Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
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At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
New cars with intrusive driver monitoring alerts are obviously going to be terrible but you can still buy vehicles made prior to this change.
I've heard that Dacia has some models that are like 2008 throwbacks, with "modern" annoyances kept to a bare minimum, but they're considered too low-market for the rental companies, I suppose. I'd consider that sort of thing if I were looking to buy a new car, money no object.
But really a well-maintained vehicle that's ~15-20 years old suits me just fine.
I bought the model with no internet connection, so the speed limit is automatically read by the front camera, and it's usually wrong. Although the alarm can be disabled, it still shows a distracting visual warning on the dashboard. I covered mine with duck tape, but now everyone who goes into the car asks me why I'm covering a warning with duck tape, and I have to explain them every time.
I converted the car into a camper, but some digital features are always on, even when the car is off.
For example, the car continuously detects the wireless key, so I bought some Faraday cage wallets to store them while we sleep. However, they don't work, so at the end I had to make my own Faraday cage wallets with aluminum foil and duck tape (yeah, in this project I found that duck tape is really versatile).
Another issue that really bothers me is that the car detects movement, even when it is completely off. Whenever I'm sleeping and I change position, the center screen lights on, some relays start to click, and some fan runs for a couple of seconds. Then, after ~10 seconds everything turns off again. It drives me crazy.
I got this car just because I wanted something shorter than 4.5m (but that could fit a 120 x 190 cm bed), with a reliable engine (this is a 1.6L from 2005, created by Renault & Nissan, without any known issues), and without internet connection. I reviewed hundreds of cars, and this was basically our only option in our country.
Also happens it gets confused with freshly painted white/yellow lines when older are still visible.
Over here, in Greece, whenever you try to avoid a pothole, a double-parked car, a cyclist, a pedestrian, a stray, ANYTHING, lane assist always tries its best to make you hit whatever you're trying to avoid.
How do you tell if someone is driving drunk?
They are driving straight!
With the unspoken part being anyone NOT drunk was weaving to dodge debris, potholes, etc.
So, yeah, it's done badly some of the time. But it at least can be done well.
This year I never turned it off. I’m guessing they updated the algorithm because it seems a lot more subtle, I don’t feel it being aggressive like before. When I deliberately cross the line (which happens a lot right now, lots of summer road fixing going on) I don’t notice it fighting me.
If it passes the sniffer it passes the sniffer, other than the parties who are whiny because they stood to make a buck who cares?
And yeah I enjoy having my car shut the hell up and let me drive.
Last year, or the year before, Texas dropped emissions testing, except in its most populous counties.
At least for my state, the emissions test a car has to pass is whatever it was supposed to have passed when it was fresh off the assembly line. So older cars do not have to pass stricter newer standards that newer cars have to pass.
Now, granted, wear and tear will eventually result in an older car not passing its original standard, but at least the standard it has to pass is fixed, rather than a moving target.
Extremely rough example numbers: Instead of testing a million cars for $20 each, 10k cars are tested for $200 each. 85% of testing stations shut down, and the rest downsize if they can, but there's still plenty of them around. The total cost of testing drops 90%. The state taxes every car $2 to pay for the randomized testing; being selected means you lose an hour driving to the station, not that you lose $200 of your own money.
Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?
I turn mine off quite often. On dirt roads and snow.
Gives you all the info you need including software.
Great start to knowing what the CAN is doing.
Modern electric Volkswagens (and some other brands) have this amazingly awful feature where lifting your ass off the driver's seat turns off the "ignition". The car just shuts off immediately, AC turns off, CarPlay disconnects, those driver settings reset. Even if I sit back one second later.
My boss sometimes drives without a belt while the car keeps beeping and he succesfully ignores it.
There are many many poor drivers and many many distracted drivers out there. I'm not accusing you of one, but maybe a little bit of self-introspection may be necessary.
The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner.
Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!
They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.
Nah, you just get knee-jerk, feel-good laws because the masses never dig deeper and the elected only care about being reelected.
I can see there being lots of valid complaints about implementation, but acting as if traffic injuries is not a major problem to be addressed and is just in the interest of busybodies is a completely unreasonable take.
Can they? How many people real world test, and are they of all different heights and weights and face shapes too?
Besides that, when I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old movies on late night TV. Often these movies had car chases, and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason. I was always flummoxed, for we had no cliffs anywhere I'd ever been, and wondered where they were, and why people were always driving on them.
When I visited California I suddenly realised "oh, they're everywhere here, just driving home".
Another poster pointed out the alarm went off, if he looked to the corner he was driving towards. People dogfooding won't notice issues with that, if the local environment doesn't have such features.
Could you test for all these things? Maybe, after realising what to test for. You'd then need a sort of regression test, too. All with people.
Obviously, you're not familiar with Toonces, the Driving Cat.
Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.
The solution to bad implementation can’t be to just throw our hands in the air and say that Kia produces bad cars so therefore we cannot introduce safety regulation
> Each year road crashes generate about 120,000 fatalities and 2.4 million injuries in the European region of the World Health Organization. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults.
Whatever it is we are doing today, it is not working.
They clearly are not helping.
EU statistics show a continuous downward trend over the last 25+ years with pretty much the only thing sticking out being the Covid lockdowns. And all thanks to safety regulations!
The fact is hundreds of thousands of people are alive today thanks to traffic safety improvements, and probably millions have been spared from a life of suffering with major injuries.
And having used those systems, they are definitely not actual improvements.
Other things may be, but not these systems. So stop lumping them in together.
I have a car with a full suite of safety systems, the automatic braking for example have helped me avoid 2 serious accidents where other drivers blew straight through yield signs right in front of me.
And in my Toyota, I have never ever been negatively affected by any safety system, I also of course test drove it to make sure that they haven’t implemented the regulations in the worst way possible.. which I would suggest that everyone does with their next car. Shitty implementations of the regulations definitely do exist, but manufacturers would make sh*t cars whether these existed or not..
And I have been rear ended by a tiktok-watcher, so I have very good reason to believe (at least hope) that this will be yet another success. At least it’s extremely hard for it to get worse than the state on the road today, where every other driver is staring at their phone..
if the parent commenter read the manual, they would know what the beeping means
Not even that. They know the laws are stupid. They don't care. It's just another day at work for them. They're trying to surgically write laws to garner support/votes from shorsighted hand wringing Karens (plenty of examples in HN comments) while also not actually hurting industry/donors.
So stupid rules and stupid beeps are what you get.
too much control creates a generation behave like the kids.
The longer it'll take you to leave or organize against your leaders, the less freedom you have. See DPRK for an extreme example.
If anything in an authoritarian regime, cars would be (and were) an instrument of control.
The extra funny part is that all the car-brained ex-communist people that had to be good little comrades during the 20-year waiting list period they had to endure are now big on the 'cars = freedom' mindset... No my guy, if cars were freedom, you can be damn sure only the communist nomenclature would be allowed to have them. Instead you were humiliated with spending half your life on a waiting list, and then the only freedom you got was to continue being a subservient communist subject under the party boot. How else would you afford gasoline after all? Not that that was enough... For context, I live in a former communist country, parents and grandparents waited for 10+ years to be graced with the permission to buy a car. Then proceeded not be able to afford petrol until the early 2000s...
I bike most places but keep my car for the odd road trip or run to Ikea. But when ICE decides to shut down the interstates and round up all us commies, my car is not going to magically smuggle me 500 miles to Canada, and i can't believe people think it will
I call it 'The Handmaid's Tale' approach!
Oh no, they can demand I unlock my phone! Better remove encryption and give them permanent remote access!
Oh no, they can close off all border-crossing roads via checkpoints and stop me from leaving the country by car! Better remove cars!
Oh no, they can stop public transport! Better remove public transport!
Oh no, they can suicide me! Better remove myself!
In the case of shit hitting the fan you take what you can get and any options are welcome. I have family who died during the communist revolution and they literally went willingly to their death because if they'd run their entire families would have gotten killed, which then led to many immediate family members of the killed ones to be put in prison on bs charges out of fear of retaliation. My grandfather was literally found guilty of assisting in the murder of a national hero who died before he was born and causing one of the largest recent wars, which also happened before he was born, because his father was an intellectual that ended in a mass grave. When things get unstable all rules are out the window. Throwing your family in the car and booking it for the border would have been an option worth considering. There wasn't one though and you can't really escape by horse cart in winter with the borders of the time. Now it's all very open. Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
Edit: Even without my schizo take, there's just a sort of freedom in that I can decide on the weekend that I wanna see castle, find one in a 400km radius and just beeline to it. With a bicycle that radius is 100km maybe. For me more like 70. With public transport there's a lot you can't reach and it's often more expensive.
Also,
> Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
At least here in the US, literally every single border crossing is already guarded by armed men. They can already close them on a whim whenever they want.
And what does driving your car require if not a written permission slip?
Just like with other media (movie, book, etc), the product is the end product, in this case a joke or a thought-provoking view. You shouldn't care about the creator's actual views or consider them while engaging with his comment.
That was the reason while Ukraine, before the war, was a huge net exporter of electricity. They never got too many or really good cars, but they do sure had plenty of electric generation plants.
The Chinese apparently learned with this, and used and export oriented economy to have the necessary scale to invest both in heavy industry as well as consumer goods.
We have those inner city bike extremists here, too. There's proposals like banning all motorized traffic from the city because you "can walk to your bakery duh". But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.
You can allow transport for business (speed-limited to 30 km/h or ~20 mph) and ban individual's cars. There are busses, trams and subway and there is no need to have a car.
I have a trailer for the bike, we can haul 100 lbs. it’s more than enough.
Businesses can be allowed to get deliveries, just personal cars are restricted.
In my city, many businesses have switched to operating from a cargo bike: plumbers, electricians, even mechanics.
This perfectly legitimate argument for Oxford would be silly to make about say Milton Keynes.
The condescending assumptions people make when they dont have arguments are getting absurd.
WTF? In inner cities, bikes are the sensible option for 90% of traffic. Not for emergency services and larger freight of course, but it's possible to aim for a sensible mix.
Edit: I think most destructive decisions are made in fear, and everyone does that sometimes. But we fear different things.
