Hacker News Reader

Comment by SuzukiBrian | Hacker News Reader

My brand new car has a feature called forward attention warning which is driving me insane. It is essentially a small camera located at the steering wheel column which emit a series of high beeps and have an eye icon blink in the dashboard if the car doesn't think I am looking forward.

Cases in which this can happen. - I orient myself before overtaking another car on the highway or motorway. - I position my hand wrong on the steering wheel and the camera can no longer see me. - I put on sunglasses when I am driving against a low sun.

It can be turned off, but if you live in the EU it is required to enable itself once the car has been turned off/on.

It will also happily warn me if it thinks I am speeding based on errornous gps data. This feature also turns itself back on once the car has been turned off.

View on HN

There is truly a scourge in the EU of increasingly intrusive "safety features" which I truly believe are making cars less safe.

I've been driving a family member's new Nissan. Nice car for the most part, but it has this "safety" feature (that's on by default and cannot be permanently switched off, thanks to the EU) which watches out for the white stripe on the right-hand side of the road and JERKS THE STEERING WHEEL when it thinks you're "too close".

Where I often drive, there are many narrow roads. No yellow line in the middle of the road. The only way to avoid hitting oncoming traffic is to drive with your wheels on the white stripe when you meet another vehicle. This can be stressful enough in itself, especially when the other vehicle is some huge bus or semi truck. Not exactly the time you want alarms going off AND YOUR STEERING WHEEL TURNING BY ITSELF. I've taken to calling it the car's auto-crash feature. Always gotta remember to disable the auto-crash. Every time I start the car.

I got so annoyed I looked up the relevant directive. Turns out new cars are required to have a lane assist feature. It is required to turn itself on automatically, and it is required to warn the driver using at least 2 out of the 3 methods: sound, visuals, haptic. So the steering wheel jerking isn't even just a bad implementation, it's the law.

Sigh.

I recently got back from Europe; rented a car. This "feature" is _insanely_ dangerous. Whatever idiot bureaucrat decided that having crappy machine vision software jerk the steering wheel around while you're driving should be sent to an island somewhere.

The damn thing tried to kill me every time we came up on a construction area on the freeway, because it got completely flummoxed by the lane realignment. I couldn't turn it off until we parked the car, and we were on the freeway. Fighting that piece of crap for an hour made for the most exhausting drive of my life.

Far from being mandated, I can't believe that safety regulators allow _anything_ to jerk around the wheel at 60MPH.

Or you could look at some of the research, which suggest that this feature may in fact reduce fatalities significantly (I'm finding estimates in the 20 to 25% range). Well done idiot bureaucrat!

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/fewer-drivers-are-opting-ou...

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Surely they could've found a better way though than to make the car automatically swerve into oncoming traffic?

I'm 100% on board with the idea that the lane assist feature might, on average, improve safety in many conditions. Maybe enough to be a net win. But I'm absolutely certain that its terrible implementation (in legislation, not just in cars) leads to situations where it reduces safety. When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line, no amount of "but it reduces traffic fatalities on highways" will convince me that automatically swerving towards the oncoming semi trailer is safe.

> When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line

My guess is that people drive these types of roads a lot less often than they swerve on highways. Hence the statistics working out. Steering into oncoming traffic does indeed sound, uhm, suboptimal though. :-/

All the cars I’ve driven with this feature vibrate the wheel when they trigger but don’t try to steer.

My Honda Ridgeline (2021, USA spec) has two modes…

Default is “sticker shaker” mode - if it senses lane departure, it shakes the wheel and displays a warning on the dash. On by default, but can be disabled after start-up.

The other mode is “lane-centering” - has to be turned on after start-up, and actively steers car to the center of the lane. Really only makes sense on a highway/interstate - clear lanes, no sharp turns, etc. On dual carriage way, it gets a bit “stupid” when turn lanes appear with a gap or change in lane marking - it thinks the lane got extra wide and tries to center, pulling me half into the turn lane.

