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.