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Comment by c7b | Hacker News Reader

It sounds awful, but it might not even make the top-5 of the most annoying/concering things you'll get in a new car (bought in the EU at least), many of which are now mandatory by regulation. What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road, an alarm when you drive over the allowed speed limit as determined by a camera, an alarm plus a mechanical yanking of your driving wheel when you're approaching the side of your lane without a turn signal on. As a cherry on top it's unclear what happens with all the data generated by these systems. And I'm probably forgetting a few.

I'm wondering what a good cutoff date is when considering buying a used car.

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Those things are at least well intentioned, and honestly the lane keeping has once or twice saved me from accidentally leaving my lane when distracted, which might have saved my life.

An ad for a spiderman movie has no upside and is another small step towards a Minority Report vision of the future.

These systems are such a pain in the butt. These can’t be saving lives. My brain completely filters away the speed limit beep. The auto-steering mostly tries to drive me into other vehicles (in the countryside it steers you towards the middle of the road ). And I am pretty sure the eye tracking thing wont prevent me from selecting a spotify song.

cutoff is officially mid 2024. I don’t know if some older cars have been firmware-updated to have these features turned on by default.

I get all of these with more or less recent (2023) Mazda here in Japan, but all of them can be turned off in settings. Are they always-on in EU?

I haven't driven a recent model but afaik the answer for most is Yes, or at best you can disable them for the current ride and they turn on again automatically on every start.

That's quite insane then. Especially the lane departure warning / assist was downright dangerous in snowy conditions when the road markings became partially covered, I cannot imagine driving with that setting on all the time.

The "lane assist" is very dangerous. I don't understand how this got in cars to begin with, nevermind become mandatory.

It's super "fun" with temporary marking around road works. I bet it works perfectly in a lab but in the real world..

I've never had a point where it is dangerous. It vibrates the steering wheel and that's it. Even on the autobahn's 2.20m wide roadwork left lanes it works good/not bad enough I just leave it on. Lane keeping is not mandatory, only a warning system.

I guess it depends on the maker. For my car it nudges the wheel back into the lane in addition to vibrating.

Yep, it does, our VW also nudges back to the lane. The annoying thing is that you can only disable it by stepping through two pages on the on-board screen, though I think many newer models just have a button on the steering wheel to toggle it.

I had lane keeping “assist” in a Subaru Forrester rental car almost kill me and my family by trying to push us into the path of a very large truck last year.

I had it behave dangerously on a VW Atlas I rented, driving south out of Atlanta. A section of 85 has those half black, half white high-contrast stripes, and I had to firmly grip the wheel for the entire section because the lane keeping system was constantly trying to correct.

I don't understand how this got in cars to begin with, nevermind become mandatory.

Invent thing, fund some studies that show a statistically significant safety improvement. lobby rule- and law-making bodies to make it mandatory. If anyone declines, run a PR campaign saying 'Jurisdiction bureaucrats/Obstructive Lawmaker want to KILL YOU & YOUR FAMILY.'

> Especially the lane departure ... assist was downright dangerous in snowy conditions

And near cyclists...

(Opposite to some configurations described nearby, some car models do automatically steer pushing the car in its lane, they do not just warn the driver.)

We have a car with lane assist. But as far as I have seen (but can be mistaken), collision avoidance has a higher priority, so it would prefer avoiding a cyclist ov er staying in lane (though if the road is small, it might just start breaking).

> collision avoidance has a higher priority

Apparently not all cars have collision avoidance towards the sides. The combination of HW and SW features now varies.

(I checked the directives weeks ago.)

In the eu, the general idea is "you can disable the functions each time you restart the car - they will be re-enabled as the car is off".

Some people spend minutes turning off the annoying parts from the settings before starting the car, each time.

It’s the main thing they tell you when you buy a new car. Press here 4 times, then here 3 times, then here once, and you’re good.

No single mamdani-burton to unsubscribe?

What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road

Coming to you thanks to the assholes who fiddle on their phone while driving. As a cyclist, I still see this happening regularly where car drivers are fiddling on their phone while driving for just a few seconds, leading to almost-collisions (well, probably I've been lucky to only witness almost-collisions, including almost getting hit myself), etc.

Same problem on bikes and electric bikes. People are so attached to their screens that they are fiddling on their phone while cycling. This was already bad when people cycled 15 km/h on a regular bike, but now we have kids who cycle on a fat bike with the 25 km/h speed limit removed, tinkering on their phone while cycling 35 km/h in small city streets. Not surprisingly, accidents have gone up a lot.

I hate in-car cameras as much as you. But I also hate the totally irresponsible use of phones while driving/cycling.

My 2015 has none of these things. It has a rear camera, no telemetry, physical buttons, no internal nav, and no giant tough screen.

Same in my car from 2017. Also has rear camera, no infotainment other than bluetooth (so I guess it doesn't have any telemetry), physical buttons, no internal nav, no EU warning systems, no alerts that I need to turn off. Perfect car. Very peaceful to drive.

> My 2015 has none of these things

The eu has started pushing those things with a 2016 (I believe) regulation that imposed "all cars approved for production after 2018 must have an "e-Call" system (internal GPS, microphone and telephone connected to the police in case of car crash)".

And then more, and then more, and still more...

Texting and driving is a real problem.

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