I sometimes wonder how these systems are being tested on the road and whether there's any feedback from the test drivers, or what kind of morons are there saying "this is completely fine, exactly like intended" when they read the feedback...
My car has adaptive cruise control and will automatically adjust speed based on speed limit signs. I was on a highway at 130km/h and the car read a 60km/h speed limit sign that was on an exit shoulder (already separated by a concrete barrier from the highway, so technically a different road altogether) and started breaking really fast - I was pretty close from getting tailgated by the driver behind me, who did not (rightfully) expect me to suddenly start breaking with nothing in front of me. Luckily this can be permanently turned off, so I can continue using cruise control without being afraid of every single speed limit sign.
Recently I had rented a Skoda Karoq (very new one, probably 2024/2025) which adjusted the cruise control speed not even based on signs, but probably based on data from built-in maps? I don't know - but it would randomly decide that I entered a 20km/h zone while driving on a 90km/h road. And this couldn't be turned off. So I just turned off cruise control completely, because wtf, how can anyone think this is improving road safety?
My car (from VW Group) came with Active Lane Keep. It detects when you're drifting out of your lane and steers you back into it. Sounds great in theory.
Except that in the US, if you're cruising in the right lane then every time there's an exit it will actively steer you towards the concrete median between the lane and the exit. I don't understand how this feature was signed off on. The risks outweigh the benefits, in my opinion.
I drive a Volkswagen ID3 and it has the same issue. It's baffling. There are certain roads that trip it up for me and make it slam on the brakes: the A2 in Greenwich (a 50mph road in London UK) it'll suddenly think it's now 30mph, and on the M6 Northbound (70mph road in Birmingham, UK) it drops to 50mph. As far as I can see, there are no signs anywhere that the camera can misread.
On one occasion it thought the limit had changed to 100mph, which isn't even a defined speed limit in the UK.
Glad I have slightly older car where 'adaptive cruise control' means keeping distance from car in front of me. Nothing more.
Sometimes I watch some reviews of newer cars, and numbers of beeping, comms on central screen, etc is just… overwhelming me. Watching video. Cannot imagine driving in that conditions.
I'm happy I wasn't able to activate cruise control in the Karoq that I rented some time ago. VAG interfaces were always confusing to me and this behaviour would be more so.
I see signs recognized like that all the time, so use satnav as my reference. Unfortunately if it's not up to date (mine hasn't been for years now), it will suggest speeds which have nothing to do with reality.
i have a bmw that read the road signs and then it prompts you if you'd like to readjust your adaptive cruise control to the new speed. Much better system than in VW cars.
I have a Korean SUV in the US, and I am rarely bothered by the attention alert. When I am, I’m very clearly not paying attention, and reminded gently to stop being a fool and pay attention! I like the implementation in my vehicle.
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.
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.
> 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.
A lot of these features seem to assume that you're driving on a multi-lane motorway with well-marked lanes. I'm constantly being nudged by my ID.3 one way or another on rural roads. You can turn it off, but it turns itself back on the next time you unlock 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.
It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".
Do you know if the law prevents you from modifying the car to disable these devices? Caveat to anyone considering this: Modifying could be used against you in a liability case. Additionally if your insurance contract has some stipulation about not removing these safety "features" and they find out, I would think you could be dropped.
What happens if you bypass these systems? Does it have a separate speaker or does it use the infotainment?
If the former, you can bypass it electronically. If the latter, I'm sure you can mess with the software of the multimedia head unit to silence the chimes.
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.
I wonder if these things are designed by people who do not drive. So they just implement to spec without thinking through whether the change produces the desired impact.
Can't you just snip/disconnect the speaker/bell wire? I did this back when I had a truck and often had to maneuver with open doors (at very slow speeds) - the "door open warning bell" was so annoying that I just pulled its wires.
AFAIK the warning tones don't come from the car's stereo speakers but have its own speaker.
We did an 8 hour ride on a rental recently in Central Europe, mostly through major motorways. The car dashboard disagreed with (apple) maps which disagreed with the road signage so often. The beeping was infuriating.
> 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.
Where do you live?
In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways).
This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.
> 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 rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating!
No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone.
I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey.
I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
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.
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.
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.
But they make it less safe in a hard to measure poorly defined way whereas they make it safer in a measured easy to take credit for way.
The safety industry (or whoever, not really sure exactly who's benefitting here) destroying $2 of value to put $1 in their pockets. Textbook example of economic broken windows.
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).
Noticed this with hire cars, we have 'school zones' that only operate within certain times (like 7am - 9am and 2pm - 4pm) and new cars pick up the 40 km/h from the sign but obviously aren't smart enough to read the times and realise it's not in effect, so the car thinks you're speeding by 20 km/h and you get all these beeps and bobs.
I also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!
Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!
I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!
> Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes!
Oh man, the incessant beeps are annoying, but speed limit monitoring in cruise control is hands-down the dumbest default "safety" feature on new cars. When that sort of thing happens on the highway, it feels legitimately dangerous, like any other kind of near-miss incident.
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.
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
2016-2017 seems peek car from a car owner/driving perspective. Before the beeps, bongs, giant screens started and button removal took over.
Currently driving a 2010 euro hot hatch, when that dies will be looking at a 2016-2017 vintage.
I watched a very interesting video over the weekend, the lost discipline of the alarm. It goes in to the research of alarms and alarm fatigue negative consequences.
Seems very relevant to the latest generation vehicles.
If I ever buy a “modern” car I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features. The only safety features I care about are traction control, abs, parking sensors and maybe blind spot mirrors. Blind spot mirrors are a double edged sword as it means people now stop doing shoulder checks relying on the blind spot mirror light only.
> I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features.
I wonder if this will remain possible. To kill my car's annoying beeps, all I had to do was cut some wires. That implies it was just an optional "feature" that they tacked on. What happens when they start deeply integrating this nonsense?
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.
I moved to Bulgaria last year, and while I love the country and its... rugged and quaint people, let me assure you, tarnishing their driver's reputation is impossible.
On an unrelated note, studying Bulgarian brought me a lot of joy.
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).
Similarly, I have a 2026 Civic: the driver attention doesn't have a camera and ships disabled. Lane departure warnings are toggleable in settings, and it sticks between starts. This is different from lane keeping assist, which is part of the adaptive cruise control and fully steers for you. (Both steering and speed and controlled from buttons on the wheel.)
Climate controls are fully physical controls, but realistically I just leave it on Auto, because it's the 21st century.
The hybrid drive train also makes it feel like an electric car, and it makes older vehicles look like a joke.
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.
I just took delivery on a new European made car (DS no 8) last week and it’s been great. The driver assist features are useful, automatic lane switching works perfectly, and the driver awareness nags are very modest.
I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me.
It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).
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 like 90s cars, but crash safety has come a long way since then. In my opinion late 2000s / early 2010s are the sweet spot between reliability, safety, and simplicity.
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 turning radius.
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 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 2008 a good cut-off? My 2016 BMW doesn't really have any annoying electronics or nannies compared to my 2005 model (other than electronic power steering :))
I drive a 2019 Passat, with lane assist, tempomat, road sign detection etc - it only beeps when there is no more washer fluid (but then it does beep every fcking 5 minutes - easily the most annoying feature of this car).
For speed-limits, I believe most of these new cars use multiple sources; so likely information found in the map at your location and cameras to spot signs. For some freak, unknown reason, the map-data is usually more trusted with the car vendors then the camera's it seems. Just don't rely on map-data for speed-limits and this would be a solved problem I think.
> 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.
Unless you're going to be staying within a small city with almost entirely short trips, you probably want a bigger and less primitive car from that era than a Beetle.
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!
And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.
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.
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.
Unless you have one of the very few cars that can even approach that speed[1], it sounds like some software "engineer" most certainly did not understand the meaning of "sanity checking".
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 fortunately doesn't set itself to it, but helpfully gives me a single-button way to set my cruise control to match).
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.
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 have a new Volkswagen and there's an annoying amount of arrogance behind the technology decisions in the vehicle that really sour the experience.
Perhaps the most annoying is that many notifications like "you can't do that while driving" are toast style notifications that disappear before you can notice or read them.
It has 360 degree cameras but it gets to decide when you can activate them. Want to know if you have enough room on the passenger side to go around a vehicle stopped in front of you without scratching up your tires? Too bad, the car doesn't detect a parking spot.
Wireless charger refuses to charge phone and puts up a notification saying it can't charge it any time you place your phone on it. There's a menu setting to disable the wireless charger, and that puts up a persistent notification telling you to re-enable wireless charging.
You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
You adjusted your volume, car readjusts it for you because reasons. You can see some of those reasons buried deep in the menu system, but not all of them. Car will adjust your volume again at a later date without your consent.
The car sends notifications about the status of the car but doesn't update or remove them when they're no longer true. I wake up most mornings to several "Your doors are unlocked" notifications but the doors are locked. Did they unlock? Why did they unlock? How long were they unlocked? Nobody knows...
Walk away car locking? Works 100% of the time when get out of the car at home and walk two feet away from the car. Fails to work the first time you park it downtown and someone rifles through your car and steals your charging adapter.
You got home and are unloading groceries from the trunk, the car is going to honk at you that the trunk is ajar before you can even get inside the house. You'll receive alerts on your phone that the trunk is open as well.
Car honks any time a door is left open or the car isn't locked even if you're standing less than 2 feet from the car holding the key.
You have a charge schedule setup so your car only charges during off-peak times. Want to charge at a pay-charger or outside of that schedule? Sure, just click the button on screen which permanently disables the charge schedule and requires to you go deep into menus to re-enable it.
Similar situation with State of Charge limits. Want to charge to 100% for a road trip? Sure that's the new permanent setting, and we're going to remind you it's bad to charge to 100% all the time.
Tesla gets dumped for so much, but their software is so well tuned compared to this garbage.
I rented a Volkswagen a few months ago and yep, that checks out.
Also it was the first time in my life I had to search online how to reset a car entertainment system, because the screen suddenly didn’t work anymore.
A friend of mine bought a new VW a few years ago. He was so excited about that app it came with alerting him about unlocked doors, open trunk, open window, etc. Well, 100% false alert rate.
> You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.
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.
I was driving my mom's brand new Mercedes suv on a family road trip (for perspective I have a 2006 diesel van with 300k+ miles on it). Absolutely hated the thing. The worst was I was causing on the highway atb74mph and that auto adjust crap slowed ke down to 30mph! On the highway! Not sure if it was a service bug or what but kinda terrifying.
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.
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.
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 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.
The "steering assist" feature in new cars is terrifying, and has almost severely injured or killed me once.
When my car was last receiving service, I was given a loaner vehicle with this new feature. I was driving home in the rain, and an aggressive driver passed me very closely, triggering the collision avoidance system - this forced the steering wheel to turn away from the car, made the car hydroplane and nearly flung me into a ditch at 55MPH. I had to force back against the steering and creatively spin my vehicle against the turn.