There have been rational leaders and politicians, but there have also been many irrational and emotional ones, and I see no evidence men are less affected than women. If anything, it seems to be the other way around, although there's not that much data yet on female decision making in politics.
But I'm pretty sure that the claim that women would be more emotional, is itself driven by emotion rather than data.
My current car shows this once per driver. I always thought toyota engineers were stupid for designing such a system.
Annoying alarms trigger driver distresss which has equally negative effect on attention while driving.
We had a replacement Yaris that had the speed alarms but one could lower the volume to the point where it didn't matter much. Much better design than the older Toyotas which would beep incessantly and louder if you didn't put belts on, back seats included.
I ended up buying loose seat belt buckles for my wife's car from a pull and pay to stop this. Evidently nobody at Toyota has a dog.
I don't drive/don't have a car, but it drives me mad when I take an Uber, I go into the back seat and put my backpack beside me and the car keeps beeping because of it (I obviously put my seatbelt on). For some time I didn't understand what was that beeping until a driver told me, now when I hear it I know to put the seatbelt in my backpack seat, and remove it when I get off the car.
What if you disconnect the speakers? Do they have a sensor for that? If so, replace them by an 8 ohm impedance.
An alternative amplifier can be connected to the speakers then. Or just use portable bluetooth speakers.
If driving alone, for music, I would then listen on headphones. That's illegal in many places but at that point, having had to disconnect the speakers, I'd be acting out of spite.
It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".
Basically these brainrotten politicians consider themselves the only responsible ones that need to remove choices for the simpletons they administer because they (the politicians) know better.
That's the core of our current woke culture that has become the zeitgeist since the 2010, especially in Germany - and it's especially strong on the left side of the spectrum ... But can be observed across all current parties to varying degrees.
That causes the politicians to think more about what "should" society be like (from their "I know better" perspective), instead of looking at reality - consequently ignoring that what they're trying to create isn't even within the bounds of our technical capabilities right now. Yes you can get close, but close is not enough for such features
It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new apps and won't update the apps they have.
If you're in that meeting... speak up. I do and sometimes it even gets people to re-consider annoying defaults that don't even benefit the company very much.
I would love to replace my 2007 GTI with something cleaner and quieter but I genuinely don't see anything new as that big of an upgrade - my car has physical buttons for every feature, it doesn't (intentionally) make any stupid noises, and it's a stick shift in the US so it's essentially theft-proof.
Why would they want to spend money on all these alarms unless it is to drive people to complain to their representatives about the amount of them.
The introduction of seatbelts, ABS, ESP all came with noticeable drops in accident rates.
However it was noticed, that these new driver assist features didn't reduce the number of accidents accordingly. These systems are not new. We know they don't really help.
Why do this?
Every few years they do a study and realize you quickly get to the point that people simply ignore all the signage when you do that, and they take all but the most important signs down. Then the sign creep starts again. It's a cycle.
I know when I drive I ignore all the beeps and dinging noises my car makes. I haven't even bothered to find out what they mean.
Where do you live?
In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways).
This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.
For example, typical city road speed is 50kmh, but residential side streets are 30kmh. If you cross an intersection there usually should be a sign telling you the speed limit because people turning onto other roads need to know how fast they're going. Except there sometimes isn't. So you're coming from a 30kmh road and turn onto a 50kmh without a sign. Your car now thinks you're still in a 30kmh road. What about GPS positioning? Sure, that works, until cities have started deciding that actually their main city roads should be 30 instead of 50. (Something I agree with btw) Except no signs and if you don't pay for your cars subscription service to get the newest updates, good luck getting that info.
Beyond that, construction zones with shittily placed signs or signs that are placed not in optimal locations. Driving on the highway but there's an offramp for an interchange with a 60kmh speed limit for the offramp? Guess your highway speed is set to 60 now. Enjoy the car beeping at you.
Good look recognizing this situation without GPS maps.
A lot of these features seem to assume that you're driving on a multi-lane motorway with well-marked lanes. I'm constantly being nudged by my ID.3 one way or another on rural roads. You can turn it off, but it turns itself back on the next time you unlock the car.
I do wish it was even quieter tho. It's kinda of a shame you got a quiet EV but then add annoying bingbongs.
I'm guessing though that you're in the EU (I'm in the US where it is almost considered criminal to go speed limit on the highway)
The way to get to the city proper goes through country roads that probably used to only get a few dozen vehicles per hour, now having to handle massive traffic due to the new developments in this area (they're still building!)
They're working on reworking the roads but the speed limits are nonsensical because of this history.
It was hard to find reputable numbers for all of Q1, so my source is only for january and february: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
Colour me skeptical. ODBII is just a protocol; it knows nothing of the modules on your buses. I think you will find you need the dealer software. Tools exist that implement big chunks of that functionality, but since they are built on reverse-engineering, the price approaches the dealer software anyway.
The only place i found the Mercedes software was a paid forum that obscures the links. Getting the cracks working was a magic incantation. It's similar for VAG. They won't sell you the software if you're not a dealer.
You will not get there with a £40 ebay special. If you can, please share what works, it will be of much interest to many.
Not sure if this has ever been implemented but I know from my time in automotive that there was the idea to exchange driving data with the insurer. If this becomes reality ignoring speed limits could increase your insurance premiums.
I rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating!
No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone.
I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey.
I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
AFAIK the warning tones don't come from the car's stereo speakers but have its own speaker.
If the former, you can bypass it electronically. If the latter, I'm sure you can mess with the software of the multimedia head unit to silence the chimes.
Will your car fail inspection if you do this?
MOST of the time it's good about telling when I'm looking and when I'm not, out of maybe... 5 alerts over the previous 8 months all, but one occurred when I was in fact looking away for one reason or another. Likewise when it's correct my lane-keeping it's been right about me drifting.
Given how inattentive I see other drivers being, on their phones for example, and taking into account that I'm (based on my record) a good driver who is attentive... I appreciate these additions. I doubt that they make us less safe, we just dislike anyone or anything telling us how to drive, because "we already know what we're doing." The subjective experience of being distracted however isn't usually so clear-cut, it FEELS like you're paying attention.
Note: This is a new model Lexus, so I expect this represents that brand as well as Toyota, but beyond that I don't know.
I'm yet to experience a downside, this isn't like using "Autopilot" or some other situation where a machine is taking over for me. I don't see why our skills or caution would be lessened by exposure to realtime feedback.
Besides, you could make such an argument for any safety feature: "I don't like how new cars have ABS brakes. We shouldn't be training people that you can just slam on the brakes on a slippery surface and expect the wheels to not lock up..."
... "I don't like how new cars have seatbelts. We shouldn't train people that they can just crash into things and not have their face go through the windshield"...
There have been many deaths over the years where drivers forgot to engage the park brake, then stepped out and got run over by their own vehicle. Including, sadly, Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin. If his car had had Auto Hold then he would very likely still be alive today.
The only scenario where this could have a negative effect on safety is where you, the driver, were used to driving a car with the feature but got surprised by its absence when driving an old car. But as I facetiously illustrated in the post above, this is not a valid argument against new safety features. Any accidents that this scenario might cause are far outweighed by all the ones that will be prevented in the long run.
Anton Yelchin's death was more annoying, it was a design defect that pushing the gear lever all the way to the top didn't put it into P (like cars of the 80s, of even 50s), the gear lever acted more like a 4-way button, and drivers needed to push it twice (or 3x?) to go to park. Unfortunately his car was probably not new enough to have auto-park when driver door is open. His family got a settlement from the manufacturer..
Which to be clear is all I did myself, but I did say it that way honestly. "there is no way that..." doesn't pretend to supply any proof, just the reasoning.
Neither of your attempted counter-examples actually amounts to the same sort of reasoning.
Except in a way you are also right and that rightness actually supports my point. I would equate you seatbelt nonsense with bicycle helmets, where it is quite up for grabs if they have been a net positive, because both the riders and the drivers are falsely trained to think the cyclists are safer and don't need to worry as much. There are not many real studies, and the few that exist, you can make them say whichever side your emotional belief wants.
But I wasn't quite going there. Operating a vehicle is operating a vehicle. Until such time as the driver, or rather mere user, bears absolutely no responsibility, like riding the bus or a train , or maybe an elevator, then "there is no way" yes a simple assertion, that it's good to train everyone that they are riding in elevators where they only need to maybe press one button to say what they want but beyond that it's out of their control and so out of their responsibility what happens after that, because we do not actually live in that world yet.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
It still falls back on the torque sensor (requiring hands on wheel) if it thinks you're not paying enough attention, or if it can't see your eyes for whatever reason.
And I guess Tesla must have enabled the camera for all new vehicles now, at least in Europe, given that it's required.
Lane keep assist though? I often drive on narrow country roads barely wide enough for two cars, with a white line on each side but no center line. To avoid large oncoming cars, I need to drive on the white line to my right. When I do, lane keep assist activates motors in my steering wheel which try to force the car into the oncoming traffic.
Easy to turn on in the modern car I sometimes drive, but oh my god, that was scary the first few times it happened. Beeping at me is bad enough but messing with the steering wheel??? This should be illegal, not required!
I'm mostly pro EU but this crap is genuinely making me resent them.
I often complain about the lack of buttons, but my car actually has a dedicated button to turn this safety feature off.
IIRC, veering from the lane is the cause of most collisions, so it makes sense to have this.
Regardless, I feel like maybe "suddenly automatically jerk the steering wheel to drive into oncoming traffic" mode should maybe be off by default? Although it would definitely make me less angry if it could be turned off.
My dad's Toyota has this. The issue is it seems to have a hard time actually centering itself in the lane, so it'll just sway from side to side like a drunk driver if the lane is somewhat narrow.
And you can forget about driving on secondary roads, which usually don't have markings on the sides. It'll keep trying to drive in the middle of the road. It's also extremely dangerous to try to correct your trajectory when there's an oncoming car on one of these roads where two cars barely fit, and you have to basically drive on the shoulder.
Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Bonus points for it just beeping whenever it's unhappy about something, without having any kind of "log". So if you don't look at the instrument cluster at the exact moment it beeps, you'll have no idea what it wanted. I know about the "imminent collision" one because I saw the dashboard turn red from the corner of my eye and immediately complained to my dad about it. Apparently it does it pretty often when he's maneuvering in and out of the garage.
Now, I know many people drive without paying any kind of attention to traffic, which is obviously very dangerous. But I'm not convinced these systems are that useful if people get used to ignoring them.
Newer cars (or other cars) do a better job of this. Mine doesn't do the ping pong - it really does keep it centered.
However, the point is that it should direct you back into the lane and you're supposed to take over. If it's ping ponging, it's because you as the driver are letting it.
> Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Is this detecting at the corners and not the front? For example, my old 2016 car has collision detection, but it will only detect if something is in front of you head on. With my newer car, it's checking the corners. Still, I get the warning only when parking. And I can turn it off.
> But I'm not convinced these systems are that useful if people get used to ignoring them.
Agreed. I think some manufacturers do a better job than others, though.
It's awful and I've trained myself to automatically long press the button on the steering wheel to disable the entire system every time I get behind the wheel.
This. It's not just beeping; if it thinks you're moving too close to the edge of the lane, it will steer the car to the other side. The only way for me to prevent doing it is by gripping the steering wheel like crazy. Who the hell drives like that?!
No, having to fight the car just to stay put is a failure of the tech.
IIRC, this is a 2022 model, so hopefully the tech has improved since.
The cruise control in my Hyundai is tied to the lane centering feature and this keeps forcing me onto exit ramps i do not intend to take. One time, it was quite aggressive during rain. The lane keep feature does not handle off-ramps in Ontario well at all.
The problem with these "safety" features is that they do not work reliably and do not handle edge cases well.
What I'm talking about is lane keep assist, which is a "safety" feature which beeps at you and jerks the wheel when the car thinks you're veering out of your lane.
Some of my worst driving experiences have been with collision detection + auto brake.
You try to enter a narrow steep hill driveway and it slams on the brakes with half your car hanging out into [potentially] oncoming traffic. Thanks, car
Or you try to speed up across a wide open intersection because the light is about to turn and it slams on the brakes because there's cars on the other side waiting for the next light down the block. Plenty of room to stop after you've cleared the intersection mind you, but hte car really really doesn't like that you sped up from 25mph to 31mph when it thinks you should be slowly coasting to a stop.
On the other hand, driving a motorcycle, I love other people's auto brake. Makes lane splitting (at reasonable speed deltas) easier because every Tesla will tap the brakes when you cut into its lane.
Anyway, I wish driving assists had rush our mode. They're pretty decent in average conditions but ho boy tightly packed aggressive rush hour traffic is hell in a modern car. So much beeping and constantly fighting with the assists.
Fun when your car makes you do both at once.
I was restraining myself from saying exactly this :-)
I can't remember where, but I recently drove somewhere and they had posted signs informing drivers that they ticket people who accelerate on yellow lights.
I agree! In this particular case we were dealing with bumper-to-bumper traffic, a light that takes many minutes, and very few cars making every green light. It took us 20 minutes to wait our turn. I really didn't want to wait for another cycle. 2 more cars rushed behind me.
Like I said: We need rush hour mode
I simply disabled the camera and radar. The car was unsafe. Did I mention it emergency braked all the time, for no reason? No, it wasn't me, and almost getting rear ended all the time gets old fast.
These systems are far too immature for use.
(I edited my comment adding the word deep, to indicate it is 3 clicks deep. Very annoying.)
Any dangerous machine (like a car) must not do anything unexpected out of the driver's control. A lane assist that resists the wheel when trying to get out? Why not, but dangerous. A lane assist that slam you back in the lane? Criminal. (same with anti-collision braking that triggers too strong too early and surprises drivers behind you)
I'm definitely of the opinion that all those features reduce security. The alarm fatigue is real, because the car always finds something to beep at you. Heck, even your hands not being a perfect 10-2 o'clock on the wheel is reason enough on some cars. You quickly ignore the beeps because there are so many reasons for the car to beep it's hard to even understand why.
What is special is one time it was a one way lane next to the tram with a concrete stub down. I wouldn't be surprised if the anti-collision kicked in and applied lane assist even with the blinker.
At any rate, the principle of least surprise still applies: heavy machinery must not jerk unexpectedly to the side. Never ever ever.
I agree but the "standard" for car/transportation discussions as set by the screeching morons is that 3rd and 4th order consequences count, so by their own rules it's dangerous even if only barely noticeable at the statistical level by torturing the data.
I agree but the "standard" for car/transportation discussions as set by the screeching morons is that indirect Nth order consequences count, so by their own rules it's dangerous even if only barely noticeable at the statistical level by torturing the data.
But they make it less safe in a hard to measure poorly defined way whereas they make it safer in a measured easy to take credit for way.
The safety industry (or whoever, not really sure exactly who's benefitting here) destroying $2 of value to put $1 in their pockets. Textbook example of economic broken windows.
> to force people out of cars.
All that stuff following is also nonsense.
“They” don’t want people out of cars, the companies want that sweet sweet revenue stream from vacuuming up data. That’s all this is
Examples include some version of "They want us to act like slaves" or "They want to control our minds".
More often than not the simplest explanation is short-sighted profit motive, or institutional dysfunction, or multiple parties with conflicting motivations with no central agenda. It's far less likely to be a grand coordinated conspiracy.
Where I live (city in the PNW), bike lanes see heavy use year-round.
But you see bicycles on the bike lanes, lots of bicycles. When it's summer time and when it's not raining.
Otherwise the people are all in their cars.
Amsterdam is a different kettle of fish entirely. That's what I'd call "heavy."
What is their motive for wanting to "force people out of cars"?
Here:
Elmar Altvater
Ian Angus
Rudolph Bahro
Adam Bandt
Hugo Blanco
Murray Bookchin
Jabari Brisport
Walt Brown
Paul Burkett
Max Chandler-Mather
Barry Commoner
Jeremy Corbyn
Pat Devine
Jutta Ditfurth
Sabrina Fernandes
John Bellamy Foster
Alberto Garzón
André Gorz
Ramachandra Guha
Donna Haraway
Howie Hawkins
Jason Hickel
Joan Herrera i Torres
Naomi Klein
Mark Carney
Joel Kovel
Dimitri Lascaris
Enrique Leff
Michael Löwy
Caroline Lucas
Andreas Malm
David McReynolds
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Steven Guilbeault
Chico Mendes
Luka Mesec
George Monbiot
William Morris
Abdullah Öcalan
James O'Connor
David Orton
Simon Pirani
Zack Polanski
Lee Rhiannon
Raül Romeva
Manuel Sacristán
Ariel Salleh
Joan Saura
Pernille Skipper
Jill Stein
Chlöe Swarbrick
Alan Thornett
Peter Tatchell
Alex Tyrrell
Derek Wall
Raymond Williams
Gerrard Winstanley
Avi Lewis
On the other hand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-socialism#Critique_of_actu... says:
> Kovel believes that the forms of 'actually existing socialism' consisted of "public ownership of the means of production", rather than meeting "the true definition" of socialism as "a free association of producers", with the Party-State bureaucracy acting as the "alienating substitute 'public'".[130]
and in general, I cannot find any examples of eco-socialists making the claims, or holding the beliefs, you're attributing to them. Eco-socialists are not, near as I can tell, a fan of the state, nor "government ownership".
Just because you can join facts together to form a narrative, that does not make the narrative true.
The narrative you've presented is not supported by the sources you've cited (e.g. the eco-socialism Wikipedia article, which appears to contradict it). You have not given me any reason to believe it, and I'm not confident that you've ever received a good reason yourself.
Every level of government, the World Economic Forum and every other organization that seeks to mandate digital currencies, mandate digital IDs, impose "chat control" and eliminate all privacy. You have to have your head buried deep, deep in the sand to think this is some sort of conspiracy. It is all happening right out in the open.
None of this has anything to do with a purported green movement that seeks to end private ownership of cars. Modern cars are easy to track, for starters.
Modern cars allow autonomy of movement, even if you are tracked (except of course those with the mandatory kill switches which our benevolent overlords have also ordered be installed).
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Digital_Id...
https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X000005JJGcUAO
https://www.weforum.org/communities/digital-currency-governa...
They aren't suborning themselves to anyone. The organization is comprised of those powerful people, who are the ones coming up with the agenda and hoisting it upon the rest of us.
Given that electric vehicles including cars, busses and trains all exist, can you explain what relationship exists between the notion of private property ownership (notably cars) and "the green movement"? It is not clear to me why a global environmentalist cabal would seek to end private ownership of electric cars, which have more or less the same drawbacks as electric busses or trains.
Furthermore:
As far as I can tell, the following groups are both wealthy and powerful, and have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels and/or the end of private property:
- big oil
- coal
- auto manufacturers
- major banks (because they finance loans, including auto loans)
- the governments of oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Canada (Alberta, mostly), Russia, Iran, etc.
Can you also explain where the "green movement" is getting its funding and lobbying to not only resist but (according to you) completely overcome the influence of the above groups?
To answer your second question, I don’t think it’s accurate to assume auto manufacturers have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels.
Okay, and where are they getting their political clout and funding? I believe in following the money. Where does the money come from?
>I don’t think it’s accurate to assume auto manufacturers have a financial interest in opposing the end of fossil fuels.
Auto manufacturers certainly have a financial interest in private automobile ownership, don't you think?
Financial interest in private automobile ownership sure, but not opposing the end of fossil fuels. I didn’t claim they’re completely aligned, the real world is complex.
Because money is power, are you new?
You claimed that some unspecified "They" are attempting to force a socialist utopia/dystopia upon us, and that "They" are seeking to end private ownership because socialism. You seem to be unable to articulate who "They" are, from where "They" derive their power, or who is funding "Them".
>If they’re in power or have influence, it could largely be a grassroots movement and it doesn’t matter?
