, put an alarm on that seat, but the other seats can contain things other than passengers.

Worth noting that something heavy enough to trigger the seat occupancy sensor can still do you a lot of damage as it flies around the inside of a car in a crash. I put the seatbelt on around boxes and bags if they're on the seat.

I have child seat in my back seat secured to designated attachment points (not the seatbelt) and its heavy enough to warn me EVERY time. It's secured, not dangerous, and is a persistent false positive. Badly designed systems can also do harm by training people to ignore them or even actively circumvent them.

This. Even outside crash situations, a brusque movement could send things flying, distracting the driver enough to cause Bad Things.

Use the boot, people; at worst, put stuff under the seat, never above.

Yes to clarify the false positives are also the thing that annoy me. Not when the system works as intended. But as somebody else said here if you have a passenger it really makes a difference to the social situation. I don’t know that much about safety engineering, but my hunch is that if there was a bypass button it would weaken the system significantly. Maybe it could be temporary and deep in the menu.

And it only kills missophoniacs so it's okay

Something like this happened in my Skoda a while ago. Driving along on the Autobahn when a really minor irregularity in the road caused the bag I had placed on the passenger seat to be pushed into the seat very gently, triggering the passenger-side seat belt alarm. I had to take the next exit and park somewhere to get it to shut up.

Unrelated but also relevant to the story: My father's new car (a brand-new Nissan) starts yelling at you to put the seat belt on the second you start the car. It's really annoying because the rest of the car systems take their precious time to start up, so I like to start the car first so the stupid computers start booting and THEN put my seat belt on. But that means being bullied by a loud alarm every time someone uses that car. Why oh why? My Audi only starts the alarm once you actually start driving, and even then only if you go faster than 10km/h or something.

> . I had to take the next exit and park somewhere to get it to shut up

This is the safe thing to do. A bag heavy enough to set off the sensors (usually 10kg) is gonna kill someone if not belted in in an accident.

It is not uncommon for bags to go through the front windscreen and kill someone in the car that crashes into you.

> It is not uncommon for bags to go through the front windscreen and kill someone in the car that crashes into you.

With respect.

It's uncommon to crash.

It's rare to have a 10kg bag in your car.

It's vanishingly unlikely to have a 10kg bag in a position where it can fly through the front windshield and hit, and kill, someone in the car that crashes into you.

Of course there's enough kilometers driven that it happens, but that doesn't make it anywhere close to 'not uncommon'.

In this case, it was a light shoulder bag containing only a laptop. Considering it's height, it should have bashed into the glove box area on impact. Stripping it down might indeed be more secure, but how do you properly strip that down with only the seat belt?

> starts yelling at you to put the seat belt on the second you start the car

Unrelated too but in France you must put your seatbelts before starting the car. It’s the law.

There are exceptions, also in France. I think the most relevant one here is for medical reasons or body shape. So if you have a passenger who is exempt from the rule you have to live with your car yelling at you.

You ca de activate I though in car settings? Or by bridging the speaker with a resistor.

on the flipside, one of my first times when learning to ride a car, I was so focused on adjusting the mirror and seat that I forgot to put on my seatbelt. I was able to get out of the parking lot and get onto a pretty busy road with semi-high speed before the alarm went off!

the alarm mostly stressed me out more than realizing I was not wearing a seatbelt, which only made it harder to find a suitable exit so I could stop the car and put the belt on!

I think this is mostly an edge case though, because I probably held a much lower speed than expected in the parking lot due to being very inexperienced behind the wheel.

"and even then only if you go faster than 10km/h or something."

No idea about other countries, but in germany you are allowed to not wear the seatbelt while driving "walking speed". So that makes some sense.

My dad spent most of his working life on "preaching" road safety for the local health service, reviewing all the data in the world (more or less) to tell people what works and what doesn't.

Unfortunately, one thing he learned is that every measure of forceful compliance is consistently more successful in preventing accidents and deaths. Seatbelts save lives, but they had to be made compulsory by law to drill the concept into people; and even with that, it takes un-inescapable annoyances like this alarm to get into compliance that last 5-10% of stubborn idiots who just won't do the right thing. Full-face helmets save lives, but so many people insist in using pointless "bowls" or even nothing at all. Respecting speed limits save lives, but it takes speed cameras to actually persuade people to do that. Etc etc.