I have a 2016 Beetle and a 2014 Mini Countryman and neither have these stupid features, thankfully! Keeping them for as long as I possibly can! In fact, my Beetle doesn't properly support Android Auto so I can't ever plug my phone into it (and the Mini only does bluetooth audio + playlists/song info for my wife's iphone integration), and my Beetle has a button on the steering wheel that I have to pay VW to use (no thanks). So I can concentrate on driving.
I also have a 1972 Beetle which has zero infotainment nonsense to distract me (the engine is deafening anyway), where you actually concentrate on driving.
It seems all this modern nonsense to warn drivers is because they've stuffed the car cockpit with all manner of distractions and giant screens, or non-tactile interfaces that you have to look at instead of feeling, thereby reducing concentration on actually driving. Rather than making new methods to ensure someone is concentrating, just reduce the amount of screens in the cockpit! My sister-in-law's Tesla is horrendous. She can't easily change the temperature whilst driving. There's a reason the space shuttle and airplanes have actual switches to change settings...
Keeping these cars for as long as I possibly can. I went around Iceland in a Fiat van (a "camper", tiny thing to sleep in) and the week was ruined with the incessant beeping of the car as it moved from speed limit to speed limit. I know the speed limits were changing because there were signs in the road, but instead I had to constantly look at the dashboard to try to find out why the stupid thing was beeping, which I presume was the same tone as any other error, thereby masking any real problem. Absolute garbage.
Incidentally, the Fiat also had that annoying "lane assist" feature which wobbles the steering wheel but it did it all the time when there were no lanes (unpaved roads etc) and it felt IDENTICAL to the car skidding to my "untrained"/"used-to-a-proper-car" hands, since the motion of the steering wheel versus car direction didn't match for a split second, and there was no real connection to the rack/pinion steering mechanism. I felt like a passenger even as the driver. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.
Not just beeping. I had a rental Nissan recently violently pull me straight off the road when it couldn't read the lines very well in a thick fog. Apparently you can disable that deep in some settings menu through some magic button presses divorced from the main settings menus, but it was frightening. For most manufacturers, almost none of this tech is good enough to even make optional and non-default, much less legislatively mandated, and that supposes I trust you not to sell my daily mood or whatever bullshit to data brokers.
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.
I dread ending up with a modern car though I know it's inevitable for me some day, exactly for these kinds of things that I know will infuriate me. All I can hope for I guess is that people will find ways of bypassing some of them
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 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.
In Europe semi-truck trailers have stickers on them representing their speed limit. Those speed limits differ by country, so quite often you see a truck with 60,70,80 and 90 sticks on it.
So then you're driving in Germany at 200km/h and the camera picks up the 90km/h and brakes aggressively.
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.
I was looking for a car recently for a 3 month visit in Europe. 2008 is the bottom of the barrel at this point. Basically deciding between scraping and trying to make few more years out of it.
They are trying to make it as unpleasant to drive as possible, and I don't really blame them - cars are a big factor in climate change, smog, etc. I gave up driving in the 90's because it was pretty obvious even back then.
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).
Nah. It's giving votes to whatever politician promises to put certain regulatory regimes out to pasture. You may find that you like some of their other policies far, far less than "seeks to restrain creeping safetyism".
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.
> 2.3.1. The ADDW system shall function without relying on biometric personal data of any vehicle occupants. In this context, the biometric personal data is resulting from specific technical processing relating to the physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of a natural person, which allow or confirm the unique identification of that natural person, such as facial images or dactyloscopic data. This requirement does not forbid the ADDW system to use data from the camera(s) equipped in the vehicle, it forbids the identification of the person by the ADDW system.
> 2.3.2. The ADDW system shall be designed in such a way that it shall only continuously record and retain data necessary for the system to function and operate within a closed-loop system.
> 2.3.3. Any processing of personal data shall be carried out in accordance with Union data protection law.
This doesn't appear to ban identification of the user by, say, the Advanced Driver Distraction Reporting System, which is triggered by and utilizes the same data streams as the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System.
The text you linked mandates, as the first technical requirement, "An ADDW system shall determine when the driver’s visual attention is not directed towards the driving tasks and alert the driver through the vehicle human–machine interface."
Can you describe how you believe the driver's visual attention can be tracked by anything other than a camera pointed at the driver's face?
If no such other system exists, how is this doing anything other than mandating cameras pointed at the driver?
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.
> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.
You might as well stick to horses. What is so specific about eighteen years ago (2026 - 2008 ~= 18)? Does that mean that you will never drive an electric car?
A camera pointed at people’s face is going to have some insanely positive effects targeting one of the absolute biggest problems on the road though.
On my daily commute about 50% of drivers are on their phones at 90 km/h, would be great if their cars were beeping at them since no one else is going to do anything about it.
I find this especially great since one of them rear ended me earlier this year and practically admitted he was fiddling with his phone at the time
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?
My parents’ ‘80s Chrysler New Yorker would talk instead of beep. ‘A door is ajar,” it would say, and we would giggle, ‘no, a door is a door!’ After Kitt in Nightrider, car companies wanted to be cool.
> But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Can't speak to all vehicles, but my VW ID3 clearly indicates what the issue is on the dashboard.
So if it's the lane-keeping assist it highlights which lane(s) it is monitoring and it provides a written prompt on screen (e.g. "drive in the centre of the lane") if it's not happy.
If the speed limiter is on it shows the current signed speed limit in the dashboard and it flashes that speed limit if I am driving over the speed limit.
If the car believes I am not concentrating on the road and instead interacting too much with the touch-screen it puts a large warning in the middle of the touchscreen to pay attention to the road and prevents me using the infotainment system for a few second.
I'd be surprised if most other modern/new cars didn't also include instrument display feedback like this alongside audible warnings.
You’d be surprised. A family member bought a 2025 utilitarian car (Dacia). It’s the one on the newer platform (Clio 6) so they can implement all the beeping mandated by law.
The car beeps exactly the same way whatever the reason so you can’t tell why. It even beeps when it thinks the speed limit has changed (up or down)… it’s infuriating to drive this car, there is a beep about something every minute or two. You can’t even tell what it’s beeping about.
Luckily there is a shortcut button near the dash that you can press to disable all these idiotic beeps. You have to do it every time you restart the car. It does make it feel like all these beeps are pointless since you can’t tell what they’re about and press the button to disable them all as soon as you start the car anyway…
Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
Class D amplifiers use that same trick, just at much higher switching frequencies (pushing quantization noise ultrasonic, where it can be filtered). Since transistors are most efficient when fully on/off, very little power is wasted as heat. That's what made the modern revolution in tiny amps possible.
Wow that’s like such an obvious thing that makes so much sense. I have no doubt something like “Hands on, Hands on, Hands on” will start chirping in near future
> 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.
Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
I don't want tunes. I want a voice. It is not any harder to learn 3 Japanese words than 3 random tunes. You don't have to learn Japanese. It's 3 words.
It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.
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.
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 silly at naming. Reminds me of how Microsoft names anything.
My Y has the stalk, but the touchscreen gear selection is no issue. (Ignoring the fact that I rarely manually drive the car) I only touch the screen to put it in gear once, maybe twice on a drive, and I'm stopped in any case.
Add in the fact that car will automatically put the car in the right "gear" 80% of the time based on environment (curbs, walls, etc.), it's even less important how the gear selected. Getting into other cars, I'm struck by how much space in the center console is wasted by this vestige of an actual manual gear shifter. Also the silly paddles on the steering wheel.
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.
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.
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.
I hate that my 2020 Ioniq EV takes decisions for me, and just overall pretends to know better. I've turned off all the gadgets I could find (lane assist etc, I hate the feeling of the steering wheel wanting to move by itself) but some remain. Some examples: (1) I want to move my car a couple of feet in the driveway, but it won't let me without my seat belt on. (2) Sometimes, even after just a few minutes, it'll replace the whole main display (speedometer etc) with an image of a cup of coffee and tells me to take a break (3) It won't do cruise control under 30 km/h (which is ok I guess), but instead of refusing to enable cruise control under 30 km/h, it will set the speed to 30 and accelerate. (4) And the most annoying (but maybe not in the same category) : when I'm braking, and drive over a bump, it'll temporarily disable regen (ABS related?), causing a sudden loss in applied braking power. This was very scary at first, but now that I know, I scan the road for bumps when slowing down.
All that said though, my wife's 2 year old Ioniq 5 is way worse with the gadgets and seems to be always beeping for everything.
In other news, I test drove a Volvo 240 yesterday and am picking it up later this week.
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 have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.
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.
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.
My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
> 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.
I think I'd consider this kind of technology at the intersection of personal freedom and _public_ safety. Drunk or distracted driving puts others at risk, not just you.
There is no limit to how much paternalism most people will accept. Therefore, we're bound to lose all of our personal freedom eventually, "for your protection."
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.
The truck I was driving had physical buttons for all the climate control functions, and for volume/on-off too. It wouldn't have been surprising to me if I was distracted fiddling with the screen, but it would give me the alert because I was playing with the buttons for an extended period of time.
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.
> 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.
Thank you! I often feel like I’m in the minority on this site, it is nice to hear someone else articulate my feelings. Driving is a privilege not a right. But since America decided to decimate public transit in the early 20th century (and stick with it) we’re stuck with cars. So I’m in favor of anything that makes it safer. Hopefully this crosses the pond.
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.
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.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
It’s also totally plausible that insurance companies will use this data to try and find every single tiny, irrelevant detail to not pay you. Sorry, you blinked before crashing into this other car, we won’t pay for that.
Law enforcement could also use that data to create a nice profile of yourself and how “distracted” you are while driving, and maybe suspend your license forever, why not? And wait till you find how unreliable these sensors are.
Just another surveillance tool in disguise, this is what the EU does best.
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 :)
I rented a car that had this feature and instantly hated it. I forget the make, but if it detected you were not looking at the road for a period of time, it would slam on the brakes and release. A way to jolt you awake.
The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.
I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.
FWIW, the only time I ever had emergency brakes kick in are in spurious situations, like tight maneuvers or there is something ahead with plenty of headway to decide whether you should brake or not. A cyclist moved close to the traffic light fast and the car completely stopped. This one was a bit more dangerous because had there been someone behind, that driver would not have expected such an abrupt stop.
>so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more
Every time it happens, it hurts as I'm not prepared for it.
Lane assist is also particularly bad as it handles some slight curves incorrectly, so it resists your driving. As a result with such cars I have my arms muscles tense up in anticipation of some turns.
Theres already 3d models of heads you can print and attach to the rearview mirror to trick the ssensor! At least for the Teslas with Autopilot, but I can imagine it working just as well with other cars.
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).
I hired a Chinese Haval Car for a weekend last year (Australia). It started beeping at me for being distracted because I was checking for traffic in the other lanes - which is crucial when driving in a 4 lane highway.
Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.
Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.
Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.
It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.
After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.
> The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
That is definitely not the point of a turning signal. The car that's already in the lane has right of way and it's your responsibility not to plow into them. If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
If you can't see the car in your blindspot when changing lanes, you're not doing a proper shoulder check, hence the blindspot warning.
The one time I rented a car with this feature, it claimed there was a car in my blind spot when there was none. It seemed to be reacting to a car that I had already determined was clear of my path.
> would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
> Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
"a turn signal is not a question, it is a statement"
If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.
Disagree. The purpose of the indicator is to signal your intention to others. Indicate first, then shoulder check. If you then discover a car in your blind spot, abort the manoeuvre if necessary or slow down to let them pass you first.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
We were just in Sicily for vacation and got a new BYD for rent. At first I was excited, coming from US I never tried a Chinese car and wanted to check it out. Excitement was quickly replaced with annoyance, that thing would beep for every damn reason. "keep eyes on road", "you are tired, consider taking a break", etc. Then all the damn safety features that a couple of times almost caused me to slam into another car. After a couple of days, I blocked the camera monitoring me and then would spend the first minute after getting in the car turning off all these "helpers", luckily most of them I could still disable. Camera couldn't be disabled in settings but just covering it up worked well. I thought about getting scotch tape but never got around to it.
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?
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).
forcing citizens to buy goods which are adversarial to them with their own money is rarely a good idea.
paradoxically, citizens expect the government to be adversarial towards them in big things (see America) but it's the 'little' things which breed true contempt.
sooner or later something will happen which will test the revealed preference of the population and everyone will suddenly discover that contempt is all that's left.
Yes. Absolutely yes. And I think this is why people vote for things like brexit, or really-obviously-bad-politicians. This is the only way in which they can pay back the many things the reasonable, progressive governments "gave" them. Stupid beeps included. I swear to god, I hate right wing populists, but I'd at least be inclined to vote for a party that promised to fight back those stupid systems.
More than once did my lane assistant try to run me into the barrier in a construction zone.
You can turn it off, however its on again after on the next start...
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
Same, I have one bend near my home on which my car always pulls my steering wheel into a certain direction even though I'm perfectly driving in the middle. These "safety" systems are anything but safe, and very frustrating.
Once on a rental car brake assist decided I'm about to hit something on a kerb in a curve on a wet highway. I was using maybe 50% tire grip to corner and sudden braking took it over 100%. 1/10 would not recommend.
Sure this sort of systems might reduce overall death toll by addressing worst suspects like drunk or distracted drivers but I'm pretty sure they makes it worse for diligent ones.
Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments.
More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
On the other hand, as someone living in a city with good public transit, I think cars should be regulated more. Cars make living in such a city a worse experience. They are loud and produce pollution (including EVs).
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
but also:
"ADDW systems use cameras and sensors to track a driver’s head position, eye movements, and gaze direction"
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
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
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.
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.
To be clear, this will also happen in the USA. The destruction of privacy is perhaps the only issue with full throated support across the political spectrum.
>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.
All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light).
Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
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.
These features suck on the few American cars I have seen them. In Florida using a rental driving to Orlando area my vehicle constantly told me to get my eye’s back on the road or to take a driving break. I was on a highway driving completely normal. Just annoying dashboard warnings over and over.
The only feature I like so far is the slight shake of the wheel if crossing over a lane.
Either this tech is janky/new or is just honestly not needed and distracting.
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.
Mazda managed to avoid the touch screen plague until relatively recently. Their latest models seem to have adopted Android based infotainment with touchscreens though. I've got a CX-5 that's 3 years old and it's pleasingly touch screen free. Also the driver aids are mild and unintrusive.
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.
I rented a car last weekend that had something similar to this and it didn’t work when I was wearing sunglasses. As soon as I put them on it said on the dashboard that I needed to take the sensor to service it or something along those lines.
Tangential, but I’ve never seen so many people fiddling with their phones while driving as I did in the US. It was pretty worrying.
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.
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.
It varies so much by brand, too. Some brands are too aggressive and end up ping-ponging you in the lane if you let them, and then there's my new Mazda where it doesn't seem to work in any case where I want it to work, but will fight me as hard as it can if I try to take a highway exit.
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.
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 find my Nissan Leaf similar. The A-pillars are so thick to keep me safe but I can't see pedestrians very well. So now I have to move my head around like a party parrot. Then the regen brake sort of has a dead spot where I feel pressure on my foot but it doesn't actually brake making it hard to stop quickly and smoothly. On a purely hydraulic brake what you feel is what you get. Then the camera doesn't see people as well as it sees bigger cars. I've nearly hit some people because of these factors.
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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 you read that article and check the latest status, the NHTSA was supposed to make a rule by 2024 and it's 2026 now. [1]
In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2]
I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule."
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'm 21 years old, I'm driving a 2010 car with the intention to keep driving it for at least another few years (well over 200,000km).
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though.
I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
The only time our 2025 Kia warned me about being distracted was about 30 minutes into a highway drive in Europe during heavy snowfall. The roads were covered in snow, people were generally cautious but traffic was still flowing and I was checking mirrors more frequently than usually to make sure lanes around me were clear and I was aware of everything going on. I guess staring straight ahead without situational awareness is the way the car prefers. :|
Cars are becoming shittier in Europe, dumb regulations and people building cars are clearly NOT driving them.
My wife got a new Volvo recently:
1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?
2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.
3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.
4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.
Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.
It is fascinating that you look at design choices that Chinese Volvo copied from American Tesla (except for the speed limit) and declare that European cars are the problem.
Because Europe is basically what drives laws here in France for driving, I would expect them to do what's best for the drivers and clearly they are not.
They should not allow car Manufacturers to sell cars when:
- There's no physical knob to open it
- The only place to read critical information like speed is a tablet on the side
- The speed limit is a constant beep unless you disable it AT EVERY START by touching a screen on the side (their law basically)
I love phone as a key. It's an optional thing on my car, you can still carry around a physical key fob if that's your jam. But outside of a long road trip I don't normally care to keep a key fob with me. It's just another piece of junk to have to have on me when I'm out and about. It's really nice having one fewer things in my pocket while I'm out and about.
The experience isn't as you list here though. It behaves pretty much exactly the same as a key fob. I just walk up to the car and it's unlocked, I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket or open any apps specifically or press any buttons on the phone.
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.
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.
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.
Camera at your face should fix what exactly? It certainly does not fix allowance to use touch screens in car, so what the hell? Can we go back to 2010 and use the technology called buttons?
It boggles my mind that some people are more concerned how much fun driving a car is supposed to be vs 60 people dying in the EU in car accidents every day.
If 60 people died because an airplane falls of the sky every day we wouldn't shrugg that off either, wouldn't we?
And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.
What you're doing now is taking a reasonable standard when going 200 on the autobahn and applying it everywhere else. And you don't see any problem with this because... think of the kids?
That's not how you optimize an important metric. At all. You look a how exactly those 60 people die and make targeted interventions with numbers backing them up. Otherwise best case you're doing security theatre, and most likely fuck things up with second order effects. Like things beeping all the time and distracting people - I already can't tell why my car is beeping at me.
the optimal crime rate is non zero and the same goes for traffic death rate, because to bring them to zero would imply a dystopia where personal freedom is seriously limited
> And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.
But according to the article it will ping when you glance at the scenery at 20 kph. If a system is annoying it will be a bigger distraction and source of frustration than what it's supposed to prevent, and people will find ways to turn it off.
Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.
As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.
Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.
And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?
I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.
The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.
Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.
I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.
Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.
Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.
There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)
As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.
Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.
I like a fair bit of what the EU does, and in the past they've been behind some significant advances in vehicle safety, but boy do I hate most of what's coming out of there lately as far as driving . All these driver "assistance" features that arguably do more harm than good for competent drivers and are forced to be enabled by default on every drive. And now this. Bleh.
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.
not saying what the EU does is a good thing but why don't I ever see any legislations like this from the US? we'd still have lightning on iPhones if it wasn't for the EU so some of what they introduce is net positive...
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.
Meanwhile in Germany I see, quite literally, 12 traffic signs on a 100m stretch of road. I'm pretty sure that looking at all those signs adds up to a few seconds at least.
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.
The interesting part of this mostly bullshit is how it exposes a kind of reverse Goodhart's law scenario. When driving becomes less about attention to surroundings and focusing on driving and more about keeping the trivial beepers off, it changes the way people drive.
First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.
Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?
Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.
Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.
A little conflicted on this one.
I firmly believe there is too much distracted driving going on right now.
And yet, I find driving a modern car a hugely distracting experience.
On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.
I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.
Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.
I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.
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 read a paper a while ago (which I have failed to locate) which used around binary masks, each in front of a single photodiode, as input to a neural network, which estimated the number of people in front of this effectively ~9-pixel "camera". The binary masks and NN weights were trained at the same time. Presumably, something like this could be used to detect lack of driver focus in a far less invasive manner.
> Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.[1]
Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
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.
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.
I have the same sentiment. Who assures me this video isn't sent to the manufacturer for "quality control" reasons? Can it be used in court in case of an accident? Will my insurance ask access to monitor my driving? Can it be used for detecting phone use?
Therefore, these cameras get a sticker, or a small printout of my head, looking alert, put in front of the camera. These systems only cause extra distraction, they do not reduce it - it feels like having a constant driving exam.
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.
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".
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.
I don't know about other countries, but public transport buses in Australia don't have seat belts on them. Even as a kid, I remember wondering why there was such a fuss made around seat belts in cars when you couldn't use one if you wanted to on the bus.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
Buses in America don't have seatbelts either. They're just so big and heavy relatively to cars that you're very unlikely to be seriously injured. (It does happen of course, and that usually makes the news.)
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.
According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted.
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
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.
As a European: Absolutely not. Never, will not comply, will do everything in my hacking power to not be subjected to this.
This is invasive, the others like Lane "assist" is just outright dangerous. Yanking my steering wheel while I'm driving? WTF? The lines on the road, in many EU cities, are mere suggestions. Especially during road works. I've had two times where I almost killed the bicyclist because the STUPID KIA SPORTAGE thought it knew better.
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.
There's considerable cynicism in these comments and I have to suspect a puritan bent in most of them. No, no one is watching you. No, these cameras are not here to catch you doing bad things.
The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.
Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
> I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since?
It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
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.
It's completely idiotic. Technology should be assisting in performing the attention itself, not nannying the driver.
Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
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.
> 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.
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.
ouf yeah, I agree. I had a lot more to say about this but the ICE checkpoint found my smuggled kinder egg and now they're sending me off to alligator alcatraz.
It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
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?
Who knew that my decision to not own a car would turn out to be so prescient. That I can still be killed by a driver distracted by the anti-distraction feature is just the usual irony of existence.
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."