Grassroots movements quite simply do not have power or influence unless either:
1. they're well-funded, in which case see my previous point. Where does that money come from? or
2. they're supported by a significant majority of the public, in which case it makes no sense to refer to "They" in such a way as to insinuate there is a small minority of powerful figures forcing these issues upon an unwitting or unwilling public. If the movement enjoys broad popular support (unlikely!), then there is no conspiracy and you simply have a minority opinion. In that case, deal with it.
I'm not going to respond to your sealioning. Either do the bare minimum research, or stop participating in this manner.
But I still appreciate the convenience of not having to keep an eye on the speed nor the distance between the my car and the vehicles in front of me when driving on the freeway, where it generally doesn't make mistakes.
My own car's cruise control is just three large buttons on the steering wheel: one which says "keep going this speed when I take my foot off the gas", one cancel button, and one "go back to the previous speed" button. It works wonders and is quite comfortable to use. Never messes up, I can rely on it 100% to do its one simple job.
The Ariya is much more fancy, but it's so much less reliable. If it's snowing outside it sometimes just randomly turns itself off because sensors got covered in snow, leading to a rapid deceleration until I intervene. Sometimes it refuses to turn on because sensors are covered in snow. And its braking curve is uncomfortable; when the car in front stops (e.g in stop and go traffic), it gets way close to the car in front and brakes hard, instead of slowly coming to a stop at a comfortable distance. Oh and it's connected to the nav system; I've had it just suddenly slow the car down to a crawl because the nav system had chosen a stupid route, it slowed down to take an exit while I stayed on the highway.
I'll take dumb but reliable any day over smart and unreliable. Even if it means I sometimes have to actually adjust speed myself.
Relatedly, I don't actually mind having to drive the car. I like cruise control because my foot gets fatigued when pressing the gas pedal for hours on end, but making manual adjustments to my speed? Changing gears? Listening to the engine to make sure it's at a happy RPM? I feel like that stuff just gives me small stuff to do so I keep paying attention to the driving.
The incessant beeping in modern cars on the other hand is just a distraction. Luckily, the Nissan lets you configure it so that 2 quick button presses on the steering wheel disables all the useless alarms. I'm so happy I don't have to do that manually for each "safety" feature every time I get in.
But it does not adjust based on the reading, I manually set the speed but of course it'll slow down if there's a car in front. Automatically adjusting to the speed limit sounds insanely dangerous. It's very common place, at least in the US, to go 10 over the posted limit on controlled access highways, does the EU not operate in a similar mode?
Or more or less strictly on the limit to avoid stress and have a safety margin.
The older I get, the more I pick the last option.
Knowing I can just keep my eyes on the road and have the car make the speed limit changes for me feels more relaxing and safer, exactly because it's easier to pay attention to traffic if I don't have to look at the dashboard as often.
O yea, that is driver lane assist ... A Toyota rental had the same issue. In a specific steep exit corner (that goes up facing the sun), how many ** times the lane assist tries to force the car to go straight (as in, off the hill! ). The first few times when it happens, scares the ** out of me.
Another fun one is going down a hill in a Rental Opel, roundabout with some cars, no problem. Slowing down naturally, while i see the cars accelerate to enter the roundabout. No need to break as by the time i get close, the cars will have started to accelerate. So my speed will have matched the last vehicles speed by the time i am close. Suddenly, emergency break slam on !!! Because "the car was going to hit the cars in front". Like, wtf!! That created a extreme dangerous situation if there was a car behind.
I really see no benefits for a lot of those new safety features. The old ones like traction controle etc, great, keep them. But all this external monitoring, internal monitoring ... If your a safe driver, those features can make it more dangerous.
That's the issue. So many people are burried in their phone or just simply driving irresponsibly for the conditions, these features may be better for them.
As someone who respects the responsibility of driving a vehicle, they're definitely making things less safe in some situations.
Do people like zone it out like parents with kids are able to zone out their little screaming devils? lol
I cannot tell you how many times I've punched the steering wheel. I want to find that source of beeping and rip its goddamn guts out of the system. Then I want to find who put it there and rip their guts too. I will rip their infernal existence out of this dimension.
And fuck cameras. Blatant privacy violation, how is this getting past legislation?
The nagging is ridiculous. I’m actually not quite sure what lane assist does, but if I look at my side mirror it chastises me for not being attentive. It also has locked up the brakes and made me think I hit somebody when backing into my driveway.
I wish I had fixed the Honda!
I might also be safer in it - oversensitive security systems nagging me with false positives almost constantly don't pair well with my ADD
I drive a 1991 Honda Prelude and I don't think I'll want to drive anything else probably ever.
Maybe I should research some cool cars from that era.
I prefer the term "lane insist"
Here's the text describing the system: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
It specifically mentions that it is illegal to use the cameras from such system to identify the person. It is pretty much the opposite of what people think its going to do.
I am sorry you don't like that its not 1984 law but the discussion is bullshit, which means in that instead of 1984 dystopia we are getting the Brave new world dystopia where bullshit prevails in the brave new world.
I am sick and tired of BS rage bates of the endless entertainment; I would take 1984 dystopia anytime, at least we would know who the bad guys are.
In the text nothing prevents the manufacturer to stream the vide of your face to their servers all over the world and do the image processing there. It would even comply with GDPR if everybody pinky promised they not using that data for anything else.
I disagree, that's a recipe for companies to spend more than they need at install time, then pay billions in fines and then pay again to re-call the vehicles to replace these systems.
GDPR is enforced, that's why US tech companies constantly complain about EU regulations.
You're aware of Consumer Reports recent investigation, right? https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa...
Can you describe how you believe the driver's visual attention can be tracked by anything other than a camera pointed at the driver's face?
If no such other system exists, how is this doing anything other than mandating cameras pointed at the driver?
> 2.3. Privacy and data protection
> 2.3.1. The ADDW system shall function without relying on biometric personal data of any vehicle occupants. In this context, the biometric personal data is resulting from specific technical processing relating to the physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of a natural person, which allow or confirm the unique identification of that natural person, such as facial images or dactyloscopic data. This requirement does not forbid the ADDW system to use data from the camera(s) equipped in the vehicle, it forbids the identification of the person by the ADDW system.
> 2.3.2. The ADDW system shall be designed in such a way that it shall only continuously record and retain data necessary for the system to function and operate within a closed-loop system.
> 2.3.3. Any processing of personal data shall be carried out in accordance with Union data protection law.
This doesn't appear to ban identification of the user by, say, the Advanced Driver Distraction Reporting System, which is triggered by and utilizes the same data streams as the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System.
I bought a 2017 Kia Forte S recently.. ($4000 for 137K miles) no touch screen, but many safety features that are not too bad like radar collision detection and blindspot warning. 2019 they started with the touchscreen, and in 2023 they added "Kia Connect" with OTA updates. Anyway definitely check the year.
Problem with 2008 is some cars didn't even have Bluetooth audio or backup camera yet (like my 2010 VW CC- I had to add an aftermarket radio).
Also don't get direct inject only engine. At least for Kias, the non-turbo engines are much more reliable (but underpowered for sure).
I have to disable the traffic sign warnings and lane keeping assistance every time I start the car. It's a swipe and three taps, but still annoying. I wish it could at least stay disabled for some time.
Very generally speaking, if I could disable all of the safety features I definitely would, they are almost exclusively false positives in my case and occur every time I drive. Yet its only two specific ones that are genuinely a nuisance (rather than annoying): The face detection on cruise control, and the car-disabling when I'm pulling out (which at times is out right dangerous).
Also, I think the issue with it stopping the car sounds like ‘collision avoidance forward safety’ which can be disabled according to the manual. I haven’t had any issues so far though.
I also disable lane assist but largely just because I prefer to have full control. The highway driving assist is really neat though.
Climate controls are fully physical controls, but realistically I just leave it on Auto, because it's the 21st century.
The hybrid drive train also makes it feel like an electric car, and it makes older vehicles look like a joke.
I would assume all such cars have an option to turn this off.
I was a bit scared by reading on internet people complaining about cars full of electronics, it's been a bless for me, for real
useful context, I live in Naples, Italy, it's a city made for horses
As a Canadian that did a road trip through the balkans over the winter, the rental car was constantly beeping at me for something. It was misreading signs and due to the bad weather (it was during a huge snowstorm in January) the roads weren't very clear and it was constantly confused. I also had some very unhappy drivers (especially in Albania) furiously trying to get around me, causing the car to further slow down to "avoid collisions". I was already stressed enough driving through countries with mixed driving records, but any actual defensive driving caused the car to nag me.
Sorry in advance to any Bulgarians, of which the car had plates from, for probably tarnishing your reputation.
On an unrelated note, studying Bulgarian brought me a lot of joy.
is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?
The lane assist can also become confused by shadows created by a fence next to the road when the sun is just slightly above the horizon. The car thought I was driving between two roads and tried to steer me to the side, but it was a single lane highway. That was the last time I had it enabled.
Unless you have one of the very few cars that can even approach that speed[1], it sounds like some software "engineer" most certainly did not understand the meaning of "sanity checking".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_production_car_speed_r...
Some of their implementations, such as lane keeping, are good enough to keep. Others, such as speed limit detection, aren’t (though it’s much better at French speed limits than UK ones, which I suppose makes sense).
After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ minutes. If I locked the doors, the interior lights would shut off, but it would automatically roll up all of the windows. Examples of "features" that are infuriating.
Ah, did your car pick up the speed limit sign on the French auto-route for… motorcycles filtering between lanes too?
Is there any cross-referencing to an onboard GPS database? GPS-based speed alerts are a feature of base-model Hyundais/Kias in Canada, so it doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch for a failsafe.
And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.
At this point I'm contemplating finding a a late 60s/early 70s Beetle - or some other car with no more complex electronics in it than headlight switches and dizzy/points type ignition. Nobody is gonna be able to sewt that to remote brick itself when it thinks I'm ignoring it's incessant beeping.
Admittedly my muscles and bones ache and complain more now than when I was in my late teens and early 20s. And I'd almost certainly regret not having air con and working heating if I owned one now.
But realistically? 98+% of all my driving is trips or 5-15km or so. And probably still 95% of my driving (at least by trip count if not by km travelled) would be less than 50km trips. I think a "suitable for around town" car supplemented by taxis or rentals at airports because I choose to fly most of my 800+km trips these days would work out just fine for me.