But, like I said, it’s 100% optional, so I use it on the highway/interstate, but nothing smaller.

Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled, which is pretty silly (if it behaves anything like the Honda system, whcih is only really designed for true interstate use).

> Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled

I'm in EU, on my 2023 Civic it's off by default and needs to be enabled after every car start if you wanna use it. Also works pretty well, other than when driving straight into the low sun or in heavy rain at night. The collision warning and road departure warning are on by default, the last one can be disabled until car is restarted.

In fairness, I haven't done much experimentation. It jerks the wheel and that terrifies me. I don't know if it's a jerk back and forth to make the wheel vibrate or if it's a jerk to steer the car to the left, either would probably give me a feeling that the wheel is moving by itself and would probably be scary enough for me to disable.

This just goes to show how bad at driving a large number of people on the road are. Driving test standards are way, way too low.

Personally speaking I felt like I somehow accidentally cheated or something when I passed my test. It was too easy. Even now I sometimes question if I should really be trusted with piloting a 4k+ lbs steel box at highway speeds.

I thing most people are bad drivers some of the time. It only takes a moment of being distracted/tired/angry/whatever to cause an accident.

What the first article actually says:

"Lane departure warning and prevention systems could address as many as 23% of fatal crashes involving passenger vehicles."

That appears to be something like a stat about how many fatal crashes involve unintentionally leaving a lane. It provides approximately zero evidence in favor of specifically mandating haptic feedback from the steering wheel.

The second article is marginally more on point - 24% fewer crashes for vehicles with lane keeping assist (so my guess at the meaning of the 23% stat may have been wrong). But the 95pct confidence interval is 2-42% and the study acknowledges that its efforts at controlling for confounding factors in the type of cars that have this feature are imperfect. It also took place in the US, so there's certainly no mandate for haptic feedback and I suspect very few cars had it. This is marginally more helpful evidence but not very good, I think--it seems very plausible that audible lane keeping features are helpful and moving your steering wheel (which sounds terrifying) is unhelpful.

As an anecdote, I crashed a car as a teenager thanks in part to panicking (unnecessarily) when a rough highway started moving the car's wheels (which I noticed of course via the steering wheel) without my intending it. Fortunately there were no injuries.

This entirely tracks to me but hints at a different problem. I suspect if this really does reduce traffic incidents and fatalities in general, it's because a large number of people are driving while tired and drift into adjacent lanes without realizing it and the lane-assist jerks them awake. Problem being this is a blunt force instrument that annoys or even endangers drivers who are not impaired and know what they're doing.

Thankfully, every car I've ever driven that has this feature allows it to be turned off and I have it turned off on my own car, which I drive for maybe ten miles a month in the middle of a Saturday when I'm wide awake.

Your snarky comeback here is "suggest[s] that [it] may" and you couldn't find the links to support even that.

I agree that my comment was a bit snarky. Thing is, I'm getting tired of people dismissing 'bureaucrats' that easily. I know little about road safety legislation, but I know enough about the EU to state that they commonly have very smart subject matter experts work on legislation. Does that mean things always turn out perfect? Far from it. But 'idiot bureaucrat' is way too cynical for my taste.

EU has a huge revolving door problem, especially in automotive, which is a major industry in its (now declining) economic champions.

They might have people with credentials working for it, but the implementation described falls into the category of "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe it." To an external observer, incompetence and malice are hardly distinguishable, especially when there is a huge economic incentive for both the automakers and legislators to be evil.

It's safety profiteering, squeezing millions in the name of saving lives.

The motivation of a bureaucrat isn’t the effectiveness of the policies they produce, but instead the political ramifications of those policies.

The safety minded “take no risks” at all approach has been if not popular, tolerated because it’s hard to argue against safety, even if the safety gains are dubious, and expensive. And so they keep their jobs.

Fast forward a few decades of this, and now nothing much new can be developed.

