> 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.

That sounds like one of those situations where you just keep turning up the radio until the beeping goes away

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 gave up and just ignore all the blips. It also sometimes invents speed limit signs.

Imagine driving thru night with kids sleeping and suddenly car starts beeping.

Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?

ngl i think people should just read their car's manual

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.

> 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?!

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).

> 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.

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?

> 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.

The emissions tests only test to the level that the car was first registered (or produced) doesn't it?

Cash for Clunkers was not mandatory

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.

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).

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a minimum intrusiveness required by law, though. One could even say it's intrusive by design, depending on your perspective

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Legislation isn't for your personal benefit, silly. It's for the corporations.

some might even say "lame insist"

That sounds like the kind of feature where there's a setting buried in the menus for it.

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.

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

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"?

You forgot the bike lanes that take up road space but nobody uses. Every socialist mayor's favorite anti-car policy.

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.

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.

You'd know the bad guys are Eastasia. Or is it Eurasia?