Given an (admittedly) optimistic future forecast for remote assessment of parameters related to driver blood chemistry and physiology - will this then be an inevitable further add-on legal requirement for human-driven transport?
In many EU jurisdictions (like Germany) continuously recording dashcams are banned. Mandating a potentially continuously recording camera pointed at you at the same time is ridiculous.
Note that they must be sold with this feature. It does not say you have to keep this feature, you can aftermarket remove it or disconnect it just fine.
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.
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.
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.
It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it.
And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.
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...
Orwellian. What an absolute nightmare of government control. Advancing technology is giving too much power to the government, do not let them have it or you will never get your rights back.
i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more.
-its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone
-its a good security feature
-the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more.
-in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.
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.
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
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.
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.
Repeated nuisance alarms have the same effect on all humans, not just on pilots - it trains them to ignore the alarms. Eventually this will lead to non-nuisance alarms being ignored and lives being lost.
Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons:
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
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.
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.
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.
For all the people complaining about driver distraction alerts… have you considered that perhaps you were in fact distracted? Looking at a passenger to talk instead of at the road, etc?
It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.
I sometimes wonder how these systems are being tested on the road and whether there's any feedback from the test drivers, or what kind of morons are there saying "this is completely fine, exactly like intended" when they read the feedback...
My car has adaptive cruise control and will automatically adjust speed based on speed limit signs. I was on a highway at 130km/h and the car read a 60km/h speed limit sign that was on an exit shoulder (already separated by a concrete barrier from the highway, so technically a different road altogether) and started breaking really fast - I was pretty close from getting tailgated by the driver behind me, who did not (rightfully) expect me to suddenly start breaking with nothing in front of me. Luckily this can be permanently turned off, so I can continue using cruise control without being afraid of every single speed limit sign.
Recently I had rented a Skoda Karoq (very new one, probably 2024/2025) which adjusted the cruise control speed not even based on signs, but probably based on data from built-in maps? I don't know - but it would randomly decide that I entered a 20km/h zone while driving on a 90km/h road. And this couldn't be turned off. So I just turned off cruise control completely, because wtf, how can anyone think this is improving road safety?
Edit: typo
My car (from VW Group) came with Active Lane Keep. It detects when you're drifting out of your lane and steers you back into it. Sounds great in theory.
Except that in the US, if you're cruising in the right lane then every time there's an exit it will actively steer you towards the concrete median between the lane and the exit. I don't understand how this feature was signed off on. The risks outweigh the benefits, in my opinion.
I drive a Volkswagen ID3 and it has the same issue. It's baffling. There are certain roads that trip it up for me and make it slam on the brakes: the A2 in Greenwich (a 50mph road in London UK) it'll suddenly think it's now 30mph, and on the M6 Northbound (70mph road in Birmingham, UK) it drops to 50mph. As far as I can see, there are no signs anywhere that the camera can misread.
On one occasion it thought the limit had changed to 100mph, which isn't even a defined speed limit in the UK.
Glad I have slightly older car where 'adaptive cruise control' means keeping distance from car in front of me. Nothing more.
Sometimes I watch some reviews of newer cars, and numbers of beeping, comms on central screen, etc is just… overwhelming me. Watching video. Cannot imagine driving in that conditions.
I'm happy I wasn't able to activate cruise control in the Karoq that I rented some time ago. VAG interfaces were always confusing to me and this behaviour would be more so.
I see signs recognized like that all the time, so use satnav as my reference. Unfortunately if it's not up to date (mine hasn't been for years now), it will suggest speeds which have nothing to do with reality.
I wonder if I should install a popup 30 sign on a rear window for tailgaters in the future.
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i have a bmw that read the road signs and then it prompts you if you'd like to readjust your adaptive cruise control to the new speed. Much better system than in VW cars.
I have a Korean SUV in the US, and I am rarely bothered by the attention alert. When I am, I’m very clearly not paying attention, and reminded gently to stop being a fool and pay attention! I like the implementation in my vehicle.
All new cars.
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.
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.
> 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.
A lot of these features seem to assume that you're driving on a multi-lane motorway with well-marked lanes. I'm constantly being nudged by my ID.3 one way or another on rural roads. You can turn it off, but it turns itself back on the next time you unlock the car.
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> 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.
It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".
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Do you know if the law prevents you from modifying the car to disable these devices? Caveat to anyone considering this: Modifying could be used against you in a liability case. Additionally if your insurance contract has some stipulation about not removing these safety "features" and they find out, I would think you could be dropped.
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What happens if you bypass these systems? Does it have a separate speaker or does it use the infotainment?
If the former, you can bypass it electronically. If the latter, I'm sure you can mess with the software of the multimedia head unit to silence the chimes.
Will your car fail inspection if you do this?
That sounds like one of those situations where you just keep turning up the radio until the beeping goes away
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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.
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I wonder if these things are designed by people who do not drive. So they just implement to spec without thinking through whether the change produces the desired impact.
Can't you just snip/disconnect the speaker/bell wire? I did this back when I had a truck and often had to maneuver with open doors (at very slow speeds) - the "door open warning bell" was so annoying that I just pulled its wires.
AFAIK the warning tones don't come from the car's stereo speakers but have its own speaker.
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We did an 8 hour ride on a rental recently in Central Europe, mostly through major motorways. The car dashboard disagreed with (apple) maps which disagreed with the road signage so often. The beeping was infuriating.
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Imagine driving thru night with kids sleeping and suddenly car starts beeping.
Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?
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> 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.
Where do you live?
In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways).
This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.
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> 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 rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating!
No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone.
I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey.
I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
I gave up and just ignore all the blips. It also sometimes invents speed limit signs.
ngl i think people should just read their car's manual
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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.
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EU driving assists are obtrusive to the point of making driving less safe in my experience. Great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-S76WEl25k
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.
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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.
> to the point of making driving less safe...
But they make it less safe in a hard to measure poorly defined way whereas they make it safer in a measured easy to take credit for way.
The safety industry (or whoever, not really sure exactly who's benefitting here) destroying $2 of value to put $1 in their pockets. Textbook example of economic broken windows.
How many bells would sound if SUNGLASSES hid your eyes?!
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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).
Noticed this with hire cars, we have 'school zones' that only operate within certain times (like 7am - 9am and 2pm - 4pm) and new cars pick up the 40 km/h from the sign but obviously aren't smart enough to read the times and realise it's not in effect, so the car thinks you're speeding by 20 km/h and you get all these beeps and bobs.
I also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!
Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!
I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!
1. https://www.austockphoto.com.au/image/40-when-lights-flash-s...
> Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes!
Oh man, the incessant beeps are annoying, but speed limit monitoring in cruise control is hands-down the dumbest default "safety" feature on new cars. When that sort of thing happens on the highway, it feels legitimately dangerous, like any other kind of near-miss incident.
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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.
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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.
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The emissions tests only test to the level that the car was first registered (or produced) doesn't it?
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Nah you pay a guy and you get your inspection sticker. This has always been the way.
Cash for Clunkers was not mandatory
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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 wish I had fixed the Honda!
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
Are you talking about an old Honda or some issue with new Hondas?
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2016-2017 seems peek car from a car owner/driving perspective. Before the beeps, bongs, giant screens started and button removal took over.
Currently driving a 2010 euro hot hatch, when that dies will be looking at a 2016-2017 vintage.
I watched a very interesting video over the weekend, the lost discipline of the alarm. It goes in to the research of alarms and alarm fatigue negative consequences.
Seems very relevant to the latest generation vehicles.
https://youtu.be/Ira28fgSF7M?si=-GrsTTGemLY1LwLw
If I ever buy a “modern” car I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features. The only safety features I care about are traction control, abs, parking sensors and maybe blind spot mirrors. Blind spot mirrors are a double edged sword as it means people now stop doing shoulder checks relying on the blind spot mirror light only.
> I’ll pull the fuse for all the annoying beeps and bongs and safety features.
I wonder if this will remain possible. To kill my car's annoying beeps, all I had to do was cut some wires. That implies it was just an optional "feature" that they tacked on. What happens when they start deeply integrating this nonsense?
> Then there's the incessant beeping at you
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.
I moved to Bulgaria last year, and while I love the country and its... rugged and quaint people, let me assure you, tarnishing their driver's reputation is impossible.
On an unrelated note, studying Bulgarian brought me a lot of joy.
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).
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Similarly, I have a 2026 Civic: the driver attention doesn't have a camera and ships disabled. Lane departure warnings are toggleable in settings, and it sticks between starts. This is different from lane keeping assist, which is part of the adaptive cruise control and fully steers for you. (Both steering and speed and controlled from buttons on the wheel.)
Climate controls are fully physical controls, but realistically I just leave it on Auto, because it's the 21st century.
The hybrid drive train also makes it feel like an electric car, and it makes older vehicles look like a joke.
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.
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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.
I just took delivery on a new European made car (DS no 8) last week and it’s been great. The driver assist features are useful, automatic lane switching works perfectly, and the driver awareness nags are very modest.
I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me.
It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).
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).
(It's a double-press, which I think of as one action but I guess it's technically two button presses, because I believe the EU mandates that)
Same here.
I drive a 1991 Honda Prelude and I don't think I'll want to drive anything else probably ever.
I like 90s cars, but crash safety has come a long way since then. In my opinion late 2000s / early 2010s are the sweet spot between reliability, safety, and simplicity.
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93 Honda Civic here. 100% agree. I don't appreciate anything on a car that does stuff on its own without my direct input.
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 turning radius.
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.
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My 2016 corolla is very low-tech, but new enough to have Bluetooth and a backup camera, so everything i want. With any luck it'll outlive me.
>2008
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 2008 a good cut-off? My 2016 BMW doesn't really have any annoying electronics or nannies compared to my 2005 model (other than electronic power steering :))
I drive a 2019 Passat, with lane assist, tempomat, road sign detection etc - it only beeps when there is no more washer fluid (but then it does beep every fcking 5 minutes - easily the most annoying feature of this car).
For speed-limits, I believe most of these new cars use multiple sources; so likely information found in the map at your location and cameras to spot signs. For some freak, unknown reason, the map-data is usually more trusted with the car vendors then the camera's it seems. Just don't rely on map-data for speed-limits and this would be a solved problem I think.
> 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.
Unless you're going to be staying within a small city with almost entirely short trips, you probably want a bigger and less primitive car from that era than a Beetle.
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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!
And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.
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.
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.
Unless you have one of the very few cars that can even approach that speed[1], it sounds like some software "engineer" most certainly did not understand the meaning of "sanity checking".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_production_car_speed_r...
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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 fortunately doesn't set itself to it, but helpfully gives me a single-button way to set my cruise control to match).
>>The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit
is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?
It's one of the travel assist features where the cars try to stick to the changing speed limits, slow down for corners etc... .
The intrusiveness of these systems varies significantly between manufacturers. Don't buy one with an annoying, intrusive system.