The last 5 or 6 years the only long trips I've driven have been in a campervan borrowed from a friend to go to music festivals in Queensland - partly because a camper van is really nice compared to a tent (especially if the weather goes bad) and partly because that friend really likes lending it out (at leat to people he trusts).
So then you're driving in Germany at 200km/h and the camera picks up the 90km/h and brakes aggressively.
I absolutely hate it.
I also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!
Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!
I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!
1. https://www.austockphoto.com.au/image/40-when-lights-flash-s...
Oh man, the incessant beeps are annoying, but speed limit monitoring in cruise control is hands-down the dumbest default "safety" feature on new cars. When that sort of thing happens on the highway, it feels legitimately dangerous, like any other kind of near-miss incident.
I have a new Volkswagen and there's an annoying amount of arrogance behind the technology decisions in the vehicle that really sour the experience.
Perhaps the most annoying is that many notifications like "you can't do that while driving" are toast style notifications that disappear before you can notice or read them.
It has 360 degree cameras but it gets to decide when you can activate them. Want to know if you have enough room on the passenger side to go around a vehicle stopped in front of you without scratching up your tires? Too bad, the car doesn't detect a parking spot.
Wireless charger refuses to charge phone and puts up a notification saying it can't charge it any time you place your phone on it. There's a menu setting to disable the wireless charger, and that puts up a persistent notification telling you to re-enable wireless charging.
You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
You adjusted your volume, car readjusts it for you because reasons. You can see some of those reasons buried deep in the menu system, but not all of them. Car will adjust your volume again at a later date without your consent.
The car sends notifications about the status of the car but doesn't update or remove them when they're no longer true. I wake up most mornings to several "Your doors are unlocked" notifications but the doors are locked. Did they unlock? Why did they unlock? How long were they unlocked? Nobody knows...
Walk away car locking? Works 100% of the time when get out of the car at home and walk two feet away from the car. Fails to work the first time you park it downtown and someone rifles through your car and steals your charging adapter.
You got home and are unloading groceries from the trunk, the car is going to honk at you that the trunk is ajar before you can even get inside the house. You'll receive alerts on your phone that the trunk is open as well.
Car honks any time a door is left open or the car isn't locked even if you're standing less than 2 feet from the car holding the key.
You have a charge schedule setup so your car only charges during off-peak times. Want to charge at a pay-charger or outside of that schedule? Sure, just click the button on screen which permanently disables the charge schedule and requires to you go deep into menus to re-enable it.
Similar situation with State of Charge limits. Want to charge to 100% for a road trip? Sure that's the new permanent setting, and we're going to remind you it's bad to charge to 100% all the time.
Tesla gets dumped for so much, but their software is so well tuned compared to this garbage.
I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.
That's an incredibly vague and dismissive statement to support lazy engineering.
If the intent is something like preventing CO2 build up in the cabin then they could periodically open the mixing value when the car is set to recirculation to refresh the cabin air.
It doesn't have to be a binary control. I've owned cars with manual mixing valves to let you control the amount of outside air gets circulated into the cabin.
But I don't think car manufacturers care about that. I think the switch to fresh air after a while is mainly to prevent the windshield from fogging up.
Also it was the first time in my life I had to search online how to reset a car entertainment system, because the screen suddenly didn’t work anymore.
A friend of mine bought a new VW a few years ago. He was so excited about that app it came with alerting him about unlocked doors, open trunk, open window, etc. Well, 100% false alert rate.
I wouldn't say the alert rate is 100%.
Many of the the alerts are technically accurate but do you really need an alert on your phone that your door is open as you're getting in/out of the car?
Currently driving a 2010 euro hot hatch, when that dies will be looking at a 2016-2017 vintage.
I watched a very interesting video over the weekend, the lost discipline of the alarm. It goes in to the research of alarms and alarm fatigue negative consequences.
Seems very relevant to the latest generation vehicles.
https://youtu.be/Ira28fgSF7M?si=-GrsTTGemLY1LwLw
If I ever buy a “modern” car I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features. The only safety features I care about are traction control, abs, parking sensors and maybe blind spot mirrors. Blind spot mirrors are a double edged sword as it means people now stop doing shoulder checks relying on the blind spot mirror light only.
I wonder if this will remain possible. To kill my car's annoying beeps, all I had to do was cut some wires. That implies it was just an optional "feature" that they tacked on. What happens when they start deeply integrating this nonsense?
> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.
When my car was last receiving service, I was given a loaner vehicle with this new feature. I was driving home in the rain, and an aggressive driver passed me very closely, triggering the collision avoidance system - this forced the steering wheel to turn away from the car, made the car hydroplane and nearly flung me into a ditch at 55MPH. I had to force back against the steering and creatively spin my vehicle against the turn.
I was looking for a car recently for a 3 month visit in Europe. 2008 is the bottom of the barrel at this point. Basically deciding between scraping and trying to make few more years out of it.
On my daily commute about 50% of drivers are on their phones at 90 km/h, would be great if their cars were beeping at them since no one else is going to do anything about it.
I find this especially great since one of them rear ended me earlier this year and practically admitted he was fiddling with his phone at the time
Not that I support mandatory driver cams, just thinking out loud...
What is preventing car owners to cover it with electrical tape and move on?
I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me.
It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).
I also have a 1972 Beetle which has zero infotainment nonsense to distract me (the engine is deafening anyway), where you actually concentrate on driving.
It seems all this modern nonsense to warn drivers is because they've stuffed the car cockpit with all manner of distractions and giant screens, or non-tactile interfaces that you have to look at instead of feeling, thereby reducing concentration on actually driving. Rather than making new methods to ensure someone is concentrating, just reduce the amount of screens in the cockpit! My sister-in-law's Tesla is horrendous. She can't easily change the temperature whilst driving. There's a reason the space shuttle and airplanes have actual switches to change settings...
Keeping these cars for as long as I possibly can. I went around Iceland in a Fiat van (a "camper", tiny thing to sleep in) and the week was ruined with the incessant beeping of the car as it moved from speed limit to speed limit. I know the speed limits were changing because there were signs in the road, but instead I had to constantly look at the dashboard to try to find out why the stupid thing was beeping, which I presume was the same tone as any other error, thereby masking any real problem. Absolute garbage.
Incidentally, the Fiat also had that annoying "lane assist" feature which wobbles the steering wheel but it did it all the time when there were no lanes (unpaved roads etc) and it felt IDENTICAL to the car skidding to my "untrained"/"used-to-a-proper-car" hands, since the motion of the steering wheel versus car direction didn't match for a split second, and there was no real connection to the rack/pinion steering mechanism. I felt like a passenger even as the driver. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.
My car has adaptive cruise control and will automatically adjust speed based on speed limit signs. I was on a highway at 130km/h and the car read a 60km/h speed limit sign that was on an exit shoulder (already separated by a concrete barrier from the highway, so technically a different road altogether) and started breaking really fast - I was pretty close from getting tailgated by the driver behind me, who did not (rightfully) expect me to suddenly start breaking with nothing in front of me. Luckily this can be permanently turned off, so I can continue using cruise control without being afraid of every single speed limit sign.
Recently I had rented a Skoda Karoq (very new one, probably 2024/2025) which adjusted the cruise control speed not even based on signs, but probably based on data from built-in maps? I don't know - but it would randomly decide that I entered a 20km/h zone while driving on a 90km/h road. And this couldn't be turned off. So I just turned off cruise control completely, because wtf, how can anyone think this is improving road safety?
Edit: typo
I see signs recognized like that all the time, so use satnav as my reference. Unfortunately if it's not up to date (mine hasn't been for years now), it will suggest speeds which have nothing to do with reality.
On one occasion it thought the limit had changed to 100mph, which isn't even a defined speed limit in the UK.
Sometimes I watch some reviews of newer cars, and numbers of beeping, comms on central screen, etc is just… overwhelming me. Watching video. Cannot imagine driving in that conditions.
Except that in the US, if you're cruising in the right lane then every time there's an exit it will actively steer you towards the concrete median between the lane and the exit. I don't understand how this feature was signed off on. The risks outweigh the benefits, in my opinion.
(I disagree with many modern car systems and think they make for worse drivers, but keeping you on-lane at high speeds is not a bad thing.)
Though I've rarely had it misbehave so I keep it on. If I lived somewhere with lots of narrow winding roads however, I'd probably reach for that button.
It only took about 5 minutes of that before I exited and looked up how to disable it, and it has to be disabled in the menus every time you start the car, there's no way to have it be permanent.
Now whenever I rent a car, I refuse to be given anything from Chrysler or VW.
FWIW Toyota implements these features perfectly. The speed warning is just a little color icon on the dashboard, the lane assist works well and doesn’t ever do anything unexpected. The auto-brake systems work incredibly well and have helped me several times when people blow through yield signs, yet never had a false positive.
If regulations don’t force the company to build a compliant vehicle that doesn’t suck, then we need to leave all the cars with poorly implemented systems unsold
Rinse. Repeat.
The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.
So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?
But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.
P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
I don't have any faith that they have the wherewithal to make any common sense design choices about error states.
You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.
Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
Maybe some people think R2D2 beeps and chirps are better, but sorry, I have no interest in learning the binary language of vaporators.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
Freakin' useless.
A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
Classic!
One of the downsides of being a lifelong engineer is I see the obvious flaws in everyday designs, and it's so frustrating not being able to fix them.
That’s what the beeps are for!
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Power-Amplifier-IRS2092S-Chan...
It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
One day the normal sounds you're used to don't happen, and instead you hear "Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu." So you try to find a manual to understand what it means, and the manual has a Japanese section ("給紙トレイで紙が詰まっています。") and an English section ("The paper loader is jammed."). How do you know that the sound you heard ("Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu") means "The paper loader is jammed" unless you already read and speak Japanese? One way to figure it out would be... icons.
My old truck had a lever that had 3 positions: COOL HEAT DEFROST. Modern cars have all these idiotic icons and I can never figure out how to defrost.
And there's a user manual in the car, you know; RTFM?
