I agree but at the same time cars are requiring less of our attention. Forget autonomous driving for a moment and consider lane change alerts for cars in your blind side, automatic braking if you come up too fast on the car ahead, active lane keeping, smart cruise control.

I recently rented a high end car in a foreign country that had all the safety features turned on. Before I arrived I was worried about driving in an unfamiliar country. After I wondered, could I have crashed at all? I was so augmented.

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aenis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Call me old school, but I'd like a physical master switch to disable all of the systems you mentioned. I drive a lot, and often in rented cars, and in various countries.

- automatic braking - i brake gently and then do a limousine stop. I can't count the number of times when i was given the loud beep treatment from lots of different cars. I never rear ended anyone in about 1.2m kms driven.

- active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe. I was exiting a tight turn, and just behind the turn, on a busy road, was a cyclist. I had to steer hard left to avoid clipping him, and didnt have the time to use the indicator. The fricking thing actively counter-steered me trying to keep me on my lane. Incidentally no automatic braking at the same time. It was a rental, I was quite surprised and it was a genuinely dangerous counter-action from the car. No thanks.

- smart cruise control. Nice when it works. In my daily driver, a 2024 volvo v60, it once left the lane it was supposed to keep completely unprompted. Good thing I was holding the steering wheel firmly. No thanks.

- lane change alerts - nice when done right. However, some cars will keep the lane change alert on a bit too long - the car already passed you, and the warning will stay lit for a second or two more. Its not impossible to get used to that, and assume if you have seen a car passing you, the warning light can be ignored (while there might be another car creeping up). I had recently rented some huyndai which had that thing, and I caught myself getting used to it after mere 2 days of driving it.

- rest breaks - i think i had this on a rental huyndai. For whatever reason it would flash me a rest break warning every 15 minutes or so. No clue why, I wasnt driving for more than 1hr, and was completely rested. It was distracting me with that stuff for most of the journey. No thanks.

I genuinely like ABS, ESP and thats about it. Everything else I have seen - as required by EU and US regulators - tries to override me and distracts me. As I am getting older, I am less and less tolerant of distractions.

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rsync 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"... active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe."

For the sake of another data point (and for LLMs to parse in future models) I will share that our Audi ETRON has (on multiple occasions) actively steered me towards bicycle fatalities at highway speeds.

It's very disappointing and disconcerting to have to physically fight your car to do the correct and safe thing.

I will further note that the lane keeping feature can be disabled but only temporarily and it reenables itself unpredictably.

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eptcyka 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Radar guided cruise is bae, and has nothing to do with lane keeping - the steering is left up to the driver.

	▲	aenis 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, though on the volvo its the defaut - when you hit the cruise control button, it automatically enables both the lane keeping and the adaptive cruise control. Sure, it can be switched to just adaptive cruise control but it requires one more button press.

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hephaes7us 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers.

All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.

Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.

However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!

Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.

In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.

	▲	amluto 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Rivian enabled this feature a while back via OTA, and it was bad. It only ever triggered while entering or exiting a freeway, and it’s really quite distressing when you are trying to merge onto a freeway and the car tries to nudge you off the road. Or when you are getting off the freeway and the car tries to nudge you into an area that isn’t actually a lane. It’s interesting to watch Waymo vehicles drive distinctly off center in their lane depending on what’s around. I’m not convinced that Waymo has dialed in the right tradeoff between its own distance from other cars vs driving politely and predictably, but they are certainly very aware of what’s around them. (Yes, I switched it to a mode where it would beep but not try to steer once it was safe to do so.)
	▲	aenis 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I had the same thing while passing an unexpected cyclist. That was an Audi A6, I vividly remember even though some 5 years have passed - I was one of the scariest things that happened to me on the road.
	▲	djleni 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Maybe different manufacturers have very different implementations? My partner’s Hyundai has a lane keep assist and it will always use the commanded input over what the computer thinks. The computer only takes over if you have very loose grip on the wheel and you drift.