But of course the bureaucrats are “smart” so they’re never to blame.

Frankly they deserve the ire they get for being part of the problem. When is the last time they got rid of an ineffective rule in the EU?

The genius bureaucrat probably did as much research as you did and came to the same conclusion.

now you're thinking like a bureaucrat!

Never. Take. Away. Control. Authority.

The only way that system could be more dangerous is if the air bags were replaced by Claymore mines.

Based on the recall patterns, I think that's a free upgrade that self-installs to every older car eventually.

It's true, mine has that as well. While I can't turn off the default mode, it is thankfully only visuals and sound. It does however also have the assisted suicide mode, where it will either jerk the wheel or prevent the wheel from turning. Thankfully that can be turned off permanently.

I still find it crazy that these are supposed to be safety features.

I've test-driven 2 cars in the last 2 years (because I'm environmentally interested in swapping my diesel for an EV), but each time has put me off that entire brand. First was Tesla, I can't stand the full iPad console with no physical controls. (And Elon... but that's a side thread).

Then, Volvo, with blue lights filling the cabin and these types of safety features.

Each time I've come away thinking what a shit-show the car was, and how that seems to be the opinion of the entire company line.

I'm still driving my 15 year old diesel with manual controls and dim orange status lights at night. I just want a simple EV with aircon and speakers with media controls by the steering wheel. Minimal extra bullshit.

I'm driving an 11 year old diesel, the main annoyance I have is that its rear proximity sensors pick up on the trailer hitch (which is detachable, but I prefer to have it attached -- besides, it's probably rusted in place or something now after 11 years). So I always have to disable proximity sensors when backing up. An awkward design, but not really a big issue in practice. You get used to it.

I'm not looking forward to getting a fancy new car with government-mandated always-on systems which try to steer the car into oncoming traffic. The insanity is genuinely unfathomable to me. It is, without exaggeration, a fuck-up of such proportions that it's making me question the whole idea of the EU, as a Norwegian whose position on the EU has historically been that Norway should join it.

Although I suppose being outside of the EU isn't exactly saving Norway from its harebrained legislation.

You won’t get it. The tickytacky safety bs is lobbied by car companies who can now sell you more systems on margin. Hold onto your current car for dear life. They won’t ever make them like that again.

In Hyundais this can be disabled by long pressing on the lane keep assist button on the steering wheel. Its the one with a couple of white lines and a steering wheel between them.

You might be able to do similar in the Nissan.

Of course, you have to do this every time you start the car thanks to EU and UK law.

In the Nissan, you can customize all of these things and the car stores your configuration, you just have to press two buttons on the steering wheel every time you start the car to load it. And with those custom config loaded, I find the car really nice to drive. We (I and the family member) have gone through all the safety feature options and made a config which we like. Which mostly means just turning off a bunch of stuff, including the auto-crash and the obnoxious beeping which tells you you're going above (what the car thinks, sometimes incorrectly, is) the speed limit.

Doesn't help when you haven't driven the car in a while so you forget to push those buttons and the car reminds you by automatically turning the wheel towards oncoming traffic :(

I love when you're trying to navigate through some zig zag construction bullshit and the lane assist keeps fighting you to eat some cones/barrels. It's also fantastic when the lines on the highway are wobbly and it starts trying to drive like a drunk person. All because of people who can't help but use their phones while driving...

E: A 2022 subaru I rented for a long drive was by far the least worst of anything I've driven. I go out of my way to try something new every time I get to rent a car

I had a 2019 Subaru that was pretty smooth at lanekeeping. A lot of obnoxious beeping, though.

A relative's Tesla totalled itself because of that feature. It suddenly auto-steered to the side, right beside a concrete barrier. The barrier won.

Does the directive specify that haptic warning must mean a steering wheel jerk? Seems like carmakers have 2 alternatives:

1) use sound + visuals

2) use any other form of haptic feedback. Vibrate the steering wheel. Vibrate the driver's seat. Anything but jerking the steering wheel.