The technical implementations can always improve, of course. And tbh, it takes nothing to fix the issue reported: just fasten the belt "empty" when you have the dog (and accept the poor thing will not survive an impact...). The industry is what it is because People Are Bad At Risk-Assessment, and that's that.

This raises a more fundamental moral issue: if I want to be stupid and I'm only endangering myself - why should't I?

I firmly believe that it's not the government's or automakers role to keep me from harming myself - but it is the governments role to protect others from being harmed by me. Consequently, I believe the government should outlaw drunk driving as it endangers others, but it should not force me to wear a helmet on a motorcycle.

Just to be clear: I absolutely believe you SHOULD wear a helmet while motorcycling - but I believe if I choose not to and by doing so am only endangering myself, that's my choice.

> if I want to be stupid and I'm only endangering myself - why should't I?

I hear you, but - on the road you're not alone even after you die. Someone will have to pick up your remains, see your brain splattered all over the road, and live with the trauma forever. Someone will have to try and resuscitate you, taking time that could be spent helping someone else. Worse, partial helmets could save your life but still get you partially paralized or disfigured, which would further burden society and yourself (treatment etc).

Note I'm a rider myself (bonneville ftw), and yeah full-face helmet doesn't fit my Easy Rider fantasy, but if it spares myself and others from the worst consequences, I'm ok with it.

"no man is an island" and in most circumstances you're not alone when driving, unless you're on your private farmland or something.

moving fast enough to hurt or kill you in a car means you're going fast enough to damage or kill whatever you hit, too. even if that turns out to be a ditch or tree, you're still running into something.

pulling your corpse and smashed vehicle out of a ditch is going to cost someone something, even if no one else died.

It's a wider problem than just the seatbelts. The whole cockpit of a car is now a distraction from the most critical thing - driving safely.

For reasons I don't understand, tactile push buttons, with physical feedback, for most tasks are increasingly being replaced with a touch screen you have to look at rather than looking at the road instead and just reaching over to the dashboard.

Hanlon's Razor? It feels like the national road safety bodies world wide, have dropped the ball on this one.

It is literally because it's cheaper, but ironically my Kia Rio, one of the cheapest cars on the road, has physical buttons.

Ironically, the savings they get from physical manufacturing they probably lose on expensive developers, lol.

I sat in a friend's Mercedes and the central display had a big flashy full screen warning that said something along the lines of "Don't let [name of their software package] distract you from driving!". It seems the irony of screaming for your attention only to tell you not to pay attention was lost on them.

The annoying alarm is actually useful so you don't have to shout on your mother in law to get her damn seatbelt. It does the dirty work for you, you don't have to be that annoying person asking for people to put their seatbelt in your car.

In cases like you encountered with your dog, just put the seatbelt on your dog or bag / boxes. It's actually safer for you in case of a crash, they wont get flying into your face. If it's not possible, just put the seatbelt on under your dog just to silence the alarm

> It is this idea of "forcing your customer to obey by inflicting discomfort" that's puzzling me. I can't think of any other industry or product that would think this would be a good idea.

Telephones. The original UK ringtone was explicitly designed to be as irritating as possible (some really weird time signature, I think?)

don't dogs need a seat belt too?

Average voters are allowed to own these cars. And the maker then gets blamed when they do average voter things with it.

You probably should have your dog belted in to a chest harness.

Check your insurance policy.

Even with the chest harness, she can switch seats. You have to put the seatbelts on the empty seats as well, but that makes it harder for her to lie down comfortably.

If there is a passenger without a seat belt I think most places you are supposed to pull over ASAP to solve the situation.

It's illegal to stop on the Autobahn if your car is still in driving condition.

No, its allowed to stop for emergencies. I agree that having a dog on the back seats is not an emergency but the intended purpose of the alarm would be having someone on the back seat who could not fasten their seatbelt. I don't know if that would count as an emergency in a German court but I certainly would count it as a emergency (and it would be illegal).

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