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.
> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.
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.
Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm.
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.
Driving4answers had a similar rant recently about the 2024 Prius, where there's an always-on warning beep every time you enter an intersection, which intrusively pulls away your attention in the exact moment when you need to be focusing on the road the most. I'll be surprised if it doesn't cause someone to die in the coming years. Laws for drivers written by people with chauffeurs.
You can switch them off but only until the engine is turned off again. Most manufacturers have a shortcut on the dashboard or steering wheel though. Eventually you just get used to doing that every time you start driving.
Depends on the car (and the regulatory regime, I'd imagine). My fancy pants 2025 car is happy to leave driver alertness detection disabled, which is handy because it's not good. Of course my ultra base model 1981 van doesn't have any features... it's a lot more fun to drive, other than the engine noise is pretty oppressive on a drive any significant length oh and the floor is missing where the accelerator pedal should mount :P
So to play devil's advocate... were you taking your eyes off the road for too long?
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.
My in-laws Kia did this for me. It got really shitty when it got darker and presumably had to use an IR camera. And I am tall so the angle might have been bad. It flagged me every minute. Even when I intentionally focused right ahead.
Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.
I had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads.
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!
I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers.
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.
Why would the manufacturers care though? You will still buy a car and now the barrier to foreign competition is higher, increasing profit, and the price goes up to pay for the dooo dads which increases financing kickbacks even if margin is same.
They can trivially determine if their tech is effective.
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.
I rented a car with driver monitoring and it made me take my eyes off the road instead. Every beep and warning is a distraction and it these systems don't work. Even if you are looking at the road and driving correctly it is flashing a warning up.
IMO most features are annoying and contribute to alarm fatigue and driver irritation, but are not directly dangerous.
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.
> IIRC, veering from the lane is the cause of most collisions, so it makes sense to have this.
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.
> 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.
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.
To be clear, I'm not talking about auto lane centering. That's something else. The Nissan has this too, but it has to be manually enabled and although it seems to work alright, I just feel like as a driver, it's my responsibility to control the wheel.
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.
You can't turn it off, you can temporarily disable it but it gets enabled again the next time you get in the car.
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.
Mine can be turned off. Three menu items, at each and every start of the car. No preferences.
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.
Isn't that just cultural? Go to a German or French website and you'll be met with a big popover with a bunch of options, half a page of legalese, and some buttons. Pick a Japanese site and you'll get a maximal amount of information packed together. Pick an American site and you'll get the heavy on the whitespace layout. Seems to be the cultural aesthetic choice.
In my experience (Tesla), attention monitoring works well even when I'm wearing sunglasses. The camera can still see my eyes even through dark polarised lenses.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
Sometimes I wonder if Tesla also has a much better software stack than most other manufacturers. IIRC, Tesla has had interior cameras in their cars for years now and I haven't heard about major issues stemming from it.
I can answer this, since I have a new car with this camera and polarized sunglasses.
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.
There is no way that training people not to worry is making us all safer. I don't even like how new cars have this thing where they will automatically hold the brake once stopped even if you let go. There is no way it's a net good to train people that running cars just stay where you put them like an inert object does.
My toyota has one that when you're in a narrow road with parked cars that you must drive around, it constantly thinks it's going to do a frontal collision. Except it detects it like half a second too late, when I've already avoided the parked car (this happens at rather slow speeds).
automatic speed control in the Toyota Yaris works absolutely terribly. On the highway, it constantly misreads signs and suggests driving at 40 km/h instead of 120 km/h. It can even interpret a 10-ton weight limit sign as a 10 km/h speed limit!
I bought a fancy Toyota SUV after my trusty 2008 Honda was damaged in an accident.
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've got a fairly new Toyota and I when I found myself needing a 2nd car for my family I ended up buying a 20 year old Honda and I have to say I enjoy driving it much more.
I might also be safer in it - oversensitive security systems nagging me with false positives almost constantly don't pair well with my ADD
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.
My friend rented a car and he told me that the wheel was moving by itself trying to follow the road. Then he tried taking his hands off and see if the car would follow the line. Nope, it would go straight into a wall (he of course was going slow for the experiment and didn't hit the wall). So it was more like fighting some "smart" feature that distracts you even more from actually pointing the car where you want it to go.
For those interested or forced to buy a new car — I recently picked up a brand new Hyundai and was impressed the new tech does not get in the way. ‘Driver attention warning’ does not have a face camera, it just uses the front sensor to confirm you’re not all over the place. It can also be disabled. Lane assist can be disabled with one button on the wheel. Almost all important controls are real (non capacitive) buttons. Warnings can be customized. Smart cruise control can be customized. As someone who really liked his 90s Toyota, I’m impressed.