Realistically, car makers are going to find the cheapest way to comply. Adding motors for vibrating the driver's seat costs money. Ditto with adding vibration motors to the steering wheel. Using the motors you already have in the steering mechanism is just software.

So there's a clear incentive to involve the motors which control steering, which is inherently going to feel terrifying.

I was very annoyed about this feature when I first read about it. I don't have it in my car.

But then I rented a Kia which had it. The nudge was very gentle and balanced and it felt pretty much like if the road had a groove or incline. Now, I'm used to driving in places with very bad roads so the feeling was very natural and my instinct was to overcome the steering wheel resistance with a gentle pressure just as you'd do when driving on roads that present those features.

But my eyes were telling me something different: the road was well paved and flat, so I realized it must be this smart feature. I was pleased at the Kia engineers for calibrating the physical response to be not surprising.

My main concern is that you can get used to this feature. The feature is not perfect and doesn't recognize the ends of the lane in many cases so you quickly learn that you can't trust it. But as technology gets better and better the risk of ending up relying on something that can fail occasionally is a serious one

Same on my Skoda, it gently nudges me back into my lane if I'm not paying attention.

My Renault Megane is a bit inbetween I think. You definitely notice it trying to get you where it wants.

But if you're holding the steering wheel normally, ie not just with two fingers, you're easily able to keep it steady.

Another feature I think is suboptimal is the auto emergency breaking. It gets confused when there is strong shadows from an overpass or similar, or winding roads with wide vehicles like campers in opposite lanes, and stomps on the breaks. However when it works it can be a positive...

Lane assist works perfectly fine on my Skoda (or I have learned to live with it). Basically it doesn't do anything under 50km/h and then above that it will mostly lightly shake the steering wheel if you drive on the line, and it will steer only in extremes to keep me in my lane, eg. driving fast and crossing a double white line or something, which saved me a few time when I was distracted. Also, sometimes I use my blinker when I think it will engage, eg. road works and I need to cross the solid center line into the oncoming lane.

> and JERKS THE STEERING WHEEL

Everybody who first encounters this feature (including me) seems to have the same reaction.

However, if you give yourself some time to get used to it, you'll probably realize that it doesn't actually "jerk the steering wheel" with any significant force.

It's more like a gentle nudge, similar to the effect of highway rutting. If you are properly holding the steering wheel, it will not actually affect the steering direction.

> a lane assist feature

More like Bike Overtake Prevention System. Unbelievable.

No matter the supposed safety benefit, the driver should be in control of the car, and it’s notifications, permanently disabling them.

A family member of mine's car has that, I've had similar experiences where (living in a rural area) I've been driving down a 2 lane road with no one else about, seen a puddle or pothole, not wanted to hit it, tried to put the car a bit over the line for that reason and got shoved back by the bloody car thinking it knew better than me.

I rented a car in the UK a few years ago and by the end of the trip I was ready to set it on fire.

- Adaptive cruise control would randomly slam on the brakes on the motorway (just passed a 30 kph exit, the speed limit must be 30 now!), or match speed with a car in the next lane that was I trying to pass

- Emergency braking would trigger if I got too close to a car that was turning out of my lane, or a shrub while parking

- Lane assist reenabled itself every time I started the car

- Radar system would fail every ~3 starts, which would disable adaptive cruise control (ok) and blast a warning sound (bad)

At least now I know that if I'm shopping for a car in the future, one of my criteria needs to be "won't actively try to kill me".

Ren

I rented a car in the states last time I visited family and it was mostly ok - the touchscreen controlled all the heat/cool through convoluted menus but thankfully had dedicated buttons to kind of control climate?