There is a minimum intrusiveness required by law, though. One could even say it's intrusive by design, depending on your perspective
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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.
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> 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.
Ah, did your car pick up the speed limit sign on the French auto-route for… motorcycles filtering between lanes too?
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
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> looking at you, Volkswagen
I have a new Volkswagen and there's an annoying amount of arrogance behind the technology decisions in the vehicle that really sour the experience.
Perhaps the most annoying is that many notifications like "you can't do that while driving" are toast style notifications that disappear before you can notice or read them.
It has 360 degree cameras but it gets to decide when you can activate them. Want to know if you have enough room on the passenger side to go around a vehicle stopped in front of you without scratching up your tires? Too bad, the car doesn't detect a parking spot.
Wireless charger refuses to charge phone and puts up a notification saying it can't charge it any time you place your phone on it. There's a menu setting to disable the wireless charger, and that puts up a persistent notification telling you to re-enable wireless charging.
You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
You adjusted your volume, car readjusts it for you because reasons. You can see some of those reasons buried deep in the menu system, but not all of them. Car will adjust your volume again at a later date without your consent.
The car sends notifications about the status of the car but doesn't update or remove them when they're no longer true. I wake up most mornings to several "Your doors are unlocked" notifications but the doors are locked. Did they unlock? Why did they unlock? How long were they unlocked? Nobody knows...
Walk away car locking? Works 100% of the time when get out of the car at home and walk two feet away from the car. Fails to work the first time you park it downtown and someone rifles through your car and steals your charging adapter.
You got home and are unloading groceries from the trunk, the car is going to honk at you that the trunk is ajar before you can even get inside the house. You'll receive alerts on your phone that the trunk is open as well.
Car honks any time a door is left open or the car isn't locked even if you're standing less than 2 feet from the car holding the key.
You have a charge schedule setup so your car only charges during off-peak times. Want to charge at a pay-charger or outside of that schedule? Sure, just click the button on screen which permanently disables the charge schedule and requires to you go deep into menus to re-enable it.
Similar situation with State of Charge limits. Want to charge to 100% for a road trip? Sure that's the new permanent setting, and we're going to remind you it's bad to charge to 100% all the time.
Tesla gets dumped for so much, but their software is so well tuned compared to this garbage.
I rented a Volkswagen a few months ago and yep, that checks out.
Also it was the first time in my life I had to search online how to reset a car entertainment system, because the screen suddenly didn’t work anymore.
A friend of mine bought a new VW a few years ago. He was so excited about that app it came with alerting him about unlocked doors, open trunk, open window, etc. Well, 100% false alert rate.
> You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.
I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.
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.
I was driving my mom's brand new Mercedes suv on a family road trip (for perspective I have a 2006 diesel van with 300k+ miles on it). Absolutely hated the thing. The worst was I was causing on the highway atb74mph and that auto adjust crap slowed ke down to 30mph! On the highway! Not sure if it was a service bug or what but kinda terrifying.
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?
> on a curve
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.
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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.
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> I find them very annoying
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?
Legislation isn't for your personal benefit, silly. It's for the corporations.
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> 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
I would assume all such cars have an option to turn this off.
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.
That sounds like the kind of feature where there's a setting buried in the menus for it.
The "steering assist" feature in new cars is terrifying, and has almost severely injured or killed me once.
When my car was last receiving service, I was given a loaner vehicle with this new feature. I was driving home in the rain, and an aggressive driver passed me very closely, triggering the collision avoidance system - this forced the steering wheel to turn away from the car, made the car hydroplane and nearly flung me into a ditch at 55MPH. I had to force back against the steering and creatively spin my vehicle against the turn.
I have a highway 98 near me. My car reads it as a speed limit.
I have a 2016 Beetle and a 2014 Mini Countryman and neither have these stupid features, thankfully! Keeping them for as long as I possibly can! In fact, my Beetle doesn't properly support Android Auto so I can't ever plug my phone into it (and the Mini only does bluetooth audio + playlists/song info for my wife's iphone integration), and my Beetle has a button on the steering wheel that I have to pay VW to use (no thanks). So I can concentrate on driving.
I also have a 1972 Beetle which has zero infotainment nonsense to distract me (the engine is deafening anyway), where you actually concentrate on driving.
It seems all this modern nonsense to warn drivers is because they've stuffed the car cockpit with all manner of distractions and giant screens, or non-tactile interfaces that you have to look at instead of feeling, thereby reducing concentration on actually driving. Rather than making new methods to ensure someone is concentrating, just reduce the amount of screens in the cockpit! My sister-in-law's Tesla is horrendous. She can't easily change the temperature whilst driving. There's a reason the space shuttle and airplanes have actual switches to change settings...
Keeping these cars for as long as I possibly can. I went around Iceland in a Fiat van (a "camper", tiny thing to sleep in) and the week was ruined with the incessant beeping of the car as it moved from speed limit to speed limit. I know the speed limits were changing because there were signs in the road, but instead I had to constantly look at the dashboard to try to find out why the stupid thing was beeping, which I presume was the same tone as any other error, thereby masking any real problem. Absolute garbage.
Incidentally, the Fiat also had that annoying "lane assist" feature which wobbles the steering wheel but it did it all the time when there were no lanes (unpaved roads etc) and it felt IDENTICAL to the car skidding to my "untrained"/"used-to-a-proper-car" hands, since the motion of the steering wheel versus car direction didn't match for a split second, and there was no real connection to the rack/pinion steering mechanism. I felt like a passenger even as the driver. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.
Not just beeping. I had a rental Nissan recently violently pull me straight off the road when it couldn't read the lines very well in a thick fog. Apparently you can disable that deep in some settings menu through some magic button presses divorced from the main settings menus, but it was frightening. For most manufacturers, almost none of this tech is good enough to even make optional and non-default, much less legislatively mandated, and that supposes I trust you not to sell my daily mood or whatever bullshit to data brokers.
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.
I dread ending up with a modern car though I know it's inevitable for me some day, exactly for these kinds of things that I know will infuriate me. All I can hope for I guess is that people will find ways of bypassing some of them
> lane assist
I prefer the term "lane insist"
some might even say "lame insist"
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?
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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.
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But how is it convenient to not pay attention to actually driving?? That doesn't sound like a convenience - that sounds dangerous
But you do have to keep an eye on those things. It can make the adjustments but you can't take your eye off them.
I just drive my car because you have to pay attention anyways. No cruise control, nothing.
What came into effect in 2009?
In Europe semi-truck trailers have stickers on them representing their speed limit. Those speed limits differ by country, so quite often you see a truck with 60,70,80 and 90 sticks on it.
So then you're driving in Germany at 200km/h and the camera picks up the 90km/h and brakes aggressively.
I absolutely hate it.
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.
You had a point until
> 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
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Lol no they don't, governments still think automotive industry is great, and of course so do the owners of these industries.
Who is "they"?
What is their motive for wanting to "force people out of cars"?
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You forgot the bike lanes that take up road space but nobody uses. Every socialist mayor's favorite anti-car policy.
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> A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
What is preventing car owners to cover it with electrical tape and move on?
> 2008
I was looking for a car recently for a 3 month visit in Europe. 2008 is the bottom of the barrel at this point. Basically deciding between scraping and trying to make few more years out of it.
> 2008 Governments will tax older cars out of existence.
They are trying to make it as unpleasant to drive as possible, and I don't really blame them - cars are a big factor in climate change, smog, etc. I gave up driving in the 90's because it was pretty obvious even back then.
But to be honest I bought a VW Polo this year, in february, it's amazing, it's invasive, but full of optionals, sensors, and comforts
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
yes I can't understand how anyone buys these
Because there is nothing else left to buy.
I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
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).
Nah. It's giving votes to whatever politician promises to put certain regulatory regimes out to pasture. You may find that you like some of their other policies far, far less than "seeks to restrain creeping safetyism".
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.
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.
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.
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Relevant section:
> 2.3. Privacy and data protection
> 2.3.1. The ADDW system shall function without relying on biometric personal data of any vehicle occupants. In this context, the biometric personal data is resulting from specific technical processing relating to the physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of a natural person, which allow or confirm the unique identification of that natural person, such as facial images or dactyloscopic data. This requirement does not forbid the ADDW system to use data from the camera(s) equipped in the vehicle, it forbids the identification of the person by the ADDW system.
> 2.3.2. The ADDW system shall be designed in such a way that it shall only continuously record and retain data necessary for the system to function and operate within a closed-loop system.
> 2.3.3. Any processing of personal data shall be carried out in accordance with Union data protection law.
This doesn't appear to ban identification of the user by, say, the Advanced Driver Distraction Reporting System, which is triggered by and utilizes the same data streams as the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System.
The text you linked mandates, as the first technical requirement, "An ADDW system shall determine when the driver’s visual attention is not directed towards the driving tasks and alert the driver through the vehicle human–machine interface."
Can you describe how you believe the driver's visual attention can be tracked by anything other than a camera pointed at the driver's face?
If no such other system exists, how is this doing anything other than mandating cameras pointed at the driver?
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.
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You'd know the bad guys are Eastasia. Or is it Eurasia?
You might as well stick to horses. What is so specific about eighteen years ago (2026 - 2008 ~= 18)? Does that mean that you will never drive an electric car?
A camera pointed at people’s face is going to have some insanely positive effects targeting one of the absolute biggest problems on the road though.
On my daily commute about 50% of drivers are on their phones at 90 km/h, would be great if their cars were beeping at them since no one else is going to do anything about it.
I find this especially great since one of them rear ended me earlier this year and practically admitted he was fiddling with his phone at the time
if all that happens is the car beeping at them then i would imagine that number will stay at 50%
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?
My parents’ ‘80s Chrysler New Yorker would talk instead of beep. ‘A door is ajar,” it would say, and we would giggle, ‘no, a door is a door!’ After Kitt in Nightrider, car companies wanted to be cool.
https://youtube.com/shorts/IhSrmB2qCdY?is=vg47_htvXpXS2ElU
Eddie Murphy had a great comedy bit based on that car.
> But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Can't speak to all vehicles, but my VW ID3 clearly indicates what the issue is on the dashboard.
So if it's the lane-keeping assist it highlights which lane(s) it is monitoring and it provides a written prompt on screen (e.g. "drive in the centre of the lane") if it's not happy.
If the speed limiter is on it shows the current signed speed limit in the dashboard and it flashes that speed limit if I am driving over the speed limit.
If the car believes I am not concentrating on the road and instead interacting too much with the touch-screen it puts a large warning in the middle of the touchscreen to pay attention to the road and prevents me using the infotainment system for a few second.
I'd be surprised if most other modern/new cars didn't also include instrument display feedback like this alongside audible warnings.
You’d be surprised. A family member bought a 2025 utilitarian car (Dacia). It’s the one on the newer platform (Clio 6) so they can implement all the beeping mandated by law.
