Comment by gotski

1 day ago

I had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads.

The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner.

Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!

I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers.

They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.

  • "might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation."

    Nah, you just get knee-jerk, feel-good laws because the masses never dig deeper and the elected only care about being reelected.

    • These laws are not driven by masses. The masses do not want this crap. These laws are driven by busybodies who think they know what's best for the masses. The politicians and their advisors think they can get "free" (statistically nobody ever voted for the other guy over something so little) turnout from these busybodies in their favor by promising/doing this stuff. It's a sick numbers game and we all lose. Just like everything else these days.

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  • They aren’t for some weird reason being pressured to make systems that work. Even in this thread I see wild shit like people telling how the system completely doesn’t work for them, but no indication that they are pushing the manufacturer to fix it?? How can we have the kind of attitude that we let the manufacturers just get away with it if it’s a safety system? If the radio didn’t work, we’d be at the dealership bothering the service staff every day - but important safety tech? Blame the EU…?

    • I don't think any complaint I've filed with a company has ever led to the situation being fixed. I still do it because I like futile exercises, but I know it won't change anything.

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  • It'd be a bold strategy, cause in the meantime everyone says "never buy a Kia!" (or whatever brand, but Kia is the usual suspect)

  • They can trivially determine if their tech is effective.

    Can they? How many people real world test, and are they of all different heights and weights and face shapes too?

    Besides that, when I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old movies on late night TV. Often these movies had car chases, and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason. I was always flummoxed, for we had no cliffs anywhere I'd ever been, and wondered where they were, and why people were always driving on them.

    When I visited California I suddenly realised "oh, they're everywhere here, just driving home".

    Another poster pointed out the alarm went off, if he looked to the corner he was driving towards. People dogfooding won't notice issues with that, if the local environment doesn't have such features.

    Could you test for all these things? Maybe, after realising what to test for. You'd then need a sort of regression test, too. All with people.

  • Why would the manufacturers care though? You will still buy a car and now the barrier to foreign competition is higher, increasing profit, and the price goes up to pay for the dooo dads which increases financing kickbacks even if margin is same.