But worse was it would use a camera to read speed signs and therein we had these issues:

- Misreading signs - Reading signs that didn’t exist - Every time it read a new sign it would “helpfully” yell that I was over the speed limit if for example I was coasting down from a 45 to 35 zone, along with scary flashing visuals on the dash

A friend of mine spends the first minute of all trips in their car turning off all the auto-safety BS loaded in by regulation these days. All on by default the next time the car is switched on.

Also, I pretty much wear sunglasses 100% of the time I'm either outdoors or driving. That attention detection is not fit for purpose. Squinting through road glare literally makes me tired.

The dangers imposed on self and society by driving are poorly matched to the requirements of getting a license. Unfortunately participation in much of society requires the ability to drive one's self from one place to another; it's been built around this requirement.

I'm generally pro-EU but they sure know how to not fix things by annoying people as much as possible. C.f. the cookie laws, headphone volume warnings, etc.

Cookie dialogs easily avoided wherever companies care about their customers/users.

Is this the sort of naive reasoning that led to the law in the first place?

The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.

And what lead to the banners is the knowledge that people like you would blame the law instead of the companies.

And they are getting better. I don't remember when was the last time a cookie dialogue forced me to uncheck 10+ switches, and making me angry that they give my browsing history to 1000+ random ad companies--I unironically miss that daily dosage of anger (against ad people and not the EU).

Most of them are one-click nowadays, just as intended. (Still bad on phones tho, especially javascript disabled.)

Yeah now they say "accept all or subscribe". Much better!

Example?

The Guardian does this now.

There has been a lawsuit over that, I've not heard of its result yet.

https://commission.europa.eu/index_en : cookie banner.

Can you find any big sites that don't have one? They're effectively a mandatory CYA, the Prop 65 warning of websites.

I understand the spirit of the law, but any implementation by the EU feels like making a wish to a monkey paw these day. I would love for people to stop watching tiktoks on their phones while driving on the motorway, but the implementation means that I now get to be constantly distracted by my own car while driving.

I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a requirement for phone screens to not turn on over 10mph and gps located on a road

Passengers about to get bored out of their minds..... And car infotainment subscription plans love it!

passenger seats already have an occupancy sensor that you could probably hook into to make a passenger seat bypass somehow.

don't get me wrong, this would probably be horribly unpopular, but otoh deaths from cars are up ~50% in the last decade, bringing us back to ~1985 in car safety. Something fairly drastic is needed

Amount of driven kilometers are also up massively compared to 1985, meaning that per kilometer we did fine on the safety record.

Stop trying to make cars safer, and reduce the amount of driving you need to do. There is a way to have more liberties and have it improve safety instead of fewer. The liberty to commute, do groceries, and go to the gym by bike is huge life improvement, whilst taking nothing away in terms of car liberties.

About the only thing they've gotten right recently was forcing Apple to switch to USB-C.

Even that only moved up Apple’s timetable for switching by a year or two.

My subaru will beep and flash a signal to let me know that it can’t see the lanes well enough to use the lane departure warning.

A safety feature takes my eyes and ears off of the road to let me know that it is not keeping me safe for the moment.

On my spouse's 2019 model, I could disable that alert in the menus. Even after I disabled every alert in the menus, the car still emits an urgent tone with an unknown meaning.

The thing is that I like the safety feature itself. It’s just asinine that it distracts me to tell me that for the next 1 second it’s not keeping me safe. Also the fact that there is absolutely nothing it changes in my driving behavior when it is off. I’m still the one driving.

I just drive with lane keeping enabled. The car will keep itself in the lane without audibly alerting me. If I really wanted to depart the lane, e.g. to avoid debris or to give a cyclist more space, the blinker or a slight nudge of the steering wheel will override it.

I’m talking about it alerting me that it has turned off for a moment because the lane isn’t marked well enough.

My Tesla often beeps loudly at things I have my focus on completely to let me know that I don’t have focus on them, thereby forcing me to look around to see if I missed something and making me lose focus on the thing i needed to focus on.