The car beeps exactly the same way whatever the reason so you can’t tell why. It even beeps when it thinks the speed limit has changed (up or down)… it’s infuriating to drive this car, there is a beep about something every minute or two. You can’t even tell what it’s beeping about.
Luckily there is a shortcut button near the dash that you can press to disable all these idiotic beeps. You have to do it every time you restart the car. It does make it feel like all these beeps are pointless since you can’t tell what they’re about and press the button to disable them all as soon as you start the car anyway…
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Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
I've gotten beeps and something flashed on the instrument panel, but when I focused my eyes on the instrument panel, it was gone.
Freakin' useless.
A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
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Class D amplifiers use that same trick, just at much higher switching frequencies (pushing quantization noise ultrasonic, where it can be filtered). Since transistors are most efficient when fully on/off, very little power is wasted as heat. That's what made the modern revolution in tiny amps possible.
It's pretty amazing what you can get in terms of power density these days.
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Power-Amplifier-IRS2092S-Chan...
Wow that’s like such an obvious thing that makes so much sense. I have no doubt something like “Hands on, Hands on, Hands on” will start chirping in near future
I know. I've known about this technique since the 80s, and yet still we get those stupid beeps coming out of the speaker.
> 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.
I'd like to know more about this, actually.
A .wma music file is just an array of values ranging from -x to +x. Above a certain threshold, replace it with 1. Below, replace it with 0.
Now feed the 1s (+5V) and 0s (0V) into the speaker at the same rate as the sampling in the .wma file.
Since the speaker cone has inertia, the result will be an approximation of the original waveform, rather than a square wave.
Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
I don't want tunes. I want a voice. It is not any harder to learn 3 Japanese words than 3 random tunes. You don't have to learn Japanese. It's 3 words.
It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
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English is the universal aviation language.
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.
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You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps.
You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.
Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
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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.
After seeing kia evs and having a Tesla. Its the only good EV brand because the software from everywhere else is a complete joke.
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.
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.
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Sigh, I’m so afraid you’re right, since I don’t want to buy a Tesla for values reasons. I wonder if Rivian will be competitive on the software front?
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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.
The VW eUp! has a similar naming consistency issue. Is it an electric VW Up? VW eUP!? VW e•Up!? VW e-Up!? Who knows...
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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 silly at naming. Reminds me of how Microsoft names anything.
I forgot to mention, it's stylized as: ᵇZ4X
> New cars are UX nightmares.
It's amazing that china might be the one stepping up and regulating sanity by returning good turn signals and gear selectors:
https://www.notateslaapp.com//news/3593/tesla-likely-to-make...
(on some models tesla has turn signals as buttons on the wheel/yoke and gear selection on the ...touchscreen... yikes)
My Y has the stalk, but the touchscreen gear selection is no issue. (Ignoring the fact that I rarely manually drive the car) I only touch the screen to put it in gear once, maybe twice on a drive, and I'm stopped in any case.
Add in the fact that car will automatically put the car in the right "gear" 80% of the time based on environment (curbs, walls, etc.), it's even less important how the gear selected. Getting into other cars, I'm struck by how much space in the center console is wasted by this vestige of an actual manual gear shifter. Also the silly paddles on the steering wheel.
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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.
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.
2026 hyundai is fine but is nothing special. Hyundai kona actually has an insane amount of physical buttons, around 50
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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.
I hate that my 2020 Ioniq EV takes decisions for me, and just overall pretends to know better. I've turned off all the gadgets I could find (lane assist etc, I hate the feeling of the steering wheel wanting to move by itself) but some remain. Some examples: (1) I want to move my car a couple of feet in the driveway, but it won't let me without my seat belt on. (2) Sometimes, even after just a few minutes, it'll replace the whole main display (speedometer etc) with an image of a cup of coffee and tells me to take a break (3) It won't do cruise control under 30 km/h (which is ok I guess), but instead of refusing to enable cruise control under 30 km/h, it will set the speed to 30 and accelerate. (4) And the most annoying (but maybe not in the same category) : when I'm braking, and drive over a bump, it'll temporarily disable regen (ABS related?), causing a sudden loss in applied braking power. This was very scary at first, but now that I know, I scan the road for bumps when slowing down.
All that said though, my wife's 2 year old Ioniq 5 is way worse with the gadgets and seems to be always beeping for everything.
In other news, I test drove a Volvo 240 yesterday and am picking it up later this week.
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".
Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.
I also have an EX30 and while I have many many MANY complaints about this car, driver monitoring isn't one of them.
Also disabling this feature is only 2 taps (because EU says it can't be only one tap), Settings -> toggle Driver Monitoring.
I have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.
I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score.
And who doesn't want the safest car?
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Is that the regulation that is bad or the way the manufacturer implemented it ?
I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.
Don't buy car that sucks.
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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.
My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
What happens if you wear sunglasses?
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> 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.
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It only sounds like overreach because we have become numb to an incredible amount of killing from distracted drivers.
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Personal freedom to drive a two tonne battering ram at deadly speeds where others are walking, biking, etc should be heavily regulated.
I think I'd consider this kind of technology at the intersection of personal freedom and _public_ safety. Drunk or distracted driving puts others at risk, not just you.
There is no limit to how much paternalism most people will accept. Therefore, we're bound to lose all of our personal freedom eventually, "for your protection."
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.
> adjusting the climate controls,
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!
The truck I was driving had physical buttons for all the climate control functions, and for volume/on-off too. It wouldn't have been surprising to me if I was distracted fiddling with the screen, but it would give me the alert because I was playing with the buttons for an extended period of time.
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The fact that it beeps at you is also them blaming you for the problem.
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.
> 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.
Thank you! I often feel like I’m in the minority on this site, it is nice to hear someone else articulate my feelings. Driving is a privilege not a right. But since America decided to decimate public transit in the early 20th century (and stick with it) we’re stuck with cars. So I’m in favor of anything that makes it safer. Hopefully this crosses the pond.
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.
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
This will not get triggered by blind spot checks and most new cars have these inside the mirrors, so you won't even need to look over your shoulder.
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.
I would argue that if someone can't safely operate a vehicle without this then maybe they shouldn't have a license
If locks are to keep honest men honest, then driving monitoring cameras are to keep attentive drivers attentive.
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In this scenario anyone who "should" have their license would never trigger this warning in the first place so it wouldn't be an issue.
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What exactly are you arguing for? Changes to the driving test to detect how someone reacts to distractions?
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> 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.
Related: https://petapixel.com/2025/07/11/dutch-woman-fined-500-after...
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 wear some pretty thick glasses and my parents' car CONSTANTLY beeped at me to pay attention to the road.
> It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
It’s also totally plausible that insurance companies will use this data to try and find every single tiny, irrelevant detail to not pay you. Sorry, you blinked before crashing into this other car, we won’t pay for that.
Law enforcement could also use that data to create a nice profile of yourself and how “distracted” you are while driving, and maybe suspend your license forever, why not? And wait till you find how unreliable these sensors are.
Just another surveillance tool in disguise, this is what the EU does best.
Eye tracking
But killing innocent bystanders is freedom!
> It also seemed really accurate.
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"
> When I'm cruising on the highway I like to rest my right wrist on the top of the wheel, which blocks the sensor.
Won't this shatter your wrist if your airbag deploys? I remember being taught to hold the sides of the wheel in driving class.
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My Subaru Solterra / Toyota bz4X is the same way.
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Should have rolled the cost of the soda into your damages in the lawsuit.
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 :)
I rented a car that had this feature and instantly hated it. I forget the make, but if it detected you were not looking at the road for a period of time, it would slam on the brakes and release. A way to jolt you awake.
The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.
I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.
FWIW, the only time I ever had emergency brakes kick in are in spurious situations, like tight maneuvers or there is something ahead with plenty of headway to decide whether you should brake or not. A cyclist moved close to the traffic light fast and the car completely stopped. This one was a bit more dangerous because had there been someone behind, that driver would not have expected such an abrupt stop.
>so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more
Every time it happens, it hurts as I'm not prepared for it.
Lane assist is also particularly bad as it handles some slight curves incorrectly, so it resists your driving. As a result with such cars I have my arms muscles tense up in anticipation of some turns.
Theres already 3d models of heads you can print and attach to the rearview mirror to trick the ssensor! At least for the Teslas with Autopilot, but I can imagine it working just as well with other cars.
These systems are always beta tested on real drivers for years. Sometimes the tech improves often it doesn't. It's absolute madness
What the hell. I had my last rental just beep at me, and was astonished. But this... sounds literally unsafe.
"The cars have all have cameras checking for bad behavior, why shouldn't your phone and laptop?" said the esteemed lawmaker.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
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).
Another variant of this is: "What, you don't want to catch the pedophiles?"
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Yeah, "think of the children" is a rhetorical technique but also a logical fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
I think they forgot about children safety!
I hired a Chinese Haval Car for a weekend last year (Australia). It started beeping at me for being distracted because I was checking for traffic in the other lanes - which is crucial when driving in a 4 lane highway.
Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.
Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.
Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.
It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.
After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.
> The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
That is definitely not the point of a turning signal. The car that's already in the lane has right of way and it's your responsibility not to plow into them. If they opt to make room for you, great (that's just courteous driving), but it's not an obligation.
If you can't see the car in your blindspot when changing lanes, you're not doing a proper shoulder check, hence the blindspot warning.
But if you do a shoulder check, the car will beep for tacking your eyes off the road!
Third base!
The one time I rented a car with this feature, it claimed there was a car in my blind spot when there was none. It seemed to be reacting to a car that I had already determined was clear of my path.
> would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
> Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.
"a turn signal is not a question, it is a statement"
If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.
Disagree. The purpose of the indicator is to signal your intention to others. Indicate first, then shoulder check. If you then discover a car in your blind spot, abort the manoeuvre if necessary or slow down to let them pass you first.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
We were just in Sicily for vacation and got a new BYD for rent. At first I was excited, coming from US I never tried a Chinese car and wanted to check it out. Excitement was quickly replaced with annoyance, that thing would beep for every damn reason. "keep eyes on road", "you are tired, consider taking a break", etc. Then all the damn safety features that a couple of times almost caused me to slam into another car. After a couple of days, I blocked the camera monitoring me and then would spend the first minute after getting in the car turning off all these "helpers", luckily most of them I could still disable. Camera couldn't be disabled in settings but just covering it up worked well. I thought about getting scotch tape but never got around to it.
To start your car please look into camera and repeat: "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
Don’t forget to drink a verification can.
Yep... gets a little less funny every year as it comes closer to reality.
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Brawndo is what your body craves. It's got electrolytes!
You mean that it's got what plants crave.
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"Doritos™ just Dew™ it™!"
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?
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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).
forcing citizens to buy goods which are adversarial to them with their own money is rarely a good idea.
paradoxically, citizens expect the government to be adversarial towards them in big things (see America) but it's the 'little' things which breed true contempt.
sooner or later something will happen which will test the revealed preference of the population and everyone will suddenly discover that contempt is all that's left.