We have two new Hyunadai's. My experience is mixed. For one, I get the "consider taking a break" warning constantly - possibly my sleepy eyes? In the Sante Fe, the cruise control disengages constantly b/c it can't see my face when I drive with left hand (my default) - this does not happen in our Ioniq though. Rear view camera + warning has been helpful on one occasion, but both rear and side cameras have fully disengaged my ability to drive many (30+) times when it was safe to do so. Basically in a city where you need to pull out and weave into traffic, if you begin moving too early it'll stop the car and also prevent the gas pedal from working (even if you let off and press many times). My most favorite is it would do this in my kids school drop off (cars are close and all moving at 5mph). The traffic helper knew this would happen to me and we had many laughs about it, after the first few times of them waving me a bit aggressively (why aren't you moving yet?). "Did you forget something in backseat" alarm goes off every time I park, I suppose from kid's car seats. Lane assist is nice when helpful, but very annoying when not (~10% helpful, 90% FP). My general read on the lane assist warning is its simply too sensitive. I disable the lane assist on cruise control, otherwise the adaptive cruise control is 90% good (it only can't seem to figure out to speed up when passing a semi, and will slow down instead).
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).
Interesting. From the hyundai manual, driver attention monitoring only uses front sensor with no face recognition in the vehicle as far as I can tell. Are you sure your cruise control issue isn’t because of hand sensors?
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.
I'm not sure if Genesis is vastly different, but the wife's G70 is my own personal layer of hell. The tech constantly gets in the way and pisses me off. They can't even figure out how to do interval settings on a windshield wiper. It's awful.
I have a BYD Seal I bought last year, and it doesn't have a face camera. My mom's new BYD Dolphin does, so maybe it's just very recent.
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.
Don't rule out another Cash for Clunkers. The 2009 program destroyed 1 in 300 cars on the road. The next one could be bigger. Also, 3 in 4 cars on the road today are now in states requiring emissions tests for your annual registration, which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.
> which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.
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.
The article is about the EU, but since you brought up US emissions testing... I live in California, only drive mid 2000s cars, and haven't noticed any of the restrictions getting tighter. It's the usual check every 2 years at the same place. Seems my cars are grandfathered into old emissions standards too.
And yeah I enjoy having my car shut the hell up and let me drive.
For mid 2000s, the car is self monitoring so an emissions check is just a visual once over to ensure no physical tampering and a computer readout of emission readiness monitors + firmware checksum for digital tampering.
I’m imagine that’s coming soon. Most new large cars are getting turbos now to meet federal and state standards, the turbos wear faster and I’m sure there will be a desire to validate them.
Now that my vehicle is approaching 20 years old, I’m so so so happy it has more interior comfort upgrades rather than mechanical ones like 4wd or a turbo.
There are some German cities (Munich) where you can’t enter the city center with a diesel car that doesn’t meet the EURO 4 standards. EURO 4 is a low bar but there’s really nothing stopping them from eventually implementing it more widely and upping the requirement to EURO 5, 6, etc.
I've been driving a 1996 VW diesel van in Germany including Munich, and nowhere anyone ever actually cared about the lack of the sticker. And now, at 30 years of age, it turned "oldtimer", so it is officially exempted.
Yup, a bigger issue for old cars trying to pass emissions is that with prices of precious metals, a worn out catalytic converter (diagnostic code P0420 ) means that most of them are mechanically totaled in California, New York, Colorado since they require either OEM or CARB approved replacements.
How vulnerable are road sign cameras to, say, someone sticking a vertical strip of black electrical tape to make the 50 appear as a 150?
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.
I don't know about 50 to 150, but someone near me appears to have put up their own speed limit sign and the font is slightly off, so my car sees it as 75 instead of 25 (and helpfully gives me a single-button way to set my cruise control to match).
In the states, buy a manual car if you can get one. I have a manual Subaru crosstrek from 2021 and the only features it has is cruise control and a backup camera.
The speed sign detection can be a bit funny at times. Mine often read signs that are for roads next to the one I'm driving, which occasionally include train tracks. Seeing a maximum speed that is 200 km/h is a bit funny, through less so when the camera catches a small road parallel with the highway with speeds that's 1/4th that of the highway. If the cruise control would follow those, the first one would be very illegal and the second one quite dangerous and possibly illegal if it got stuck like that. It also has detected a 357 km/h (or around that) while driving in the city, possibly by random patterns from a shop's street window.
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.
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).
Renault have nailed this. In their latest cars (the EVs, at least) you set up which features you do and don’t want, then a single button press when you get in the car makes it so.
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).
I have a Volkswagen ID3, I love the adaptive cruise control. Yes, it gets it wrong in some spots (signage isn't great here in Asturias, Spain), and it gets it wrong in both directions (too slow at certain locations, too fast in others).
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.
