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Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.

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I distinctly remember that there was an article years ago about this. Automotive bodies have been mandating features for decades, and were doing followup studies.

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?

It's a moat. If you're afraid of losing market share you want your competitors to be busy finding out ways of passing these kind of rules you already figured out how to implement. That's why quality doesn't matter, only compliance does.

Unless it is malicious compliance?

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.

I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.

The thing is, the "walking experience" can be pretty miserable as well. Road fatalities still are unacceptably high in Europe, even if we're better than the US.

Cycling then? The cycling experience is pretty good around here.

Surely they would be interested in making more infrastructure compatible with not driving then?

In the EU? done!

The irony there being the "cars are evil" politicians are typically the strongest advocates for EVs, but EVs (being new) are the cars most likely to be affected by these annoyances.

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.

It would be nice if they first proved that it actually improves safety. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has some doubts about that.

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