Yes. Absolutely yes. And I think this is why people vote for things like brexit, or really-obviously-bad-politicians. This is the only way in which they can pay back the many things the reasonable, progressive governments "gave" them. Stupid beeps included. I swear to god, I hate right wing populists, but I'd at least be inclined to vote for a party that promised to fight back those stupid systems.
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More than once did my lane assistant try to run me into the barrier in a construction zone. You can turn it off, however its on again after on the next start...
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
Same, I have one bend near my home on which my car always pulls my steering wheel into a certain direction even though I'm perfectly driving in the middle. These "safety" systems are anything but safe, and very frustrating.
Once on a rental car brake assist decided I'm about to hit something on a kerb in a curve on a wet highway. I was using maybe 50% tire grip to corner and sudden braking took it over 100%. 1/10 would not recommend.
Sure this sort of systems might reduce overall death toll by addressing worst suspects like drunk or distracted drivers but I'm pretty sure they makes it worse for diligent ones.
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Totally insane that they enshrine this stuff in law without a reference design and corresponding data to validate its effectiveness.
Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments.
More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
Maybe those who write the regulations have drivers, and don’t experience the downsides to their own regulations
On the other hand, as someone living in a city with good public transit, I think cars should be regulated more. Cars make living in such a city a worse experience. They are loud and produce pollution (including EVs).
I found this useful: https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-advanced-driver-dis...
From that article:
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
but also: "ADDW systems use cameras and sensors to track a driver’s head position, eye movements, and gaze direction"
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
> Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function
It's quite difficult to know what happened in the previous frame without any kind of retention.
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
How does this work with sunglasses?
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?
if you watch European car enthusiast review videos, they nearly all start by showing what's required to disable all of the nannies.
Don't worry the next OTA will both restore the warning and change/remove the ability to disable it. It's the future!
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.
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They’re almost always wrong too, so they just beep at you for going over 50 when you’re in a 90 zone
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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.
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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.
To be clear, this will also happen in the USA. The destruction of privacy is perhaps the only issue with full throated support across the political spectrum.
The destruction of privacy by technological and regulatory means is unfortunately a world-wide phenomenon.
>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.
All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light). Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
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.
> alarming
Literally. It’s the windows visa-ification of cars. I hate it.
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These features suck on the few American cars I have seen them. In Florida using a rental driving to Orlando area my vehicle constantly told me to get my eye’s back on the road or to take a driving break. I was on a highway driving completely normal. Just annoying dashboard warnings over and over.
The only feature I like so far is the slight shake of the wheel if crossing over a lane.
Either this tech is janky/new or is just honestly not needed and distracting.
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.
[1] https://www.carsized.com/en/
Mazda managed to avoid the touch screen plague until relatively recently. Their latest models seem to have adopted Android based infotainment with touchscreens though. I've got a CX-5 that's 3 years old and it's pleasingly touch screen free. Also the driver aids are mild and unintrusive.
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.
thankfully most of the mid-2010's I've driven haven't been bad
Then these features are not for you.
They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
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Just get a golf 6 or 7 (can be had without any of the nanny features).
I rented a car last weekend that had something similar to this and it didn’t work when I was wearing sunglasses. As soon as I put them on it said on the dashboard that I needed to take the sensor to service it or something along those lines.
Tangential, but I’ve never seen so many people fiddling with their phones while driving as I did in the US. It was pretty worrying.
Sometimes I feel that EU has an unhealthy obsession with safety, at expense of almost everything else. This is one of those times.
Preventing car crashes and people dying in said crashes isn't an unhealthy obsession with safety.
but that's not what they're doing. that's just you believing the rhetoric
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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.
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My Tesla is quite accurate about whether I'm looking at the road or not. What car specifically had this issue?
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.
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It varies so much by brand, too. Some brands are too aggressive and end up ping-ponging you in the lane if you let them, and then there's my new Mazda where it doesn't seem to work in any case where I want it to work, but will fight me as hard as it can if I try to take a highway exit.
How are they great?
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.
Does it at least have more cupholders for your verification cans?
"Mountain Dew is for me and you!"
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 find my Nissan Leaf similar. The A-pillars are so thick to keep me safe but I can't see pedestrians very well. So now I have to move my head around like a party parrot. Then the regen brake sort of has a dead spot where I feel pressure on my foot but it doesn't actually brake making it hard to stop quickly and smoothly. On a purely hydraulic brake what you feel is what you get. Then the camera doesn't see people as well as it sees bigger cars. I've nearly hit some people because of these factors.
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Weird dark surveillance state stuff. I thought EU was trying to champion privacy?
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”.
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The EU wants to be the only one who spies on its citizens.
Driver monitoring systems will be required in all 2027 vehicles in the US as well.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
If you read that article and check the latest status, the NHTSA was supposed to make a rule by 2024 and it's 2026 now. [1]
In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2]
I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule."
[1] https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NHTSA-2022-0079
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
Goal - make driving so annoying that customers will be begging for fully self driving cars!
Good, hopefully in 10-15 years we will have mostly self-driving cars for most ground transportation requirements.
If we're allowed to dream, make it public transit, as private cars, regardless of how they are driven, are a climate disaster we can not afford.
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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'm 21 years old, I'm driving a 2010 car with the intention to keep driving it for at least another few years (well over 200,000km).
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though. I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
and who would take care of your BMW when you're not around anymore ?
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.
I have nothing to add other than those are cool vehicles.
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?
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.
I do this too. Want to get a comma.ai device just so I don’t have to wiggle the steering wheel.
comma.ai will not disable the warning. This is a warning that's on all the time.
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.
You should buy a dumber car
I have no idea how well such a system works, but, I found these lines pretty jarring:
> 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 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.
"self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads" https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads...
And you can bypass a seatbelt warning by just plugging in a buckle without the belt, but most people don't bother. It's not worth the inconvenience to circumvent, so it still has a positive impact on safety.
Go in a car from 1970 and try the seatbelts.
I can see why people didn't want them.
I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
By comparison today we have luxurious silk strands that don't pinch anywhere.
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A shocking fraction of people will simply ignore the seatbelt beeping for the entire drive
Seatbelts are actually heavily enforced around the EU, most people would rather just belt up than pay the fine.
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In the event of a serious accident police will likely check to see if it was tampered with and so sentence will be more severe
That's not how courts function.
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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 ?
The only time our 2025 Kia warned me about being distracted was about 30 minutes into a highway drive in Europe during heavy snowfall. The roads were covered in snow, people were generally cautious but traffic was still flowing and I was checking mirrors more frequently than usually to make sure lanes around me were clear and I was aware of everything going on. I guess staring straight ahead without situational awareness is the way the car prefers. :|
Cars are becoming shittier in Europe, dumb regulations and people building cars are clearly NOT driving them.
My wife got a new Volvo recently:
1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?
2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.
3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.
4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.
Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.
It is fascinating that you look at design choices that Chinese Volvo copied from American Tesla (except for the speed limit) and declare that European cars are the problem.
Because Europe is basically what drives laws here in France for driving, I would expect them to do what's best for the drivers and clearly they are not.
They should not allow car Manufacturers to sell cars when: - There's no physical knob to open it - The only place to read critical information like speed is a tablet on the side - The speed limit is a constant beep unless you disable it AT EVERY START by touching a screen on the side (their law basically)
I love phone as a key. It's an optional thing on my car, you can still carry around a physical key fob if that's your jam. But outside of a long road trip I don't normally care to keep a key fob with me. It's just another piece of junk to have to have on me when I'm out and about. It's really nice having one fewer things in my pocket while I'm out and about.
The experience isn't as you list here though. It behaves pretty much exactly the same as a key fob. I just walk up to the car and it's unlocked, I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket or open any apps specifically or press any buttons on the phone.
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.
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.
Smart cars are the new Smart TVs
Europe learnt nothing from the 1910-1950 era it seems. If the Stasi were around to see their dream rebuilt twice over....
New cars are painful to drive. So many alerts it's distracting.
bing bing bing
NOW what?
The EU is quickly becoming the surveillance capital of the world.
Didn't Russia ban and block all messenging apps that aren't the backdoored government-approved Max messenger?
EU has a while to go to become the surveillance capital I think.
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Do you... not understand what the ADAS system does and how it works?
You have a camera aimed at your face when typing this nonsense post.
That camera isn’t on all the time scanning your face. God knows what sort of sketchy implementations car companies will come up with.
It's funny how assumptions betray us.
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.
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For not letting people snooze off behind the wheel?
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.
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Death by a thousand cuts. It never stops at just one thing.
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if I'm that tired I don't think a beep mixed with road noise and radio would wake me up anyway
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Camera at your face should fix what exactly? It certainly does not fix allowance to use touch screens in car, so what the hell? Can we go back to 2010 and use the technology called buttons?
It boggles my mind that some people are more concerned how much fun driving a car is supposed to be vs 60 people dying in the EU in car accidents every day.
If 60 people died because an airplane falls of the sky every day we wouldn't shrugg that off either, wouldn't we?
And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.
What you're doing now is taking a reasonable standard when going 200 on the autobahn and applying it everywhere else. And you don't see any problem with this because... think of the kids?
That's not how you optimize an important metric. At all. You look a how exactly those 60 people die and make targeted interventions with numbers backing them up. Otherwise best case you're doing security theatre, and most likely fuck things up with second order effects. Like things beeping all the time and distracting people - I already can't tell why my car is beeping at me.
the optimal crime rate is non zero and the same goes for traffic death rate, because to bring them to zero would imply a dystopia where personal freedom is seriously limited
Personal freedom to fall asleep at the wheel or look at your phone while driving?
> And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.
But according to the article it will ping when you glance at the scenery at 20 kph. If a system is annoying it will be a bigger distraction and source of frustration than what it's supposed to prevent, and people will find ways to turn it off.
Imagine using the same argument for installing government visible in your own home to protect domestic abuse victims.
I don't want a camera watching me. I don't want to pay for repairs or my car being out of commission b/c the camera isn't working.
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60 a day for whole EU is a really good number.
Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.
As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.
Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.
And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?
I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.
The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.
Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.
I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.
Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.
Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.
There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)
As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.
Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.
I like a fair bit of what the EU does, and in the past they've been behind some significant advances in vehicle safety, but boy do I hate most of what's coming out of there lately as far as driving . All these driver "assistance" features that arguably do more harm than good for competent drivers and are forced to be enabled by default on every drive. And now this. Bleh.
This is the part I hate, enabled for every drive? What kind of hostile cockroach UX is that?
1) Unplug the cellular modem.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
2.5) Your car doesn’t start
3) Enjoy
I will start now but I think not for long. “For your own safety we disabled your car”.
> 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.
2.75) Test this during the test drive
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
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.