I have a CRV with adaptive cruise (USA) and while the car reads the speed limit signs it only uses them for display. There are instances where it misreads signs which is understandable because some of the road signs are very similar or the posted speed only applies to trucks ect.
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?
I've rented a 2026 Kia minivan this week for vacation and I can set a cruise control offset of -10 to +10 in steps of 5.(which is kind of funny in isolation, "how much do you want to break the law today?")
I drive a Nissan Ariya sometimes, which has adaptive cruise control. It's ... okay, but I'm not sure my own car's "dumb" cruise control is any worse to be honest.
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.
The stuff BMW ships is great. The ACC that I tried in a normal Toyota a few years ago was way worse. I'm a huge ACC fan but it really woke me up that I need to evaluate the vendors before I purchase the car.
People are selling those older cars at a significant discount compared to previous years, because they got banned from low emission zones - you need euro 5 for diesel and euro 4 for petrol to be allowed in centers of many of large EU cities.
I've heard China has something similar where you need an electric vehicle to drive in many city centers. Part of a huge effort to fix air pollution issues.
We have an 80 kph sign about 6m after the autoweg sign (100kph), why they didn't combine them is anyone's guess. My detection system always misses it, and often there are speed checks. Fortunately I can disable sign recognition for the cruise control.
Wait does your cruise control automatically accelerate by default when it thinks it sees a sign..? That sounds terrifying! I've only seen systems which give you a prompt to switch speed which you can accept with a button
I suspect owning a car will become increasingly rare as self driving improves. You'd take public transport for the bulk of trips with self driving cars for odd routes / late night trips PT doesn't cover.
I drove an '89 Prelude (with a carburetor!) that had been used hard before I acquired it, until it left me stranded by the side of the road one too many times. I am happy to report that a 2000 Acura Integra is a very reasonable upgrade. Basically the same car, except better (fuel injection, ABS brakes, airbags, etc.). The only thing I miss is that the Prelude had a tighter steering radius.
Most of the rentals around my neck of the woods are VWs or entry-level Mercedes. The two seem approximately equally bad; they both have the exact same problems with cruise control, lane assist beeps, speed limit beeps, "take a break!" beeps, and so on.
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'm the owner of a 2025 Dacia Jogger. It has a physical button to disable all warnings and alarms, which I really appreciate, but I still need to press that button twice (with ~1s of delay between pushes), and I need to do it every time I turn the car on.
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.
Ever driven a Dacia? I had one for a rental in Portugal. Honestly the least comfortable and most irritating vehicle I've ever driven. I'm not just being fussy, we've had plenty of Hyundais, Citroens and the like without a problem.
OP said after 2008. There are many cars made after 2008 that do not have intrusive systems. For example, my 2018 Camaro has none of that. The only proximity sensors it has are side vehicle indicators and all they do is turn on a light.
New cars with intrusive driver monitoring alerts are obviously going to be terrible but you can still buy vehicles made prior to this change.
Last year, I rented a Kia. I was coasting downhill on a curve and approached a group of bikers. Everything was fine. I was a little below the speed limit, they were in the bike lane, I was in my lane, it was a sunny day. The car detected them as a hazard to avoid and STRAIGHTENED AND LOCKED MY STEERING WHEEL in the middle of the curve turn. I ran into a shallow ditch, but holy shit, what if it took control and over corrected onto an oncoming car?
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.
I recently rented a new car, and just wanted to sit with the windows open while waiting.
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.
Lane assist is also genuinely dangerous when there's men at work on the road and they change the lanes, yet the car tries to stick to the painted ones and I have to fight the car to do what it has to do we don't kill nobody.
Also happens it gets confused with freshly painted white/yellow lines when older are still visible.
I have a dodge ram (work provided truck) with lane assist. I had it completely disabled for two years because it was awful and possibly dangerous as you mentioned, though I’d enable it on rare really long multi-hour drives across states. Fortunately the button to turn it off stayed that way instead of having to set it every start.
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.
Tell me you live in a civilised country without telling me you live in a civilised country.
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.
Earlier this year, I rented a new Toyota Camry (US model). It had lane assist, but it was very easy to override it. I didn't really have to fight it. (And that was nice. I've drive other cars where it was more of a battle.)
So, yeah, it's done badly some of the time. But it at least can be done well.
I don't know, even if it's not that forceful, sometimes I have a light touch on the wheel and I'm going straight, I don't want to suddenly have to fight the car swerving me onto oncoming traffic.
It BS article, no cameras pointed at your face are required. They require "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System", don't specify how it should be implemented.
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.
It's like we live in different worlds. The entire arc of technology over the past 30 years has been to centralize, collect, and then monetize. There are tons of systems that shouldn't be doing that, but they all evolve to end up doing that. We need a new version of Zawinski's Law: every company will attempt to monetize until they're selling user data.