Proof that it is not obvious what it means. Besides, what would a pre-contact tribesman know about 50 year old standards?
> RTFM
If you cannot read DEFROST, you cannot read the manual, either.
In general, pictures of things is no substitute for verbs.
I'd like to know more about this, actually.
Now feed the 1s (+5V) and 0s (0V) into the speaker at the same rate as the sampling in the .wma file.
Since the speaker cone has inertia, the result will be an approximation of the original waveform, rather than a square wave.
Can't speak to all vehicles, but my VW ID3 clearly indicates what the issue is on the dashboard.
So if it's the lane-keeping assist it highlights which lane(s) it is monitoring and it provides a written prompt on screen (e.g. "drive in the centre of the lane") if it's not happy.
If the speed limiter is on it shows the current signed speed limit in the dashboard and it flashes that speed limit if I am driving over the speed limit.
If the car believes I am not concentrating on the road and instead interacting too much with the touch-screen it puts a large warning in the middle of the touchscreen to pay attention to the road and prevents me using the infotainment system for a few second.
I'd be surprised if most other modern/new cars didn't also include instrument display feedback like this alongside audible warnings.
The car beeps exactly the same way whatever the reason so you can’t tell why. It even beeps when it thinks the speed limit has changed (up or down)… it’s infuriating to drive this car, there is a beep about something every minute or two. You can’t even tell what it’s beeping about.
Luckily there is a shortcut button near the dash that you can press to disable all these idiotic beeps. You have to do it every time you restart the car. It does make it feel like all these beeps are pointless since you can’t tell what they’re about and press the button to disable them all as soon as you start the car anyway…
For my experience i've found the safety features helpful and don't mind them. I turn off the audible warning but the onscreen warnings are helpful nudges/reminders.
The lane-assist bit I leave on and whilst I do occasionally have to 'wrestle' with the car a little in some scenarios, it doesn't ever feel like I lose control I just have to overcome a little bit more resistance when the system is concerned about me departing the lane inadvertently. For me that's not really a problem, but I do see how others might find it frustrating.
I'm listening to an audio through a webpage, as soon as I change the volume it starts my last music. This is really annoying. I should guess the right volume, unlock my phone, resume my audio. Old physical volume knobs only changed the volume, not start one of the few apps they know about.
Oh and if I've been listening to loud music and now someone's in the car, I can't lower the volume without starting the music. I want to start with a low volume and then increase it.
These are some of the many stupid UX decisions. I would still not drive an old car. Especially ICE. But would pray that the equivalent of Frame.work appears, I can get an open source car with an open source infotainment.
With Chevrolet starting to sell DIY EV packages and the general simplification of the mechanics of EV cars, I believe such a thing would eventually happen.
Kia will tell me my doors are unlocked when I'm at home.
Tesla has a set home feature. Plus the 50 other annoyances.
Regen doesn't even persist with kia. You have to press the paddle to add it every time you start the car.
All this to say, the only good ux car anymore is tesla. Too bad they leak all recordings and have privacy problems too.
I would assume that most people who live in a city would want to know when the Kia is unlocked at home. I think your dislike of that feature may reflect your residence type or garage type.
My experience of Tesla UX was poor, given how few manual controls were available, and the extensive touchscreen reliance required while driving.
Or not lock in a certain area.
Plus the app is an actual usable thing. Not a crap one that sends notifications about doors being unlocked in a garage that never updates.
Last year I had to take my kia to the dealer just to have connectivity work. Verizon had a change and you couldn't even fix it without going in. Antiquated dealer software updates as well.
Started a DC charger using card reader, which means you can't stop the charge session on the charger itself (only via app which I wasn't bothered to set up). Turns out car doesn't have a feature to stop DC charging. Had to wait for it to top up to 80%.
Give us an example lol
Not on my ev3. The only time it changes Regen is when I hook up a trailer.
All of the things you described work perfectly as you'd expect from good UX pov on a Tesla. And Rivian should not be far behind either.
It's amazing that china might be the one stepping up and regulating sanity by returning good turn signals and gear selectors:
https://www.notateslaapp.com//news/3593/tesla-likely-to-make...
(on some models tesla has turn signals as buttons on the wheel/yoke and gear selection on the ...touchscreen... yikes)
Add in the fact that car will automatically put the car in the right "gear" 80% of the time based on environment (curbs, walls, etc.), it's even less important how the gear selected. Getting into other cars, I'm struck by how much space in the center console is wasted by this vestige of an actual manual gear shifter. Also the silly paddles on the steering wheel.
- anything involving a quick 3-point turn. Or making a u-turn and not making it and having to back up a bit. (don't know if the car can guess right)
- creeping out to make a turn when poor visibility and having to quickly back up out of the way of something. (the car cannot guess here)
This stuff requires quick maneuvers and situational awareness. With a stalk this is all intuitively done keeping your eyes on the road and setting the direction. looking at a touchscreen or relying on the UI guess in the middle of all this is bad news.
All that said though, my wife's 2 year old Ioniq 5 is way worse with the gadgets and seems to be always beeping for everything.
In other news, I test drove a Volvo 240 yesterday and am picking it up later this week.
You may want to check out Slate. They just started taking orders I think. Every one off the line is the same, then you can customize it how you want with aftermarket stuff. There is no infotainment system, bring your own.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".
Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.
And who doesn't want the safest car?
At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)
By your logic, we should keep drinking and smoking.
Every intervention has a cost. Not all results will be worth the cost we pay for them. I think we are well past the point in Western society where we are giving up too much in order for too small a return, personally. With cars, but also just in general, people have lost the ability to do cost-benefit analysis and act as though every safety improvement is an unalloyed good. But they aren't, and I think that this thinking is making all of our lives significantly worse.
That was different in the early sw versions, where blocking it would simply do nothing, so I had a 3D printed thing to block the camera.
I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.
Don't buy car that sucks.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
Also disabling this feature is only 2 taps (because EU says it can't be only one tap), Settings -> toggle Driver Monitoring.
It's really not. When I'm cruising on the highway I like to rest my right wrist on the top of the wheel, which blocks the sensor.
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
Won't this shatter your wrist if your airbag deploys? I remember being taught to hold the sides of the wheel in driving class.
I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/steeringtechniqu...
This is the exact opposite of my experience! The one time I tried BlueCruise, it went into "panic mode" every time I turned my head to check my blindspots.
Well if they hadn't removed climate control buttons, this would not be a concern!
Not being able to easily adjust climate settings is very much a safety concern. And the fact that it beeps at you is them acknowledging it!
That's why I hate screens.
Probable especially if it gets drunk drivers off the road but I, for one, would be deeply uncomfortable driving knowing my every twitch is recorded and _more importantly_ open to misinterpretation in case of a claim. I could easily believe otherwise averagely fine drivers being negatively affected by this if the surveillance takes up headspace.
Observation affects systems but not always for the better.
I also wonder how well this fares under night driving conditions where the inside of the car has poor exposure.
Related: https://petapixel.com/2025/07/11/dutch-woman-fined-500-after...
Given the general state of auto manufacturer software I would fully expect something like this to be janky and unreliable. It might work in some conditions on some faces but also perform abysmally in many other scenarios.
It also beeps indefinitely if you first open the driver's side door before turning off the engine. You have to close and re-open the door to get it to stop.
Also has 6 chimes on startup as punishment for daring to start the car without already having your seatbelt buckled.
Not to mention the annoying chimes for actually having any seatbelt unbuckled in the vehicle. It fluctuates them, so you can't even tune it out, and has a tendency to go off if you're hauling heavy cargo. (Though granted, 3 quick prints on a 3D printer later and you'll never have to worry about it again.
Next mod I'm doing to this car is ripping out the chime speaker. I'm just done. I learned to drive on a car that didn't have these chimes, and honestly it made for an easier driving experience.
I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction. Other people say the same about the diverted driving detector, and I imagine others said the same about the seatbelt sensor.
The intersection of personal freedom and personal safety is an interesting topic, I don't think there's a right answer and it's ultimately pretty subjective.
> Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction.
Congress already passed a law in 2021 to start the process of requiring alcohol impairment detection in new cars around 2030 - the HALT Drunk Driving Act. It had broad, bipartisan support. I would say "most people agree" does not appear to be the case.
if alcohol_detected_in_cabin:
promptDriverForFingerprint()
I’d love to see an opinion poll on the topic, I imagine people’s opinions are going to change depending on the implementation.
If the pitch is “you won’t even notice it unless you’re drunk” then I’d imagine you’re right, and maybe people are more receptive than I thought.
Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.
That being said I know it would never be implemented in a sane way in the US, and you would probably have situations like your car insurance automatically increasing due to a faulty sensor, so I'm ultimately against it unless a lot of other stuff changes.
But it's still much more possible than "preventing drug addiction"
I can already see two issues with these devices:
- They can’t reliably identify the actual driver. Criminals might simply ask someone else to blow into the device.
- With every car equipped with this safety feature, people might assume everyone driving isn’t drunk.
I’m not sure. It seems like this will only add extra hassle for law-abiding citizens while those for whom it was designed will likely find workarounds.
> 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/trumps-transpor...
For reference, fatalities on bikes:
> 9.32 fatalities per 100 million cyclist miles (6 deaths per 100M kilometers)
https://www.calbike.org/urban-transportation-research-bike-f...
>The US has eight times as many pedestrian deaths per mile as Germany.
Clearly the US is unusually bad for distracted driving.
Here's the source document: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Regarding "distracted driving" causing cyclist fatalities, my point was more that bicyclists have a higher risk rate. If we're already going down this path for safety, banning bicycling would have a higher impact than reducing fatalities ~10% which is what the EU claimed it could prevent.
Regarding the claim that "pretty much all fatalities on bikes are the result of being killed by drivers", that's simply not true. It also largely depends on laws and location.
https://www.bikeattorney.com/bike-accident-common-causes.htm...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/05/20/1364622...
For exemple, pedestrian killed by motorist are too often not counted as a motorist issue, but a pedestrian at the wrong place issue.
It’s also totally plausible that insurance companies will use this data to try and find every single tiny, irrelevant detail to not pay you. Sorry, you blinked before crashing into this other car, we won’t pay for that.
