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At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
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.
Not even that. They know the laws are stupid. They don't care. It's just another day at work for them. They're trying to surgically write laws to garner support/votes from shorsighted hand wringing Karens (plenty of examples in HN comments) while also not actually hurting industry/donors.
So stupid rules and stupid beeps are what you get.
Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?
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.
Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.
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 also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!
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! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!
I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!
1. https://www.austockphoto.com.au/image/40-when-lights-flash-s...
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.
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.
I often complain about the lack of buttons, but my car actually has a dedicated button to turn this safety feature off.
IIRC, veering from the lane is the cause of most collisions, so it makes sense to have this.
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.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
MOST of the time it's good about telling when I'm looking and when I'm not, out of maybe... 5 alerts over the previous 8 months all, but one occurred when I was in fact looking away for one reason or another. Likewise when it's correct my lane-keeping it's been right about me drifting.
Given how inattentive I see other drivers being, on their phones for example, and taking into account that I'm (based on my record) a good driver who is attentive... I appreciate these additions. I doubt that they make us less safe, we just dislike anyone or anything telling us how to drive, because "we already know what we're doing." The subjective experience of being distracted however isn't usually so clear-cut, it FEELS like you're paying attention.
Note: This is a new model Lexus, so I expect this represents that brand as well as Toyota, but beyond that I don't know.
The nagging is ridiculous. I’m actually not quite sure what lane assist does, but if I look at my side mirror it chastises me for not being attentive. It also has locked up the brakes and made me think I hit somebody when backing into my driveway.
I wish I had fixed the Honda!
I might also be safer in it - oversensitive security systems nagging me with false positives almost constantly don't pair well with my ADD
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.
And yeah I enjoy having my car shut the hell up and let me drive.
Last year, or the year before, Texas dropped emissions testing, except in its most populous counties.
As a Canadian that did a road trip through the balkans over the winter, the rental car was constantly beeping at me for something. It was misreading signs and due to the bad weather (it was during a huge snowstorm in January) the roads weren't very clear and it was constantly confused. I also had some very unhappy drivers (especially in Albania) furiously trying to get around me, causing the car to further slow down to "avoid collisions". I was already stressed enough driving through countries with mixed driving records, but any actual defensive driving caused the car to nag me.
Sorry in advance to any Bulgarians, of which the car had plates from, for probably tarnishing your reputation.
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).
Also, I think the issue with it stopping the car sounds like ‘collision avoidance forward safety’ which can be disabled according to the manual. I haven’t had any issues so far though.
I also disable lane assist but largely just because I prefer to have full control. The highway driving assist is really neat though.
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.
At this point I'm contemplating finding a a late 60s/early 70s Beetle - or some other car with no more complex electronics in it than headlight switches and dizzy/points type ignition. Nobody is gonna be able to sewt that to remote brick itself when it thinks I'm ignoring it's incessant beeping.
Is there any cross-referencing to an onboard GPS database? GPS-based speed alerts are a feature of base-model Hyundais/Kias in Canada, so it doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch for a failsafe.
I drive a 1991 Honda Prelude and I don't think I'll want to drive anything else probably ever.
I bought a 2017 Kia Forte S recently.. ($4000 for 137K miles) no touch screen, but many safety features that are not too bad like radar collision detection and blindspot warning. 2019 they started with the touchscreen, and in 2023 they added "Kia Connect" with OTA updates. Anyway definitely check the year.
Problem with 2008 is some cars didn't even have Bluetooth audio or backup camera yet (like my 2010 VW CC- I had to add an aftermarket radio).
Also don't get direct inject only engine. At least for Kias, the non-turbo engines are much more reliable (but underpowered for sure).
The lane assist can also become confused by shadows created by a fence next to the road when the sun is just slightly above the horizon. The car thought I was driving between two roads and tried to steer me to the side, but it was a single lane highway. That was the last time I had it enabled.
And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.
is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?
Ah, did your car pick up the speed limit sign on the French auto-route for… motorcycles filtering between lanes too?
Some of their implementations, such as lane keeping, are good enough to keep. Others, such as speed limit detection, aren’t (though it’s much better at French speed limits than UK ones, which I suppose makes sense).
I would assume all such cars have an option to turn this off.
But I still appreciate the convenience of not having to keep an eye on the speed nor the distance between the my car and the vehicles in front of me when driving on the freeway, where it generally doesn't make mistakes.
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?
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.
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.
I bought the model with no internet connection, so the speed limit is automatically read by the front camera, and it's usually wrong. Although the alarm can be disabled, it still shows a distracting visual warning on the dashboard. I covered mine with duck tape, but now everyone who goes into the car asks me why I'm covering a warning with duck tape, and I have to explain them every time.