That's literally why we have GDPR. This will be very illegal and the law itself specifically bans user identification with camera on top of the stuff protected by GDPR.
Is it BS if this is the only way to implement such a system? Then it is practically required. Legal or not these cameras will be used to identify you, car companies do all kinds of shady stuff with the data they collect with all their fancy new sensors. Besides, cars have famously lagged in security standards, so this data will be exfiltrated. By comparison, your comment is more hysterical sounding than the article. It is very reasonable to not want even more invasive systems installed in cars, especially when this may bleed into US models and then used against us here where the company can absolutely legally sell your data.
If you want to believe that when light shines on a CCD chip the only option is to record the data and transmit it to the corporations and the governments then keep believing it. Everything needs to be extreme after all, right?
It's not 'extreme' its just extrapolation and common sense. Profit motives dictate this as the only outcome. In what world are you living in where any system exists that collects data and doesn't transmit it to corporations and governments? Yes there are arguably a couple niche E2E encrypted open source programs, but surely that isn't at all comparable with proprietary big corporation vehicle software which have always notoriously been some of the worst privacy violating software around.
That's actually illegal in EU without consent. In this particular case, there's also specific ban on identifying the user with the cameras that the system may use. It's in the text, as a result we may hear from the tech companies how EU regulations are making it hard to do business even.
You need to have the hardware(camera isn't enough, you need storage and way to transmit) in place to do these things. I guess Tesla's and other connected smart cars can do that already but that's not what this regulation requires.
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 good news is that by making cars more trouble than they're worth, this may speed us closer to walkable, bikeable neighborhoods that can only be reasonably navigated on foot or by bike, connected by extensive public transit networks (which already do track where you're going).
Well yeah, that's the point. They want to enshitify cars and make driving as expensive and as annoying as possible to force people out of cars. They know they can't just ban cars outright, so they enshitify this little thing this year, mandate this other thing the next year, add a new tax/fee the next year, add a new restriction the next year, reduce speed limits the next year, etc., etc., all in the name of safety / "save the kids", until decades later they finally get to where they want to be.
Yeah. Whenever someone starts explaining to me that "they" - meaning some vague and undefined cartel - want you to (blank) I immediately flag their reasoning as suspect until proven otherwise. More often than not it's indicative of a lack of serious critical thought.
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.
The “green movement” and “the environment” but mostly a desire for control. Why should people be able to own private property like cars, we should all be using government owned means of transportation in our new socialist utopia.
>Why should people be able to own private property like cars, we should all be using government owned means of transportation in our new socialist utopia.
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?
I don’t need to know the names of the various lawmakers, lawyers, and politicians to know that they exist and to see the effects of their work. You’re being willfully blind here.
>Who desires the control? Can you name a member of this nebulous conspiracy?
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.
>[seeking to] mandate digital currencies, mandate digital IDs, impose "chat control" and eliminate all privacy.
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.
>Regulators are responding to a real problem: EU-funded research estimates driver distraction plays a role in 5% to 25% of car crashes
>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.
Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms.
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?
Ford has had that since Blue Cruise 2.0, or thereabouts. It really shocked me how often it catches my attention being diverted. Things like talking to my passengers, adjusting the climate controls, or eating- I'm not even talking about 'advanced distractions' like my phone.
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
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.
> 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.
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.
It gives me false positives when I'm holding the wheel at the top and my wrist is blocking line of sight from the camera. On the other hand, sunglasses have never tripped it all.
Owned a Ford Mustang Mach-e with BkueCruise for about 3 years now. No obvious false alarms about missing attention. Interestingly, it doesn't get confused by my sunglasses and still catches me looking aside for too long. I think it is a rather good implementation overall.
> It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
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.
I don't doubt your experience but I've had the exact opposite experience with a Subaru where there were so many false positives it was worse than useless and was instead an active distraction.
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.
Interesting perspective. In my experience the risk is actually that it results in alert fatigue, which means that drivers that would otherwise pay attention to such an alert no longer do.
good way to get notification fatigue and tunnel vision. look ahead, ignore everything else and have a shocked pikachu face when you sideswipe someone because you're well trained to not check your blind spots
I need to call bullshit on this. I own the same system and it totally allows looking around for normal driving. Stare to the side or the center console for more than a few seconds and it will alert you - exactly at the point where it becomes recklessly unsafe to do so.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
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.
The Kia Niro EVs I drive at work have something that apparently detects driver fatigue. I don't know what sets it off but it starts beeping at fire alarm levels and makes the huge LCD constantly flash up warnings, usually before I've even left the yard. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn it off or stop it, so you just have to put up with a constant "BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING" for the whole journey.
I honestly have zero idea how this is at all related to the story at hand, but the surfeit of unnecessary specific details is both enjoyable and making me slightly suspicious that this is AI :)
New cars are UX nightmares. I'm driving an electric Toyota bz4x. Lovely mechanics, but the general UX (some are because of Android Auto) is terrible.
