- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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When I was in Australia last year I was overwhelmed by how much modern cars beep at you. The worst offender by far was a 2025 Kia Carnival that had different beeps for every possible thing the system might label a driving error.
It was more distracting than helpful to be honest.
This article is 2/3 fluff. The majority is about convenience features, not safety.
That said, I recently moved from a ~15 year old car to a modern one, and have driven several newer models with the features described.
Adaptive cruise: it‘s often poorly designed. It brakes far too rapidly and abruptly should traffic or a car ahead slow, and there‘s absolutely no reason to apply as much throttle as it does should it decide acceleration is appropriate. Also for uphill driving the cruise control often drops into far too low a gear in order to maintain speed. It‘s more of a nuisance than an aid, and it‘s even worse if traffic increases or you‘re in a lane with jackasses that can‘t maintain a steady speed. Adaptive cruise attracts idiots, too. The new versions will stay engaged and slow to a complete stop. If the driver has set the following distance to maximum the car will stop with a 4-5 car distance from the car ahead. They‘re treating it like some kind of autopilot that will run the car for them.
Lanekeeping: there‘s a huge span of quality here. Some are shit, some are far too aggressive, some are “jerky” following a segmented plotted line rather than a smoother curve. They can overcorrect and really make for an unstable drive attempting to counter intentional driver input. Some “give up” and disengage with little warning, the audible alerts are often weak. Some briefly follow merge, exit, or widening lines for an additional lane pointing you off the road before they get confused and disengage with the car pointed in an unsafe direction.
Auto braking: in my experience it has engaged every time when I was already braking, or engaged when there was no need to brake. The few times I thought it should have engaged, it didn’t. It’s a nuisance at best, ineffective at worst.
Reverse cameras don’t provide a full picture and are awful in developing driver proprioception about the dimensions of their car. They’re fine for what’s immediately behind you, but use of mirrors and looking around is far better for backing out and looking for approaching people or cars. That said, I love the “360°” view ones. Those are great for centering oneself in a parking space.
So I completely understand why drivers don’t use them. They’re often low-quality, inappropriate overcorrections for the situation, and make for a worse ride and potentially even detrimental to safety. That’s saying a lot considering the quality of a lot drivers on the road today.
I run 80% of the time with adaptive cruise and lanekeeping off. I can’t disable the autobrake, if I could I would.
So glad my 2019 car is a standard but still has CarPlay.
Like, CarPlay is about the most “smart” feature I need/want. I just want a good map and the ability to play podcasts and listen to music easily. That’s it.
Since it’s a standard the car couldn’t get any of the “smart” features I didn’t want anyway.
I’ll drive the car, thanks.
This is me too with my 2020 Crosstrek. A little screen for the backup camera that also shows the navigation and Spotify from my phone. No lane monitoring or any of that stuff. And I do like deciding when I want to shift.
Heh, mine is a 2019 Crosstrek, so, yeah, I understand.
I turn off all that shit for one reason: too many electronic nannies mean less attention is required to drive. I rarely even use old cruise control.
The problem with some of these “safety” features is they malfunction at such a high rate they seem more likely to kill me than save my life. They also don’t anticipate future consequence in any way.
The collision detection malfunctions regularly giving a loud beep or applying breaks when nothing is ahead.
The lane departure does not understand situations where you had someone wander into your lane and you may drive onto the shoulder quickly before signalling. I don’t need my car fighting me while im making the correct call. I also think having the car take over, even gently, is so startling that it could cause the accident it was meant to prevent. If I’m startled I might over correct and lose control. While that has never happened, with everything considered, it seems safer to leave some of these features off.
I don’t need to be an early adopter on flawed technology that could get me killed.
The lane departure does not understand situations where you had someone wander into your lane and you may drive onto the shoulder quickly before signalling
This is one of the biggest things I hate about my parents car. You almost have to fight against the lane detection when when changing lanes, being in a merge lane, or more importantly when another car starts drifting into you lane. It’s great if you’re on a long haul but it’s detrimental because it’s conditioning you to not have to pay attention as much.
I drove a rental that had collision detection in it. Three or four times, it suddenly slammed on the brakes for no discernable reason, and with no regard to how close/fast traffic behind me was moving. I had to pull off, download the manual, and figure out how to turn it off before the car killed me.
One of the most important things in safely operating a vehicle is using gradual, predictable movements. My car braking without my input makes predictable movement impossible.
After my car suddenly slammed on the brakes for the third time on wide open highway while screaming warning beeps at me I went to the settings and disabled everything. I had enough “safety” thanks.
Semi truckers have been fighting this for years. And they’re not allowed to turn it off unless they own the truck. Most truckers work for someone else.
The typical scenario, approaching an overpass in broad daylight, the sensor sees the shadow on the road and freaks out, stomping the brakes.