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> “For your own safety we disabled your car”
Drive onto freeway, `sneeze` directly at camera, car "disabled for safety", causes chaos on freeway (hopefully no one dies), sue car maker, retire
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.
And remember to format the car before you take it in for a service.
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.
Both are illegal.
It's illegal to disconnect the modem? Where?
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Under which juridiction? I doubt it is in any country of the EU.
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Not really, it will still be fully road legal, at least in my EU member state.
not saying what the EU does is a good thing but why don't I ever see any legislations like this from the US? we'd still have lightning on iPhones if it wasn't for the EU so some of what they introduce is net positive...
> A Reddit user, u/premium_bawbag, who hired a Ford Puma for a week reported a similar experience.
Lovely traditional Scottish name there. ;-)
Already requirement in China
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.
Wear a halloween prankster mask
Modern cars are user hostile
Meanwhile in Germany I see, quite literally, 12 traffic signs on a 100m stretch of road. I'm pretty sure that looking at all those signs adds up to a few seconds at least.
In 5 years, every car will need to include a pack of adult diapers.
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.
Black vinyl tape over the camera?
You need to splice in a looped recorded video like in a heist movie, otherwise the camera detects blockage from the tape and incessantly beeps
Disconnect the beep
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The interesting part of this mostly bullshit is how it exposes a kind of reverse Goodhart's law scenario. When driving becomes less about attention to surroundings and focusing on driving and more about keeping the trivial beepers off, it changes the way people drive.
First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.
Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?
Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.
Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.
Good thing we have those cookie banners warning us about websites tracking us.
A little conflicted on this one. I firmly believe there is too much distracted driving going on right now. And yet, I find driving a modern car a hugely distracting experience.
On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.
I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.
Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.
I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.
Any one knows what happens when duck tape is being used to cover the camera?
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!
You can deactivate it, but has to be on every car start. It's so annoying having to tur off all that crap every single trip.
Sometimes i forget the lane assist ON and get nudged randomly at high speeds, so so scary.
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).
Time to start jailbreaking car software
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.
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Car starts quacking at you
I read a paper a while ago (which I have failed to locate) which used around binary masks, each in front of a single photodiode, as input to a neural network, which estimated the number of people in front of this effectively ~9-pixel "camera". The binary masks and NN weights were trained at the same time. Presumably, something like this could be used to detect lack of driver focus in a far less invasive manner.
> Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.[1]
Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
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.
Phone use whilst driving is a huge problem so not surprised.
Funny how that became the solution instead of I don't know, banning massive tablets on the dashboard and enforcing buttons.
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.
I have the same sentiment. Who assures me this video isn't sent to the manufacturer for "quality control" reasons? Can it be used in court in case of an accident? Will my insurance ask access to monitor my driving? Can it be used for detecting phone use? Therefore, these cameras get a sticker, or a small printout of my head, looking alert, put in front of the camera. These systems only cause extra distraction, they do not reduce it - it feels like having a constant driving exam.
> What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ?
Because it'll beep.
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.
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I'm so happy I don't need a car anymore. It sounds like hell driving these days with when the car second-guessing you the whole time.
I love driving.
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.
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".
Europe gave us cookie popups on every website, and now... in Europe you get a camera watching you in your own car while driving.
I'm wondering how it will work with various types of sunglasses?
It works, but there are mechanisms to also track your head position if it can't see your eyes.
What about domestic accidents? Domestic violence?
It is clear to me, that we also need cameras in every room in every home and office.
Every year it feels more surprising how motorcycling is still allowed. No seatbelt, no ABS, no problem...
Motorcyclists don't usually kill an entire generation of people when they T-bone a mid-sized sedan in an intersection. That's the problem.
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.
Wearing a seatbelt or not doesn't also prevent a family getting killed, yet its strict in cars, but not on bikes? What gives?
I don't know about other countries, but public transport buses in Australia don't have seat belts on them. Even as a kid, I remember wondering why there was such a fuss made around seat belts in cars when you couldn't use one if you wanted to on the bus.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
Buses in America don't have seatbelts either. They're just so big and heavy relatively to cars that you're very unlikely to be seriously injured. (It does happen of course, and that usually makes the news.)
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.
Wonder what the regulations have to say about a small, strategically placed piece of sticky tape.
According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted.
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
What is the car’s reaction if you just block the camera. Will it still drive?
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.
“Your driving data has been sold before” - that was in the US though. Not the EU.
I guess I’ll keep walking, biking and using public transport.
All these years we heard Germans are anal about privacy.
Is that only when mass hysteria is pushed against internet companies? How are they okay with this?
When FSD actually works 100% (or as close as possible), manual driving will become obsolete, we're 5-10 years away.
how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?
Yeah we were 5-10 years away from full self driving 15 years ago too.
This is not OK.
As a European: Absolutely not. Never, will not comply, will do everything in my hacking power to not be subjected to this.
This is invasive, the others like Lane "assist" is just outright dangerous. Yanking my steering wheel while I'm driving? WTF? The lines on the road, in many EU cities, are mere suggestions. Especially during road works. I've had two times where I almost killed the bicyclist because the STUPID KIA SPORTAGE thought it knew better.
And now I'm filmed during driving? No. NO!
Guess i'm keeping old faithful a little while longer
Does that mean every car sold must have Level 1 autonomy? Similar to how ABS, Air Bags and Stability Control are required.
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.
(laughs in American)
We should make an open source one that provably doesn't transmit anything except the distracted driving warning signal.
Maybe I'll get downvoted for being off topic, but when we try to say "EU has too much regulation", this is the kind of shit we're talking about.
Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
There's considerable cynicism in these comments and I have to suspect a puritan bent in most of them. No, no one is watching you. No, these cameras are not here to catch you doing bad things.
The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.
Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
> I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since?
It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
wait are we as drivers required to have a camera? I mean its a good thing to have a camera but no idea how you set it up to record automatically.
No more "making love" in the car. Sorry guys. That'd be left to Hollywood stunts.
That is a good initiative however what ever data is being recorded needs to kept in a responsible and safe manner
It isn't supposed to store any data, just process the real-time feed and output a Boolean signal for whether your eyes are on the road.
Selling it to Flock makes you a criminal who needs to go to prison, but they'll probably find a way around that.
I laughed. Thanks!
Not to worry, Flock, Palantir, and whoever else has use for it will keep it very safe once they buy it from the car company for $1/driver/month.
Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.
[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
I wonder if they also have a seeker pointed at my face then, because I don't want that shining into my eyes.
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.
It's completely idiotic. Technology should be assisting in performing the attention itself, not nannying the driver.
Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
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.
But the EU still blocks self driving cars which would make this unnecessary.
> 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.
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.
ouf yeah, I agree. I had a lot more to say about this but the ICE checkpoint found my smuggled kinder egg and now they're sending me off to alligator alcatraz.
It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
you're more likely to die from heat exhaustion as well, because you nincompoops still haven't figured out how to cool the air
It's incredible that comments similar to yours are getting actively downvoted.
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.
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?
Thanksfully there are plenty of vehicles in the second hand market.
Who knew that my decision to not own a car would turn out to be so prescient. That I can still be killed by a driver distracted by the anti-distraction feature is just the usual irony of existence.
proud to drive 2002 volkswagen golf in these creepy times
Ditto for 1992 Buick, 1996 Toyota. Also 1961 Sunliner, weather permitting.
fortunately I'm old, I drive a 2007 car, and won't live in this new world for much much longer!
That will definitely help their car industry.
I hate this new world we find ourselves in.
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."
Given an (admittedly) optimistic future forecast for remote assessment of parameters related to driver blood chemistry and physiology - will this then be an inevitable further add-on legal requirement for human-driven transport?
I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.
What happens if I cover the camera?
In many EU jurisdictions (like Germany) continuously recording dashcams are banned. Mandating a potentially continuously recording camera pointed at you at the same time is ridiculous.
Note that they must be sold with this feature. It does not say you have to keep this feature, you can aftermarket remove it or disconnect it just fine.
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.
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.
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.
This is a privacy nightmare that is making me speechless, I think, while staring at a phone with a camera pointed directly at my face.
fuk
It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it.
And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.
I seriously can't believe all the commenters here advocating for mandated ability to spy on people
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...
It's weird how the discourse on X is so much more high brow compared to HN these days.
buying a new car gets less attractive every year.
Orwellian. What an absolute nightmare of government control. Advancing technology is giving too much power to the government, do not let them have it or you will never get your rights back.
My bmw has this for the traffic jam self-drive (< 40mph) feature.
My eyes wander a bit and it scolds me.
This can't be real life
i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more. -its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone -its a good security feature -the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more. -in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.
Every new driver in the European Union must include a roll of electrician tape.
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.
This is what we call a slippery slope
Nope, that's not what we call slippery slope. This system does not require data recording or sharing, does not require cameras.
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I don't think it's misleading at all. Is it a camera that's aimed at your face? It seems like it.
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.
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.
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
I don't know who told you that but maybe it wasn't the EU?
legislate volume knobs
They'll do anything but address the root cause of distractions: the addictive nature of mobile phones/the apps on them
They hate us for our freedom.
Maybe would be the good time to create a company to sell webcam covers for cars...
All the repeated discussion and warnings about Chat Control in the EU, and this shit just snuck through?
Wish I could just buy a new car that was a car and not an app with wheels.
I'm buying 0 cars with this nonsense. And 0 cars without CarPlay support.
Fun fact: there are significantly more heat deaths in Europe than car fatalities.
Interesting priorities...
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.
And Europeans think they have privacy lol
This sort of nonsense is well studied in aeronautical world, and will lead to too many alerts, which, in turn, lead to predictable outcomes: https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/normalization-of-devian...
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.
Repeated nuisance alarms have the same effect on all humans, not just on pilots - it trains them to ignore the alarms. Eventually this will lead to non-nuisance alarms being ignored and lives being lost.
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Imagine reading this headline in 1999 lol
Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons:
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
This is just more evidence that the GDPR was just a set of protectionist laws for EU companies.
The GDPR protects people from companies keeping their data and using it recklessly.
And here we go again :)
It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
In fact, he loves us!
Fuck this
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.
Innovation? Who cares?? Regulation is where the real value is. /s
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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.
Holy heck, you weren't kidding. Not 3 comments before a string of Undercover Russian accusations.
You wonder if some people can't conceptualize other people disagreeing with them in good faith, without being part of some shadowy influence campaign.
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.
I’ll take that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442503#48444168
Being concerned about the trend of laws in the EU doesn't make someone a bad actor.
A sus posting history, grammar peppered with typical machine translated russisms, and an occasional ‘russia good’ slip does.
If its closed looped its great. All cars should also come with alcolocks.
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.
my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494
As a pedestrian I love this.
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.
For all the people complaining about driver distraction alerts… have you considered that perhaps you were in fact distracted? Looking at a passenger to talk instead of at the road, etc?
It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.