The remote's lock/unlock don't do anything when the car is on. Example: I'm by the trunk and it won't open unless I go back to the driver's door and unlock the doors. App's remote function has too many conditions to do anything. For instance, I'm resting in the back seat and want to turn on the car for some air conditioning, but it says: the doors should be locked, the key fab should be out of the car to start the car.
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.
What I hate about my new Toyota's volume knob is that there is no indication of volume level in the UI, and the knob itself doesn't ratchet. So I have absolutely no feedback about how much louder or quieter it's going to get when I turn the knob. If I have no music going, but I'm waiting to hear the next GPS instructions, how can I make sure I'm going to hear them? If I'm not sure where the volume is at right now, I can't, unless I turn it and then try and trigger some sound effect or something. It's needlessly complicated.
Disagree. I have been driving Kia for 2.5 years. I think the UX is quite good.
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.
You mean the bZ4X. It wasn't enough that the name is incomprehensible, they also capitalized it incomprehensibly. I think the primary goal of that car was to see how few they could sell, so they could go back to hybrid and hydrogen.
Why are car companies other than Tesla and BYD so dumb with their EV naming strategy, but perfectly fine at naming gasoline cars? Really curious because it seems like you have to put in effort to be this stupid at naming. Reminds me of how Microsoft names anything.
New Teslas are not a UX nightmare... go test drive a Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, GM, etc, then lastly a Tesla. Come back and tell me which car has the best software.
That's because you bought a car from a company which places UX at the bottom of their list. On top of that, even if they place it high on their list, they are simply incompetent at it.
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.
I think part of this acceptance of the "well if it saves one [usually child's] life..." - it's extremely powerful but is deceptive as it devalues the value of freedom (or some similar trait).
This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
This is alarming. Very soon there will be no point driving because insurance is going to jump in and mandate strict rules around how to sit, hold the steering wheel and how I should be looking and the fun of driving will be gone. This is all converging towards autonomous driving without a steering wheel.
That you are aware such rules about correct driver position exists makes me wonder how (if?) you are driving legally, as you certainly seem to lack the familiarity with the laws concerning it.
If I hate anything about the EU, its the morons writing regulations for cars. My car constantly distracts me with some beeps, sometimes loud enough to be dangerous. Its surely one of the reasons far right is on the rise -- with things like 'drivers party' in some European countries winning serious votes. I spend 1-2hrs in the car each day, and I hate what those regulations did to driving.
(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).
I was recently in the Uk and one of the cars I was in would alert the driver if he was over the speed limit. Fair enough. But the alert itself is distracting. Are we to review every single alert from these cameras? Is that not just another distraction?
There’s usually some kind of short cut action to disable that for the car. In a Mercedes you hold the volume down button in the steering wheel for 3 seconds and it “updates settings” which is basically disabling that annoying feature.
Recently rented BMW had the same, disable speed warnings by holding down "Options" button or something on the steering wheel. Annoyingly though, it didn't remember the selected driving profile after being turned off, but not sure if that's because I wasn't logged in to a BMW account, it was a rental, because the profile was the sport profile, or whatever, so had to tap around on an annoying touchscreen to select that every time I used the car.
I've literally had my vehicle alarm and tell me to keep both hands on the steering wheel when I had both hands on for a long time. My biggest concern is where do false alarms take us in the not-too-distant future? Inept sensing -> you can't drive.
It's very hard to do that when every few seconds some new alarm goes off and some big red flashing warning on the TV screen that's blocking your view of the road comes on.
This hyperbole is barely worth responding to. If someone really triggers alerts on such a regular basis, then I have to question whether they have a road legal driving style based on the quality and accuracy those assistants actually have now achieved.
Oh, and the dashboard in my newest car is smaller than any dashboard with analog needles could ever have been. Dashboards probably have gotten smaller, not bigger with the switch to LCD screens.
Perhaps not everyone should be driving? This is not a criticism towards you, I don't have the patience to be behind a wheel, and I know of many drivers that are a danger to themselves and others. If the side effect of this system is that there are fewer people driving because they can't manage the alarms, then that's good enough for me.
This stuff is a nightmare for new manufacturers and is usually lobbied-for by large OEMs or to keep startups out of the market or as a patent trap
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
My Hyundai Ioniq 6's "safety" systems have caused several near accidents and scary and distracting moments, as soon as I forget to turn them off. I have to disable these every time I start the car.
I have a manual 2003 Golf TDI (purchased in 2003; has a tape deck!) that's slowly rusting, and I'm not looking forward to when I have to replace it.
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.