Name and shame please!
Some of the safety tech has tried to kill me twice, due to glitching itself, so I have had to turn it off. 🤷♂️
I’ve disabled safety tech in cars I drive because the signal to noise ratio was bad.
You’re going over the speed limit, says the shitty sign recognition that missed the one outside that says otherwise.
You’re tired, says the racist eye closure camera that can’t deal with Asian eyes.
Your seatbelt is undone, says the sensor that can’t discern between your backpack and a person. (To be fair, this one is just for the power of threes. Buckle in heavy objects. Secure your load.)
My seat sensor is capacitive so if I have something sufficiently wet (like chinese takeout) or my phone plugged into the charger with the cord slack on the seat it thinks there is a person and beeps incessantly.
My 2015 would have the ‘collision alert’ because a car was in an adjacent turn lane, but the road curved and it didn’t know that.
It also would go off most days on a stretch of road because it was certain I was going to slam into the guardrail of the curve. Again, the system had no cameras, no map awareness, so it just had radar saying ‘something metal ahead’.
It was slightly annoying but left it on, just in case.
Now my 2023 on the other hand hasn’t had a false positive that I can recall, in fact if not for one incident, I wouldn’t even know it was doing anything. Someone pulled right out in front of my kid learning to drive. I had just enough time to think “oh, we are going to hit or my kid is going to yank this thing off the road”. Instead, my kid executed a shockingly perfect evasive swerve that landed perfectly into the free lane. Then I find out that it also would take over steering and as a result, I’m pretty certain it saved me a pretty significant wreck.
Then I find out that it also would take over steering
Um. This is kind of terrifying.
Based on what I saw and what I read, it only took over of it detected you trying to swerve and an obstacle that would hit and change it into an aggressive lane change. The steering into was at least roughly the maneuver desired, but it just corrected it.
Though it may sound scary, it absolutely worked in my scenario. I’ve never ever seen it activate accidentally.
I can’t even be sure whether it activated or not that time, I wasn’t driving. It just seemed like a scenario and maneuver unlikely for a barely driving 15 year old to pull off so perfectly. I’m not so sure even I would have avoided an accident, but even if I did, I doubt I would have hit the maneuver so spot on.
Two hours ago, I was driving in my little town. Speed limit is about 35. At the edge of town is one of those giant freeway-style lighted signboards that flashes some info about upcoming construction starting soon. When you see them on the freeway, they don’t look as big. When you’re up close to one, you realize they’re pretty freaking big.
Anyway, the signboard is now on it’s back, all fucked up, twisted and broken. Looks like a dinosaur picked it up, bit it and threw it. A little farther up the road is a late model kia sedan with the front torn off and some fucking twat of a driver taking pictures of his car.
So I don’t know what model he was in, but it was one of the larger sedans, so not an Elantra or something cheap. I know darn well that it at least had to have automatic emergency braking, maybe even some other driver aids. Somehow, this muppet was able to NOT see the giant lit up, bright orange signboard and his car did nothing to stop anything by the looks of it.
So it doesn’t surprise me that people turn this shit off, not one tiny bit. It’s always the people who need to have them on the most, as usual.
My only experience with a car that had lane-keeping assist was that the car actively tried to kill me by steering me into oncoming traffic.
That car also thought I was sleeping when I wore sunglasses and again tried to kill me by scaring me with the loudest beep to ‘wake me up’ again.
If that is how well this tech works it is not adding any safety. Quite the opposite actually.
I also really started to wonder how bad the government ageny that tests these cars operates to certify this safety risk on wheels.
I have a car from 2020 with most of the “modern” safety features. I have most of them off, but I do like the radar cruise control, makes long trips less stressful since it will adapt to traffic in front of me.
Maybe if half of it didn’t spy on you …
Lane keep assist has been around since about the 00s I believe and adaptive cruise and emergency braking since the 90s. That’s not the tech that’s spying on you lol
Lane assist makes people complacent and inattentive. If you aren’t going to pay attention to driving then don’t sit behind the wheel.
When it was created, this was true. However, now cars have systems that log just about everything you do and send it to the manufacturer, who then sells it on to insurance, ICE, anyone with money.
So it started off ok, but now I would imagine that if your car has a sensor, it is reporting data back to that central telemetry unit which is sending it up up and away.
Then they’ll just report to the insurance that you turned it off and also report all the sensor data anyway.
And you can just rip out the antennas for the telemetry and that won’t magically make your safety systems stop working.
You can switch off the safety systems if you want to, but don’t pretend you’re doing it for privacy reasons.
So you are sure that no one can access the cameras used for that?
It’s more “is it practical to access the cameras” than “can someone access the cameras”.