I converted the car into a camper, but some digital features are always on, even when the car is off.
For example, the car continuously detects the wireless key, so I bought some Faraday cage wallets to store them while we sleep. However, they don't work, so at the end I had to make my own Faraday cage wallets with aluminum foil and duck tape (yeah, in this project I found that duck tape is really versatile).
Another issue that really bothers me is that the car detects movement, even when it is completely off. Whenever I'm sleeping and I change position, the center screen lights on, some relays start to click, and some fan runs for a couple of seconds. Then, after ~10 seconds everything turns off again. It drives me crazy.
I got this car just because I wanted something shorter than 4.5m (but that could fit a 120 x 190 cm bed), with a reliable engine (this is a 1.6L from 2005, created by Renault & Nissan, without any known issues), and without internet connection. I reviewed hundreds of cars, and this was basically our only option in our country.
New cars with intrusive driver monitoring alerts are obviously going to be terrible but you can still buy vehicles made prior to this change.
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.
Also happens it gets confused with freshly painted white/yellow lines when older are still visible.
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.
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.
How do you tell if someone is driving drunk?
They are driving straight!
With the unspoken part being anyone NOT drunk was weaving to dodge debris, potholes, etc.
So, yeah, it's done badly some of the time. But it at least can be done well.
I cannot tell you how many times I've punched the steering wheel. I want to find that source of beeping and rip its goddamn guts out of the system. Then I want to find who put it there and rip their guts too. I will rip their infernal existence out of this dimension.
And fuck cameras. Blatant privacy violation, how is this getting past legislation?
I prefer the term "lane insist"
So then you're driving in Germany at 200km/h and the camera picks up the 90km/h and brakes aggressively.
I absolutely hate it.
After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ minutes. If I locked the doors, the interior lights would shut off, but it would automatically roll up all of the windows. Examples of "features" that are infuriating.
Here's the text describing the system: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
It specifically mentions that it is illegal to use the cameras from such system to identify the person. It is pretty much the opposite of what people think its going to do.
I am sorry you don't like that its not 1984 law but the discussion is bullshit, which means in that instead of 1984 dystopia we are getting the Brave new world dystopia where bullshit prevails in the brave new world.
I am sick and tired of BS rage bates of the endless entertainment; I would take 1984 dystopia anytime, at least we would know who the bad guys are.
I was a bit scared by reading on internet people complaining about cars full of electronics, it's been a bless for me, for real
useful context, I live in Naples, Italy, it's a city made for horses
I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
> 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
Examples include some version of "They want us to act like slaves" or "They want to control our minds".
More often than not the simplest explanation is short-sighted profit motive, or institutional dysfunction, or multiple parties with conflicting motivations with no central agenda. It's far less likely to be a grand coordinated conspiracy.
What is their motive for wanting to "force people out of cars"?
Where I live (city in the PNW), bike lanes see heavy use year-round.
It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.
The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".
Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.
And who doesn't want the safest car?
At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)
I think your comment and the one you were answering to explain it very well.
Don't buy car that sucks.
That was different in the early sw versions, where blocking it would simply do nothing, so I had a 3D printed thing to block the camera.
I think an in-car breathalyzer which gates the ignition would also save a lot of lives.
Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction. Other people say the same about the diverted driving detector, and I imagine others said the same about the seatbelt sensor.
The intersection of personal freedom and personal safety is an interesting topic, I don't think there's a right answer and it's ultimately pretty subjective.
> Most people agree that kind of manufactured paternalism is an overreach and would be against its introduction.
Congress already passed a law in 2021 to start the process of requiring alcohol impairment detection in new cars around 2030 - the HALT Drunk Driving Act. It had broad, bipartisan support. I would say "most people agree" does not appear to be the case.
This is the exact opposite of my experience! The one time I tried BlueCruise, it went into "panic mode" every time I turned my head to check my blindspots.
Given the general state of auto manufacturer software I would fully expect something like this to be janky and unreliable. It might work in some conditions on some faces but also perform abysmally in many other scenarios.
Well if they hadn't removed climate control buttons, this would not be a concern!
Not being able to easily adjust climate settings is very much a safety concern. And the fact that it beeps at you is them acknowledging it!
Probable especially if it gets drunk drivers off the road but I, for one, would be deeply uncomfortable driving knowing my every twitch is recorded and _more importantly_ open to misinterpretation in case of a claim. I could easily believe otherwise averagely fine drivers being negatively affected by this if the surveillance takes up headspace.