Yeah I have 2002 Honda accord and I’m dreading the day I need to get a modern car. My wife has a 2021 car and there is not a single feature it has that is necessary. In fact, many of them are actively bad. I’ve been driving every day, accident free, for 20 years and have never once needed lane assist, attention tracking or whatever the fuck. I wish there was a car that just had no additional ‘features’ beyond actual mechanical/efficiency improvements.
The overregulation and the constant attempt to destroy any notion of privacy has really pushed me towards being anti EU. I wonder if ressources are spent seeding that sentiment.
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.
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.
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 ?
I have a 2012 Skoda Yeti, 170000 miles. Serviced every year, never had anything go wrong with it yet. If it starts costing me money I will buy a 2012 Skoda Yeti from Autotrader with 50000 miles on the clock. At my age that should just about do me :)
I’ve got 2017 Yeti (last year they were made) with 80k miles on it, will probably keep it for another decade. I wish I could buy an electric yeti but everything else about it staying the same.
The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.
I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.
I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.
Maybe I drive more defensively than most but I almost never drive in the center of the lane unless I am in a ‘middle’ lane with lanes on either side. I drive with my tire riding the correct side of the solid line demarcating the shoulder, people (especially pickups hauling trailers, pro semi drivers are usually good) are really bad at staying in their lanes so I sometimes drive onto the shoulder to prevent an accident in the case of another driver lane drifting and overcorrecting.
I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.
Generally the cars with better lane warning/centering use camera or radar to see other vehicles.
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.
Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.
That's the trouble with automating cars - being quite accurate is not really that great over 100k miles. On Tesla's specifically I find the "hands on wheel" attention detection a bit iffy.
For FSD, at least in the US they long dropped the hands on the wheel thing, unless the attention monitoring isn't functioning. At least the folks I know that have it, they absolutely love it.
The current docs still say issues with the camera detection results in the hands on wheel prompts https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GU... but yes, it was nice when they removed the requirement to have the hands on the wheel even when the camera was working right.
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!
lane assist is fundamentally an unsolvable problem with just a cheap camera, it's in the same category as autonomous driving, that's what these stupid legislation do not get.
Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.
Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.
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.
It seems like you are being downvoted but I've had the exact issue you mention where there is heavy over-banding on the road surface. Or where you try to move out to overtake a cyclist and it decides to correct you back into lane.
This feels like a regulation whose effectiveness will expire in the next couple of years (as driverless cars become the norm), but which will set a precedent that this is the norm. This with the EU chat control coming up really set a tone.
Those are the same insane morons who came up with the cookie consent. Cottage industry of lawyers that push for those regulations and then collect lucrative retainers from companies wishing to not be fined. One of the reasons EU is so hopelessly behind on any innovation.
Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
If they make cars irritating enough, people might give up the joy of driving and pivot to more economical transit modes. I have mixed feelings about this, and I doubt the car companies are thoughtfully doing this, but I do wonder sometimes.
It's bad though because glancing at your side-view mirrors is good, but this will train drivers out of it by beeping at them because their eyes aren't perfectly forwards-facing.
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 love the warning about not having hands on the steering wheel.
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?
I have the same issue in my 2020 AMG. With lane assit on, the way it detects that your hands are on the steering wheel is by sensing your inputs to counter its inputs to the steering wheel position. It even seems to deliberately steer you off the center of the lane to see if you react.
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.
My Nissan does check both hands are contacting the steering wheel making lane centering basically useless if I want to do anything with one hand like adjust my glasses, change the audio etc.
This is why I like modern Renaults/Dacias. They all come with a single button to turn all of this stuff off, or to a preset of your choosing. No need to fiddle with a screen, nothing you cannot disable. Bliss.
What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ? 0.1€ cost, can be removed in case of control otherwise you can pretend the camera wasn't working.
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.
That sounds like a hardware issue that might be soluble in "wire cutters and a bad attitude", or at minimum "hot air resoldering station, microscope, and a bad attitude". I wonder what their software stack is like, too.
This is already in Teslas for supervised self driving, not sure what the big deal is. People can be very distracted while driving and the Tesla OS makes sure to let them know.
Expect an error but this will depend on the brand.
"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.
Not sure about the systems on cars in the EU, but I got a loaner 2025 Hyundai Tuscon when my EV was in the shop. It had some driver attention monitoring feature with a camera above the steering wheel staring me in the eyes. I covered it with a piece of black electrical tape. It popped a little warning on the main display (IIRC, a crossed out eye, but maybe I'm confusing with Subaru Eyesight) when the car first started up, showing that the camera wasn't working, then proceeded to be silent for the rest of the drive.
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!
Maybe you'll be able to buy a box to plug into the CAN bus and simulate pressing the button to deactivate it. Sorta like the auto-stop eliminator for that horrid feature (which saves less than 5 gallons of gas per year in my dad's Subaru - thankfully mine is one year too old for that).