Law enforcement could also use that data to create a nice profile of yourself and how “distracted” you are while driving, and maybe suspend your license forever, why not? And wait till you find how unreliable these sensors are.
Just another surveillance tool in disguise, this is what the EU does best.
Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.
Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.
Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.
It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.
After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
That is definitely not the point of a turning signal. The car that's already in the lane has right of way and it's your responsibility not to plow into them. If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
If you can't see the car in your blindspot when changing lanes, you're not doing a proper shoulder check, hence the blindspot warning.
Third base!
Incorrect. The turning signal is called an Indicator, because it give other drivers an indication of your intentions. So you first look and check that it's possible and likely safe to merge. Then you indicate your intention. You then merge if/when safe.
Indicating an intention to merge into a narrow gap is fine - as long as you only merge when there is sufficient room to do so.
But if the car beeps at you just because you indicated - then there is a design issue.
> If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
Absolutely - I was not implying it was an obligation. I am only saying that you use your indication to indicate to other drivers your intention. It is totally valid to turn off your indicator and not merge after indicating.
That said, I still think it's a generally good feature. If a person is distracted and fails to see the vehicle in their blind spot during their inital shoulder check, that beep might prevent an accident.
On my vehicle that warning can be disabled, which I think is the right way to provide features like this. People who find it useful can leave it on and people who find it distracting can turn it off.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
But, if you are in tight traffic then a gap will unlikely open up. In this case you use your indicator to signal your intention, and wait until somebody chooses to let you in - making sure they have noticed you before moving in.
A car that beeps at you just because there is a car in your blind spot when you indicate is not suited to Australian road rules.
"a turn signal is not a question, it is a statement"
The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.
I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.
>so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more
Every time it happens, it hurts as I'm not prepared for it.
Lane assist is also particularly bad as it handles some slight curves incorrectly, so it resists your driving. As a result with such cars I have my arms muscles tense up in anticipation of some turns.
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
Or was it the other way around?
(Worst offenders: Japanese cars since they seem to take the regulations most seriously. Least annoying: generally BMW, Volvo, though they are both getting worse each year).
More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
Sure this sort of systems might reduce overall death toll by addressing worst suspects like drunk or distracted drivers but I'm pretty sure they makes it worse for diligent ones.
paradoxically, citizens expect the government to be adversarial towards them in big things (see America) but it's the 'little' things which breed true contempt.
sooner or later something will happen which will test the revealed preference of the population and everyone will suddenly discover that contempt is all that's left.
The most recent regulatory disaster that blew up a bunch of startups was mandatory lane keep assist for trucks in overseas western markets, which meant all new startups needed fancy steering racks which are very much not off-the-shelf, and it virtually tripled the cost of the software stack too
From that article:
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
It's quite difficult to know what happened in the previous frame without any kind of retention.
It goes off all the time. And each time, my hands are on the steering wheel.
It doesn't actually detect contact - it checks to see if you're actively adjusting the steering wheel.
Except I don't need to! The lane keep assist is so good that it's rare I have to give it additional help.
So - I kid you not - I've gotten used to giving a nudge to the steering wheel every so many seconds to prevent that warning (you cannot disable it).
Imagine a car gave you cruise control, and then checked if you were paying attention by requiring you to press down on the accelerator every so many seconds. Does that make sense?
That is a seriously broken control system. It should be keeping you in the center of the lane and not make you fight against the car.
Literally. It’s the windows visa-ification of cars. I hate it.
Which is to say, from the authoritarian left to the authoritarian right, but not the other half of the compass.
>Article 6(3) of the GSR states that the system should be designed in such a way that it does not continuously record or retain data other than what is necessary for its purpose
I get that there are problems, but it doesn't sound that bad to me? Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people every year in Europe. If we can improve this 25% (more realistically, 10%) it's a huge step forward.
I don't have a garage/drive way, and so have to park on the street, which makes me leans towards another short [1] vehicle: currently thinking about VW Golf, Mazda 3, Mazda CX-30, Kia Niro.
From what I've seen from almost all cars, lots more screens and lots fewer buttons.
They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
Which could (maybe) be fine if they could be permanently turned off (and not reset-to-on on every startup). Heck, even if it was a dealership-only change it would be something.
See recent driving 4 answers video on the silliness of some of these features:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-S76WEl25k
An alert that causes you to look down every time to enter an intersection/roundabout when you most need to be looking up? Warnings when you put on sunglasses?
I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.
We have been moving from pretty crude centering, to adaptive based on other vehicles, to intelligent enough to avoid potholes and cross lane markings deliberately (eg, passing a cyclist on an empty road).
The problem is all these options exist simultaneously, with the same marketing, and same ancap bonus points; even when the actual capability of the car varies massively.
I liked the Tesla progress & road trips but my real bar for joy is the Waymo style promise/start of delivery. There's no fallback to wait for improvement there, either it does everything it promises or it doesn't do anything!
Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.
Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2]
I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule."
[1] https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NHTSA-2022-0079
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
Under the GDPR provisions, strictly necessary cookies are exempt from the consent screen. But the way the exemptions read prompts all the lawyers to "well, maybe it's sort of necessary for you to have a session_id, but its so, so much safer to have the damn consent screen, so please...".
I worked in technical roles at large companies that had completely honest-to-god private, strictly necessary cookies - where compliance people forced the cookie consent screens, there was no space for a discusion. At my latest company, despite being a CTO, I could not convince our legal team that going without the consent screen as we are really only using "strictly necessary" cookies was fine. Its "mate, you may even be right, but really, nobody is skipping the consent screen, and we won't risk a compliance issue on your say-so.".
Sure, lots of companies - maybe even most - do shit things, and of course the real tagging of people and fingerprinting happens in sophisticated ways that actually defy GDPR, require no cookies whatsoever and so on - and thats another problem. Those moronic consent screens server exactly no real benefit for a while now.
If your company is overcompliant, seems to be a company issue. This is a general trend I observed: way too many companies and even government entities don’t do certain things for "privacy reasons", while they’re just lazy and privacy is an excuse.
It’s not like not having a consent banner for necessary cookies will result in a fine right away. Most fines are for serious stuff.
That ignores the main issue, though. Companies moved on, cookies are no longer needed to associate your behaviour on various websites. I'd argue that because cookies were regulated like this, we now have state of the art tech that profiles people across vpn's, not to mention incognito browsing. Just ask anyone working with big data aggregators or having access to telco data and other logins. Its not just browsing behavior, some companies can get your extremely intimate, offline-only facts by combining those data sources. But hey, a bunch of technically illiterate people in Brussels feel like they did us all a favor.
> They found it fires on ordinary driving, not just distracted driving.
> Glance away from an empty highway to take in the scenery, or look at the infotainment screen to change a song, and the warning goes off anyway.
Like, isn't that the point, that if you aren't looking at the road it should go off?
It's an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, that also coincidentally helps advance the surveillance state more than it does help prevent distracted driving.
I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
I can see why people didn't want them.
I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
By comparison today we have luxurious silk strands that don't pinch anywhere.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to ~fifty years of aging of the belt material. It's not as if the very first time we'd ever designed and installed an operator-safety belt was in the 1970s... so it'd be very surprising if the designers chose to make them stiff blades. Your description is also at odds with how I've seen people handle and use seatbelts in motion pictures from the era... from what I've seen, those belts look to me to be reasonably flexible.
Of course, one wonders what the car does if the camera is blocked with a post-it. Will it just not work, or fall back on something else, like pressure at the steering wheel, like Tesla does ?
It’s the police who decide what are lines of enquiries to be followed and then present that evidence to the prosecutor.
If the defence want to file to exclude any exhibits that’s a decision for them, the ‘courts function’ by deciding on the evidence before them.
But yes, the punishment is like you say increased with more crimes added to the sheet.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752...
You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?
If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.
In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars. On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.
I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.
The only feature I like so far is the slight shake of the wheel if crossing over a lane.
Either this tech is janky/new or is just honestly not needed and distracting.
Tangential, but I’ve never seen so many people fiddling with their phones while driving as I did in the US. It was pretty worrying.
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though. I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
My wife got a new Volvo recently:
1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?
2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.
3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.
4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.
Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.
They should not allow car Manufacturers to sell cars when: - There's no physical knob to open it - The only place to read critical information like speed is a tablet on the side - The speed limit is a constant beep unless you disable it AT EVERY START by touching a screen on the side (their law basically)
The experience isn't as you list here though. It behaves pretty much exactly the same as a key fob. I just walk up to the car and it's unlocked, I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket or open any apps specifically or press any buttons on the phone.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
In general tampering with safety equipment is not legal, enforcement is another thing.
I'm not a fan of people giving poor advice online.
3) Enjoy
I will start now but I think not for long. “For your own safety we disabled your car”.
This is precisely why you should not want an Internet-connected car. It isn't truly yours if it can be "upgraded" behind your back through a backdoor.
Truly yours, car insurance company.
3) Do not buy car
3.5) Buy a different car
3.75) There are no different cars
4) Buy an old car from 2014 and maintain it carefully
4.25) Give up driving
4.5) Become a hermit
Drive onto freeway, `sneeze` directly at camera, car "disabled for safety", causes chaos on freeway (hopefully no one dies), sue car maker, retire
People cannot even criticize the surveillance state: we're at that point.
It's "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys, always ever state-loving.
"ChatControl 2.0 ain't that bad because it's not mandatory"
"A camera in every car ain't that bad because the recordings won't necessarily be shared"
It's sickening. I'm tired of you people.
It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
That could be more distracting than the distraction it's trying to detect.
Our car warns you when it thinks you're about to crash into the car in front of you, and it does so with a very loud and annoying noise. I hadn't noticed it for years until it suddenly went off several times in a couple of days, so maybe there are circumstances where it gets overly sensitive.
Of the 3 times it warned that I can clearly remember, 1 was correct: I was indeed getting close to the car in front of me (I was aware of it and was already about to start braking when the alarm went off. The other two were I think the shadow of a viaduct I went under, and probably a parked car next to the road.