The one that annoys me the most is the one right near where I live where a wider street becomes a narrower street, which makes my car think I’m going to rear end parked cars at 30mph and always beeps loudly. Even when I know it’s coming, it startles me and makes me lose focus, sometimes when there’s pedestrians trying to cross the street. Very dangerous.

I really did like the actual lane-keeping function of my Mom's Subaru when I drove it on narrow two-lane roads, intentionally hugging the outside of the lane when appropriate. The sound it made wasn't annoying or startling, and quickly became another form of situational awareness to let me know that I was indeed near the edge of the road like I wanted to be.

Yes I like the feature itself. The annoying thing is that it beeps and flashes when it shuts itself off which is pretty frequent where I live.

I've found that disabling the lane assist in my 2020 Civic permanently disables that too. It's an EU model. For anyone looking for a solution, try if this solves it (if you wouldn't miss the lane assist, of course).

Unfortunately as I've later learned, it's a requirement in all cars in the EU from 2025, so there is no way to disable it permanently. Thank you for the suggestion though.

My understanding was that it is only required for lane assist/cruise control, unless i misunderstood. Hopefully if you deactivate those, your car will allow disabling this "feature".

No, it is mandatory for all new cars in the EU since 2025 and while you can turn them off, they will turn themselves on again once the car has been turned off. It doesn't matter if you use lane assist or cruise control.

Unfortunately.

I wonder if there's a market for a little device that taps into the CAN-bus(es) and auto-applies your desired settings on startup.

My dealer suggested that I cover the sensor with electrical tape, since that is what all his other customers were doing. It will then just give off a single warning when you start the car telling you, that the forward attention warning is disabled.

I have since learned that you can put some tinfoil between the sensor and the tape and seemingly disable it completely without any alarms going off.

With that in mind I wouldn't be surprised if there was a market for a gadget that remove all the hassle. I am definitely not alone with this issue.

In a lot of places in the world you can return new cars. I would return one that did that. Manufacturers won't get the hints until they start seeing returns wreck their bottom line.

Wouldn't that wreck your credit score though? Pardon my ignorance.

I don't know the law in your country but most forms of credit have a 'cooling off' period where you can return the money or asset and reset the credit agreement within a certain time but I'm not sure if doing it a lot in a small period of time would flag to a future creditor though.

Manufacturers can't do anything about it if it's required by law.

They can lobby the politicians

Why would they on such things?

In any case, it's law, there's no coming back from this.

possibilities: (1) they get lots of angry customers and bad press, and are tired of being made to look bad because of gov req's (2) it costs them more to manufacture all the fancy nanny tech, so their bottom line would be positively impacted by rolling back the requirement for it

Laws are immutable now?

> Why would they on such things?

Read the context of what you are replying to.

They do. They know this will make cars more expensive and most people don't want any of it.

If a substantial portion of people refused to keep buying them, that's data supporting the repeal.

If people just keep buying them, then the lawmakers get to go "no see the people like it".

The law requires bad design/implementation?

Yes, pretty much.

They could try to cheat! That's actually what Volvo did in the Dieselgate. The EU regulation mandated the impossible duo of lower NOx emission and higher fuel efficiency. Diesel engines get higher efficiency by increasing compression ratio, which also increases NOx production.

So they should innovate then, spend those millions into some real R&D. Or does innovation only come in form of touch screen panels?

I’m pretty dure you mean Volkswagen, not Volvo…

I’ll keep my stupid, non-digital 2010 car running until the day I die. They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I’d rather register it as a vintage car and keep driving it.

Mine is over 50 years old. It's been upgraded with a few "modern" features like distance sensors, rear cameras, and a GPS, but those are actually useful and won't actively fight me.

The assist to keep you in the lane that also auto turns on has been the only cause of 3 near crashes I've had, when renting cars. Never have I even had a slightly dangerous situation other than this bullshit turning the fucking wheel for me. Who the heck thinks that a machine knows best if it should turn the wheel than a human, with eyes, driving? I cannot understand how it ever helped anyone and it's much worse than just a beep, literally trying to steer against you.