Look at it this way… How are “they” going to access your cameras? Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle, and upload realtime video data from multiple cameras in real time? Maybe for one car, but to do it for every car, they would end up choking out all the cell towers in an area. What about storing your data in the car and accessing it later? Well, storage is relatively cheap, but when you add in the compute required to encode that video, and depending on how much you want to store, it could easily be a few hundred dollars to include all that, and let’s face it, manufacturers want to cut costs, so who is going to pay for it? To top it off, if this repository of compute and storage existed, computer nerds would have found it and publicized it, so it seems unlikely to me that it exists for most cars. Finally, what data would “they” hope to get from real time-video of your car that is not already documented in other ways? The GPS unit can log your position and velocity with ease, your phone is an active listening device that follows you everywhere, so there are simpler and cheaper ways to get the same useful data as a realtime camera feed of the side of the road that don’t involve some huge conspiracy.
Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle
Yes, they have a mobile broadband connection in your vehicle. Selling your data more than covers the cost for them.
Well, the cars all have modems and quite a lot of processing. They don’t need to send a lot of data anywhere to check if it has seen familiar faces.
Modern cars are literally cameras with wheels.
I will admit that changing the settings on the safety tech changes nothing in this regard.
Cameras sound like a really expensive and inefficient way to gauge distance and speed differential between yourself and another object. I doubt many cars (besides, famously, Tesla) use cameras for LKAS or ACC.
I’m not even sure if they use cameras for driver attention systems.
Cameras are always used for LKAS, even things like Waymo mix cameras with LIDAR. That’s the only way to see the lines on the road, etc.
Now for ACC that’s always radar except for newish Tesla. Same with blind spot monitoring and parking sensors unless those are ultrasonic or something, but not cameras except for Tesla.
See comma.ai how one can basically do LKAS and adaptive cruise with one camera, but IME it typically uses the radar based ACC built into the car already.
They are used, not exclusively except by Tesla, but yeah. Lane keep is legit hard to do without a camera, acc is OK but using a multi sensor system is a lot more reliable.
My “parking assist” feature got immediately turned off when it slammed on the brakes because I backed into a parking spot and it saw the concrete parking block 6ft behind me…
I got out of the car thinking an animal had ran under a tire where I couldn’t see it, then figured out it was just the car being “helpful”.
AND that’s the problem with “safety” tech. It doesn’t act as an assistant it acts as a nanny. A nanny that makes mistakes. Sometimes harmless, sometimes irritating, and sometimes dangerous. Each driver should be allowed to decide what level of assistance they need/want without being forced or shamed about it. If we can’t trust drivers to drive then maybe we shouldn’t have cars and should redirect resources to public transportation infrastructure instead. (Personally I’m very on board with the latter.)
“Safety tech”. OK. I was visiting a mate in the states, and the rental gave me a Nissan. Apparently, there’s a lot of construction going on in that state, and the Nissan tried to literally run me, at 100kmh, into a median, because it recognized the (clearly) scratched off lane markers and not the (clearly) newly painted lane markers. I had to use nearly all my upper body strength (whatever little of it I had left after a 13hr trip), to force the wheel to the left and away from death. And that fucker bitched at me the entire time! would have 100% died. All because of their fucking “safety” tech. I turned that shit off as soon as I parked. All of it. I’m still so angry at them for that shit.
I hate lane assist, its so irritating. Worst thing is: in my skoda you cant turn it off for good, every time you shut of the engine it resets to default, which means lane assist on.
After my skirt with death because of this thing, it’s a ‘no sale’ feature.
The safety tech is not mature enough, simple as. People turn it off because of the false positives and general nagging behavior
This is the correct answer. Most of this stuff is half baked at best.
Really depend on the safety tech. My partner’s Honda Civic is so bad, that turning off CMBS (Collision Mitigation Braking System) and LKAS (Lane Keep Assist System) is essential to operating the car safely, as accidentally leaving these systems on has almost wrecked the car on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the same systems on my fake Mustang work great. Sometimes backing out of the driveway, it will panic and warn me that I might crash into the ground, but it doesn’t slam the brakes. The hands-free driving is actually really good, and a feature I would continue to use if it wasn’t several hundred dollars a year. In comparison to Honda, Ford’s safety tech is much more predictable and reliable.
This is my personal experience with two cars that I drive relatively frequently, so other people may have other opinions and experiences that are completely valid.
For me they have often created a more dangerous situation than the one I was already working on unfucking
I know a couple people who one could describe as “twat” who turn off traction control and abs, thinking they are going to be rally drivers on the way to McDonalds. They tend to end up in the ditch.
Subaru has been good. The lane warning was the only thing we turned off because it was just obnoxious. If something is beeping constantly and erratically, what’s the point? The lane centering had a tendency to pull towards semis when passing but that seems to have been fixed in an update. The only other thing that is more a quality of life is a way easily and preemptively to turn off the backup warning and breaking assist when pulling a trailer.