It also seems to detect max speed based on signs next to the road. Fortunately it doesn't do anything annoying with that information, because it's frequently wrong.
"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
Sometimes i forget the lane assist ON and get nudged randomly at high speeds, so so scary.
The scariest was when I had to swerve into another lane to avoid some trash that was sticking into the road from the highway. It tried to force me back into it twice! Luckily I was ready but it gave me a fright for sure.
> 3.1.2. It shall be possible for the driver to manually deactivate either the ADDW warning or the ADDW system, depending on which of the two possibilities (or both) the vehicle manufacturer chose to make possible.
The full text of the regulation is linked at the bottom of the article.
I dunno if that'll fly going forward. I know I'll test it in every new car with this feature that I test drive though!
If it truly is like this how are you Europeans ok with this? Do you really trust your politicians to have your best interest at heart?
Car: You appear to be suffering from acne. Try Zit-away, available at the convenience store in 2.4 kilometers.
Car: Facial recognition failed. Car is now disabled. Contact your car dealer to reenable vehicle.
I guess it's just hard to imagine that the government may work FOR the people?
In the US, it is MY job and no one else's to make sure I don't fall asleep driving my own car. In the same way it's my job to make sure I don't leave my stove on and burn down the apartment building. Should we also install cameras on every stove in every apartment?
If the US government tried to force-install cameras into our cars to watch us, there'd be a revolution.
Section 24209 requires regulators to research driver monitoring systems to deal with driver distraction, disengagement, automation complacency, and misuse of driver automation systems, and then to either start the rule making to implement such monitoring or report to Congress explaining why it cannot be done.
Section 24220 might also be relevant. That section is dealing with drunk and impaired driving, and part of that will be monitoring driver performance.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684...
If anything, the incredible thing is this "me-only" mindset that many have.
You have a camera aimed at your face when typing this nonsense post.
Not everyone is on their phone, or a laptop.
On a site for tech enthusiasts, there are a shocking amount of folks with very "tech is what you get at the Apple Store" mindsets about.
Nor does everyone leave front-facing cameras (or any device camera) uncovered.
There's no minimum fidelity required, you could use potentially any sensor to surveil. It's a question of use.
EU has a while to go to become the surveillance capital I think.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.
It is capable of beeping, but only does it if I leave the handbrake up or start driving without a seatbelt.
I don't have modern comforts like a backup camera, cruise control, or those fancy motorized seats some cars have. But it does it's job. I push on the go pedal and it goes, I push on the stop pedal and it stops.
I also recently installed an Android Auto capable head unit, so I don't need to illegally interact with my phone to navigate places.
bing bing bing
NOW what?
Car makers are chronically awful at making software, and regulations that force them to write more such software are doomed to suck.
It felt like total security theater, which a huge surveillance tech vector as well. I will do my damnedest to never ever buy a car with this anti-feature. If I ever have to I'm sure those beeps will either get disabled one way or another, or eventually be completely filtered out by my brain like other predictably useless sounds are.
End of story...
Honestly, I'm all for more automated system while driving because I drive but I also bike and walk. Some people are complete nuts that shouldn't have their license and the least you can do is hold their hand, with as much algorithm as you can, like they are toddlers driving a 3 Tonne car.
Because it'll beep.
If you cut a wire, expect the car company + insurance company to become aware of the "mod" you did. Expect the car to simply not start anymore. Expect the local authorities to be notified.
We need to stop this nonsense at the legislation level, not after the fact.
If 60 people died because an airplane falls of the sky every day we wouldn't shrugg that off either, wouldn't we?
And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.
But according to the article it will ping when you glance at the scenery at 20 kph. If a system is annoying it will be a bigger distraction and source of frustration than what it's supposed to prevent, and people will find ways to turn it off.
Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.
As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.
Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.
And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?
I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.
The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.
Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.
I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.
Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.
Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.
There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)
As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.
Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.
I don't want a camera watching me. I don't want to pay for repairs or my car being out of commission b/c the camera isn't working.
That's not how you optimize an important metric. At all. You look a how exactly those 60 people die and make targeted interventions with numbers backing them up. Otherwise best case you're doing security theatre, and most likely fuck things up with second order effects. Like things beeping all the time and distracting people - I already can't tell why my car is beeping at me.
Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
I think that was added after I made posted that comment. I remember using ctrl-f to search for "1" and didn't see it.
It is clear to me, that we also need cameras in every room in every home and office.
https://x.com/gothburz/status/2074902503599059357
I just know insurance companies are going to use this to try to weasel out of doing their job
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
Lower damage potential of small and light cars compared to SUVs does not seem to give them a free pass to skip the sprawling driver assistance regulations.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747587
Has anything changed your mind since then?
how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?
But my 12 lb bucket of brain cells guiding itself, and other lives, is the wrong tool for the job of staying in between the two bright lines.
Self-driving, here we come.
Is that only when mass hysteria is pushed against internet companies? How are they okay with this?
Lovely traditional Scottish name there. ;-)
Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.
[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
Selling it to Flock makes you a criminal who needs to go to prison, but they'll probably find a way around that.
I was in a rental car recently that was filled with random chimes going off. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was sure a nuisance and took my mind off the road.
My eyes wander a bit and it scolds me.
First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.
Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?
Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.
Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.
On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.
I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.
Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.
I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.
Sure, don't nag a pilot who is already very well backstopped by the existing solutions. Your uncle coming back from the bar at 2am doesn't have any of that.
This kind of counter-intuitive/smarter-than-the-obvious pontification is a HN smell to me. Most of the time the obvious solution is correct. Driver attention management is one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) contributors to accident rate, and IMHO probably deserves some assistive technology attention. If the reverse is true, it needs actual evidence and not an attempt to reason from aviation evidence (a regime where inattention is NOT a major problem!).
Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
And I triple hate that we've helped develop the technology that powers it.
In hindsight, it was inevitable.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.
Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since?
It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
1. Apple/Google exposure notifications during the latest pandemic. 2. The Signal Protocol. 3. Differential Privacy (DWork et al) deployed by the US Census and Apple/Google. 4. Examine David Chaum’s body of work. 5. PIR motion sensors. 6. Elder care monitors. 7. Cities selecting lidar over cameras in traffic applications (motivated by privacy). 8. Retail foot-traffic counters. 9. Stickfigure/silhouette masking in Japanese elder care recordings. 10. Those traffic signs that read, “your speed is X.” 11. On-air or active-session indicators in recording studios.
Jeez it turns out that when you go looking for examples of designed-for-privacy monitors they are EVERYWHERE. Sounds to me like it is a completely reasonable expectation.
Considering how many mk7 golfs were made over the years it'll be easy to just get another one for the next decade. I'd also consider the Hyundai ioniq 5 or 6 which have a shortcut on the steering wheel to just disable all the nanny crap.
This is invasive, the others like Lane "assist" is just outright dangerous. Yanking my steering wheel while I'm driving? WTF? The lines on the road, in many EU cities, are mere suggestions. Especially during road works. I've had two times where I almost killed the bicyclist because the STUPID KIA SPORTAGE thought it knew better.
And now I'm filmed during driving? No. NO!
I also recently discovered that I must periodically accept the terms when turning on my car, or else carplay won’t work. This isn’t every time but I think it’s on a timer as it’s at least every new day I’m driving it.
What the hell is this, who is expected to reread the terms every time they start the damn car
You wonder if some people can't conceptualize other people disagreeing with them in good faith, without being part of some shadowy influence campaign.
Interesting priorities...
Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the same place as well, and in relation to the marked edges of the road, which often isn't the natural placing in curves and so on. As a consequence roads likely need maintenance more often, and as a proficient driver that does not let the car have opinions about placement on the road one commonly has much smaller margins when placing the car in the nice trajectory through a curve due to the sunken lanes from the assisted cars.
I don't think cars should whine about what I do or don't, because they suck at being drivers. As I understand it, this kind of crap comes from the US, which is a society that tries to force people to spend as much time as possible in the car regardless of whether they should be there or not, even allowing people to drive when rather drunk at 0.08% BAC. It's not something I welcome the spread of.
Also, cameras are receivers. Nothing happens when cameras are aimed at your face, it is only significant when you are interested with the received image and it actually nothing happens, it is processed on device to see if you are tired/distracted/asleep.
Here is the actual text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
They mention that cameras are required when testing the systems compliance but does not specify how these systems should work.
If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
also: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+slippery+slope+mea...
yes you've read the text accurately, now it's time to use your brain and consider what it means.
> processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean
and I'm the one being pedantic. ok bro. There's a thing called common sense, thinking for yourself, using your own brain to perform inference. Try it some time.
"New government mandate paves way for additional government mandate" is about as straightforward a slippery slope argument as you can get.
Slippery slope arguments don't require the eventual fear (e.g. cameras recording you) to be present in the current form, otherwise it wouldn't be a slope.
As a US-based developer, all it does is make it more irritating to build anything that europeans might use because I have to gather consent 100 times. Nothing else changes about the system, you just decide whether to use it or not -- which, by the way, is already a feature of all software right out of the box. So GDPR achieves nothing except annoying all developers and users everywhere.
Now they can simply write consent into the purchase agreement for a new vehicle. No consent = no purchase. It's really simple.
Whether there are cameras mandated now is irrelevant. The framework that accepts government-mandated ADDW is now in place. Most makers are fulfilling it by using cameras, whether required to or not.
Future enhancements to how ADDW is enforced (such as mandatory cameras), is now a much smaller hurdle for them to overcome.
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, you don't understand GDPR (or at least, how it affects US companies).
Tbf protectionist laws are everywhere now including the US. Globalism is dying.
The spirit of the law was to protect people’s data from every entity including government bodies.
It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.
Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.
In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.
I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:
>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494
I actually suggested a solution like this 2 years ago, because so many drivers are bad at signaling. I wanted a camera that used machine learning to learn a driver's cues when they're making a turn, and eventually it would be able to activate the signals for the driver.
I'm sick and tired of standing on the side of the road with my dog and waiting for a car just for it to make a turn. FOAD
I am rarely in a rush, if a car signals I will allow it to turn, I will stand back and wait, no problem. But 80% of them are really bad at this.
It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.