I actually knew about this one going in, since it's been a requirement for a bit longer. My Hyundai has two modes, one where it simply beeps if you cross the lines without the turn-signal and the dangerous one where it locks the steering wheel.

Only the slightly annoying beeping one seems to be mandatory, the extremely dangerous steering wheel locking one isn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought the car at all.

Steering wheel lock? Is that seriously a thing, or is that a strong exaggeration?

My car just gently applies a tiny bit of force on the steering wheel, to keep the car in the lane. It's very easy to override manually. In fact, it feels quite similar to moving out of pretty shallows ruts in te road, and could even be mistaken for it.

No, it will actively prevent you from turning the wheel if it means you will go outside your lane. It does have threshold if you struggle enough, in which case it will simply undo the lock and you get to jerk the wheel dangerously in that direction.

If you use the turn signal it won't lock the wheel, but if child suddenly runs into the road and you will try avoiding a collision, you'd better remember to use the turn signal first.

This reminds me of how Boeing introduced an automatic nose-down feature in the 737 MAX, meant to compensate for its higher-mounted engines causing nose-up during takeoff. According to a video I saw, they didn't make pilots aware of this change from the older 737, nor train them in how to recognize it or turn it off, and its behavior in response to a bad angle of attack reading turned out to be deadly.

I think this is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KQ0g_-qJs

Keywords: 737 MAX MCAS trim

> is required to enable itself once the car has been turned off/on

Get an older car. Screw panopticon tyranny.

Thanks, looks like I'll be repairing my 2010 Honda Fit (Jazz in EU markets) forever to avoid getting anything of the sort of antifeatures you describe.

That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.

Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.

Honda was still good in recent years. I drive a 2024 Honda CR-V. No tones that annoy me. No interior cameras. All of the important controls are still physical.

It sounds like some of these things need to be disabled by pulling a fuse, or else disabled via button every time the car is on, like a takeoff checklist for an airplane.

I hear a lot of people do that for the auto start/stop feature on cars in the US. And the INEOS Grenadier, which has an alarm go off if it detects you are going above the speed limit. Every time you turn the car on, you have to navigate a touchscreen menu to turn that off.

On the Kia EV 9 I had to go in and disable lane assist (which you can still disable here in the US).

It was downright dangerous, jerking the steering wheel at seemingly random times when it gets confused.

Why not return the car for an actual sane one from 5 years ago?

I would, but once I fully understood the problem it was too late to return it. When I got the car I simply turned off the features, and because I don't drive a lot I didn't notice that the car would turn them on again until I was outside the return period.

I really just didn't have the imagination to think that it could possibly be a problem. Even the manual says that it stays turned off once disabled.

I live in EU and my car does not have any of that.

Obviously the reason will be revealed as you get into questions like what year was your car manufactured and at which stage of integration is your country.

It's required in new cars from 2025 and onwards.

Why'd you buy it?

Because it's otherwise a great car. I did notice the problems during the test-drive, but I figured it wasn't a problem, since it could be turned off in the console. So I turned them off and forgot all about it. I would never have imagined that some obscure EU-regulation, that I've never heard about, would require them to turn back on.

You can't avoid cars with these anti-features if you want a new car. They're required by law in the EU.

Catalytic converters are required by law too, yet I know plenty who have done a "cat delete" on their vehicle. As a simpler example, pulling the seatbelt chime fuse was a common mod long ago when I grew up. You may want to check if the modding scene has any solutions for your make and model.

If you modify your car in such a way in the EU it won’t pass the mandatory yearly inspection which means it’s no longer road legal.

You obviously restore your mods before the inspections, and redo them afterwards. Even the "stupid Americans" know that much. ;-)

Yeah, that's why I don't buy new cars. Put up or shut up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com