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Comment by Dries007 | Hacker News Reader

My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea.

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.

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I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score.

And who doesn't want the safest car?

how much have cars safety improved in terms of crashes, airbags, etc, versus the robot will stop the crash?

Impossible to measure, many other uncontrolled variables - esp. significant improvements to infrastructure in Europe, and regulations. Take NL, where a crash involving a pedestrian or a cyclist effectively forces the driver to prove their innocence. I can walk across a Dutch town blindfolded with the biggest risk to my wellbeing being cyclists (well, and the canals). I'd guess the impact of those intervention dwarfs the "i will beep at you until i make you deaf if you don't put your seatbelt over your grocery bag" innovations.

I grew up in/with cars which would score 0 (more like -3 to -5) and made it to adulthood, so I have a feeling that these features are not strictly neccesary.

At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)

My father grew up drinking a ton of alcohol and smoking, like his friends. Many of them are dead.

By your logic, we should keep drinking and smoking.

We should ban driving by your logic?

Everyone dies eventually, so that means very little by itself. Did they die young? How much younger than their peers? Did they gain enough enjoyment from drinking and smoking to offset the fewer years of life (subjective, of course, but important to consider)?

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.

Given that its society that invests in them during development and has to pick them up when they're broken its only fair to also nudge towards a preemptive solution. The economics of people dying needlessly in their 20s is worth the intervention.

People that have a perfect driving record.

Everyone starts with a perfect driving record until one day it’s not perfect.

And annoying beeps and chimes that distract you from the road get you closer to that

I also have an EX30 and while I have many many MANY complaints about this car, driver monitoring isn't one of them.

Also disabling this feature is only 2 taps (because EU says it can't be only one tap), Settings -> toggle Driver Monitoring.

I have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.

My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.

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.

Sounds about right for Volvo, sadly. I’ve owned four over the years, all great, but my most recent one has such dogshit software that I’ll never buy another Volvo.

Is that the regulation that is bad or the way the manufacturer implemented it ?

I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.

Don't buy car that sucks.

What happens if you wear sunglasses?

Normal sunglasses it sees trough, but if you somehow block it, you can't enable some features anymore (pilot assist).

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.

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