Those nudges are gentle and totally safe in every car I've ever had. And no "random" nudges outside road construction work with dubious lane markings where you need to have a grip on the wheel anyway. A regular firm grip always overrides lane keeping.
I mostly agree in my 2024 Ioniq 5, but not in my 2019 Subaru Outback. You can definitely override the lane keep if you have a firm grip and are ready for it, but it tries to throw me off the road often enough that I don't use it anymore.
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.
I test drove a Subaru (in America) with this feature and absolutely hated it. The amount of false positives was ridiculous. Often I was literally staring straight ahead, driving on a straight road, and getting beeped at to pay attention.
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.
I purchased a new a hybrid car a year ago. It is impossible to deactivate permanently speed limit and lane alerts. They are useless, dumb and dangerous if you ask me. Detecting a 40km/h on the highway from a road sign on a near by road it's not safety. It's been a year of touching and correcting touches for disabling these two alerts, of course you have to do more clicks no way of accessing it from a quick menu or from quick actions on the steering wheel. The car works perfectly but this thing is so annoying to me that I'm seriously thinking of selling it. The touch screen is slooooow, when the internal temperature is higher is even more slooow for a ui that should be 1200fps for what it does even on a underpowered throttled by heat waves board chip. I either sell the car of take my time and find a way to hack that damn firmware. This is not the way to go, the way to go is autonomous driving not all this annoying BS
The speed limit detection exists on my US Toyota vehicle, but it doesn’t beep or nag, just tells me what it thinks the speed limit is on the HUD, which is nice. Although when I drove through Georgia the interstate has all these minimum speed signs that look close enough to speed limit signs that fully half the time through Georgia it thought the speed limit was 40mph instead of 80mph. It would have been an absolute nightmare drive if it had beeped intermittently for 6 hours.
True, but there are quite lightweight cars and heavy motorcycles.
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.
because when crashing on a motorcycle, it's only the cyclists face that's turned inside out and in such a way that it's not a burden on society to treat a vegetable.
Gadget Idea: Small display with a lens that can be mounted over the camera that hooks into the material around it, plays an AI generated video of $RANDOM_CELEBRITY singing karaoke off-key and driving very carefully.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
So, 1. yet another beep/boop in the car contributing to alert-fatigue, and 2. another stream of data inevitably sent off-device and monetized in god knows what ways by god knows which third party "partners".
It won’t be long until someone finds a way to flash the firmware or install a bootleg sensor or something else. You can already get a lot “chipped” on VAG and BMW cars.
Chances are most manufacturers are going to use a cheap USB camera. Can a raspberry pi emulate webcam? Just place the same video of you diligently staring out of the window on repeat.
As a rule, I do my own maintenance or take the car to an independent mechanic. I wouldn't trust a dealer given how misaligned their incentives are with my interests.
It's so incredible the difference in mindset across the Atlantic.
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.
Good. The amount of people I see looking at their smartphone while driving, completely oblivious to what’s happening on the road is concerning. I don’t see why that footage needs to be transferred anywhere and GDPR should ensure it won’t be, so no need to spin this as a privacy nightmare cars have tons of sensors already and there’s probably little commercial interest in filming people’s faces while they’re driving so I don’t see what’s so controversial about this.
Ok I'm a citizen of EU country. I don't consent, I don't agree. I want a car without inside cameras, without systems beeping, blinking, nor vibrating at me. Don't you ever move the steering wheel under my hands. Why I'm screaming into the void?
My car would start beeping randomly and one day it wouldn't stop beeping. Turns out it was because we have a baby seat in the back on a window seat but it would slightly touch the edge of the middle seat. The solution was to clip in the seatbelt on the middle seat even through there was nobody sitting there.
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."
I'll keep my 2014 golf mk7 thank you. Euro5, no adblue bullshit. Still gets good mileage, is still cheap to maintain even after 260k km (the biggest expense has been the dual mass flywheel with a clutchpack) and the only high tech feature is a radar based adaptive cruise control.
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.
> On the positive side, the regulations require the ADDW system to work on a "closed loop" without the use of biometric data.
lmfao, the regulations required antipollution systems too didn't they ?
Even if by some miracle this is the case for all manufacturers I'm betting my first son the software can helpfully be updated to be cloud enabled once insurances companies catch up or regulations are updated for more safety.
Hope you like walking a lot.
Many of these warnings are hazardous, especially in an unfamiliar vehicle. They are extremely annoying and often incorrect. They result in extended periods of distracted driving trying to figure out how to turn off the warning.
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.
A mandatory camera and a mandatory modem in every car is a privacy nightmare. The EU does not care about privacy of it's subjects, it cares about control. The US is not much different. It's over for freedom in the west. The frogs are boiling.
I would rather die in a car crash than get nagged like this. Europe is the nanniest of nanny states, its inconceivable that people actually want to live like this.
