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Comment by 55873445216111 | Hacker News Reader

"self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads" https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads...

And you can bypass a seatbelt warning by just plugging in a buckle without the belt, but most people don't bother. It's not worth the inconvenience to circumvent, so it still has a positive impact on safety.

A shocking fraction of people will simply ignore the seatbelt beeping for the entire drive

Seatbelts are actually heavily enforced around the EU, most people would rather just belt up than pay the fine.

Toyota... When we look after a dog for a few days for a friend, it beeps. When I put shopping on the back seat, it beeps. Drives me wild. It "beep... beep... beep..." for a minute then "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP".

I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.

I once made the mistake of renting one of those cars, putting my backpack and some groceries behind me, and driving straight onto a freeway. This absolute sh*tbox was beeping so loud I was afraid for my hearing. I drove some 10 miles like this before I could pull over and move the things. I'd not set foot in one of those cars ever again (same goes for Lexus). I was dreaming of really bad things happening to people who thought it was a good idea to emit series of very loud beeps while the car is driving.

I once rented a VW which beeped the seat belt warning at me from the weight of my phone in the passenger seat. It was absolutely insane. Seat belt nags are an utterly terrible feature.

This is how you get many people to just keep the belts fastened permanently and not bother putting them around themselves.

As if those people were going to be using the seat belts anyway

Go in a car from 1970 and try the seatbelts.

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 too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.

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.

Apparently they were nylon instead of polyester. So less comfortable, yes. Plastic blade, maybe not.

I have a car from that era. The seatbelts feel like those in any other newer car I've been in, although perhaps a bit thicker.

In the event of a serious accident police will likely check to see if it was tampered with and so sentence will be more severe

That's not how courts function.

Why are you mentioning how courts function?

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.

Being guilty of an unrelated crime doesn't influence how guilty you are for the first crime. If there's a car accident, it might be the other driver who caused it. Courts should not take into account irrelevant factors when determining guilt, and irrelevant evidence has very little value.

But yes, the punishment is like you say increased with more crimes added to the sheet.

Uh, oh! That's great. Need to get an Arnold Rimmer or Captain Kirk one.

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 ?

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