One of the very dangerous side effect of this is it pushes a lot of people out of the ability to own a decent car legally. The camera, AI chip and all supporting electronic supporting it will raise the price of the entry level Dacia (a Dacia Spring is already more than 15k euros). So people will keep old cars as long as they can.
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.
For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system:
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.
The headline is wrong. The article and the headline seems to be written in a way to cause outrage by giving the impression that the EU requires cameras which should be recording your face all the time and storing/sending it to authorities or something but what the EU actually requires is "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System" which may be implemented using cameras and no recording or transmitting is required, in fact actually recording and transmitting would be a problem with GDPR.
"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.
There are no camera requirements and if cameras are used they are prohibited from using them for the stuff the article implies because the privacy is protected by GDPR. Remember how US corporations really hate EU regulations? Yes that's the regulation preventing them from processing your face even if the system is implemented with a camera.
GDPR doesn't protect privacy of data, it regulates how any collected data is stored and used and requires consent of the person.
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.
If you really want to believe that if a light shines on a CCD chip the only way forward is to record that and send that to corporations and the governments that keep believing it. We are in an age of extremism, everything must be extreme and detached from reality.
You either didn't read my comment, or aren't groking it.
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).
and what sensor do you propose using to make sure people appear awake and alert? a magic device that can evaluate posture, demeanor, facial expression, wakefulness, etc but somehow definitely is not a camera?
yes you've read the text accurately, now it's time to use your brain and consider what it means.
If you want to be pedantic you can choose to be pedantic about the fact that the text literally does not require a camera. If we can pass that, then let's stick with the reality and understand that processing the light that shines on CCD sensor doesn't automatically mean that it is being recorded and handed over to the police. Since we are allowed to use our brains, we can understand that recording and transmitting would require extra hardware over what's required to process the data from CCD sensor and discard it right away.
> 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.
Nope, the laws require Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System and does not require cameras aimed at your face.
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.
I remember the brief period when they told us that the self service checkout weren't recording video. Then they just said oh actually they do now and nobody battered an eye lid
If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
Very different threat model though. Commercial aircraft aren't sensitive to keep-your-eyes-on-the-road failures with seconds-scale latencies, airlines require autopilot use, there is a copilot present at all times, the FAA very strictly regulates work hours and substance use, etc...
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.
Designing this machine vision system is insurmountable. It will never be actually good at its stated purpose, because how much you can look through some window or glance back at your kids is decided by the outside environment and it will be impossible to fit accurate judgement of it in the computers in the car.
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 have news for you: those systems already exist and they work. The "insurmountable" development work has already been done. How long you can safely look away from the road is determined mostly by physics and has hard bounds. More than ~5 seconds is never OK while the vehicle is on a public road. At speed, a single second can be a second too long. The problem isn't that the road looks clear now. The problem is that this can change instantly, without warning and in the most surprising ways at any moment. A kid running into the road from behind a car, an object falling onto the road, an animal jumping onto the road from the brush/ditch/tree-line... the list goes on. Forcing the driver to pay attention is good. There is no massive situational leeway.
To make things fair, I looked at both yours and his. Guess he's concerned about privacy especially in the EU, and you like to call anyone a Russian bot for complaining. I probably qualify as Russian bot too, brb changing Lada oil.
If it helps, my posting history is more diverse and I agree with antondd. OP's free to post what they like about the EU but I think people should know what sort of an ideological position it's coming from.
Modern HN is all about the nanny state. If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide ... right? It's not like a future government might decide that just existing as a certain race or accessing health care as a certain gender is a crime...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, did your car pick up the speed limit sign on the French auto-route for… motorcycles filtering between lanes too?
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.
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).
is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?
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).
I would assume all such cars have an option to turn this off.
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.
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?
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.
I drive a 1991 Honda Prelude and I don't think I'll want to drive anything else probably ever.
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.
New cars with intrusive driver monitoring alerts are obviously going to be terrible but you can still buy vehicles made prior to this change.
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.
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.
Also happens it gets confused with freshly painted white/yellow lines when older are still visible.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
> 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.
What is their motive for wanting to "force people out of cars"?
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.
Don't buy car that sucks.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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'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.
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.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
(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).
Oh, and the dashboard in my newest car is smaller than any dashboard with analog needles could ever have been. Dashboards probably have gotten smaller, not bigger with the switch to LCD screens.
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
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.
[1] https://www.carsized.com/en/
They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
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 wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
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 ?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
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.
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
In general tampering with safety equipment is not legal, enforcement is another thing.
I'm not a fan of people giving poor advice online.
EU has a while to go to become the surveillance capital I think.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
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
"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).
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.
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
It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
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.
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.
You wonder if some people can't conceptualize other people disagreeing with them in good faith, without being part of some shadowy influence campaign.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442503#48444168
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.