Observation affects systems but not always for the better.
I also wonder how well this fares under night driving conditions where the inside of the car has poor exposure.
Related: https://petapixel.com/2025/07/11/dutch-woman-fined-500-after...
It's really not. When I'm cruising on the highway I like to rest my right wrist on the top of the wheel, which blocks the sensor.
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
"Watch the road"
Won't this shatter your wrist if your airbag deploys? I remember being taught to hold the sides of the wheel in driving class.
I'm listening to an audio through a webpage, as soon as I change the volume it starts my last music. This is really annoying. I should guess the right volume, unlock my phone, resume my audio. Old physical volume knobs only changed the volume, not start one of the few apps they know about.
Oh and if I've been listening to loud music and now someone's in the car, I can't lower the volume without starting the music. I want to start with a low volume and then increase it.
These are some of the many stupid UX decisions. I would still not drive an old car. Especially ICE. But would pray that the equivalent of Frame.work appears, I can get an open source car with an open source infotainment.
With Chevrolet starting to sell DIY EV packages and the general simplification of the mechanics of EV cars, I believe such a thing would eventually happen.
Kia will tell me my doors are unlocked when I'm at home.
Tesla has a set home feature. Plus the 50 other annoyances.
Regen doesn't even persist with kia. You have to press the paddle to add it every time you start the car.
All this to say, the only good ux car anymore is tesla. Too bad they leak all recordings and have privacy problems too.
I would assume that most people who live in a city would want to know when the Kia is unlocked at home. I think your dislike of that feature may reflect your residence type or garage type.
My experience of Tesla UX was poor, given how few manual controls were available, and the extensive touchscreen reliance required while driving.
All of the things you described work perfectly as you'd expect from good UX pov on a Tesla. And Rivian should not be far behind either.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.
So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?
But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.
P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
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.
Freakin' useless.
A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.
Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
From that article:
"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."
and
"only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function"
Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
The most recent regulatory disaster that blew up a bunch of startups was mandatory lane keep assist for trucks in overseas western markets, which meant all new startups needed fancy steering racks which are very much not off-the-shelf, and it virtually tripled the cost of the software stack too
>Article 6(3) of the GSR states that the system should be designed in such a way that it does not continuously record or retain data other than what is necessary for its purpose
I get that there are problems, but it doesn't sound that bad to me? Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people every year in Europe. If we can improve this 25% (more realistically, 10%) it's a huge step forward.
(Worst offenders: Japanese cars since they seem to take the regulations most seriously. Least annoying: generally BMW, Volvo, though they are both getting worse each year).
And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
I don't have a garage/drive way, and so have to park on the street, which makes me leans towards another short [1] vehicle: currently thinking about VW Golf, Mazda 3, Mazda CX-30, Kia Niro.
From what I've seen from almost all cars, lots more screens and lots fewer buttons.
[1] https://www.carsized.com/en/
They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
I can see why people didn't want them.
I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
By comparison today we have luxurious silk strands that don't pinch anywhere.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to ~fifty years of aging of the belt material. It's not as if the very first time we'd ever designed and installed an operator-safety belt was in the 1970s... so it'd be very surprising if the designers chose to make them stiff blades. Your description is also at odds with how I've seen people handle and use seatbelts in motion pictures from the era... from what I've seen, those belts look to me to be reasonably flexible.
I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
Of course, one wonders what the car does if the camera is blocked with a post-it. Will it just not work, or fall back on something else, like pressure at the steering wheel, like Tesla does ?
Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most.
A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though. I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps.
I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.
Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.
Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.
> They found it fires on ordinary driving, not just distracted driving.
> Glance away from an empty highway to take in the scenery, or look at the infotainment screen to change a song, and the warning goes off anyway.
Like, isn't that the point, that if you aren't looking at the road it should go off?
It's an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, that also coincidentally helps advance the surveillance state more than it does help prevent distracted driving.
Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
It goes off all the time. And each time, my hands are on the steering wheel.
It doesn't actually detect contact - it checks to see if you're actively adjusting the steering wheel.
Except I don't need to! The lane keep assist is so good that it's rare I have to give it additional help.
So - I kid you not - I've gotten used to giving a nudge to the steering wheel every so many seconds to prevent that warning (you cannot disable it).
Imagine a car gave you cruise control, and then checked if you were paying attention by requiring you to press down on the accelerator every so many seconds. Does that make sense?
That is a seriously broken control system. It should be keeping you in the center of the lane and not make you fight against the car.
It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
Lower damage potential of small and light cars compared to SUVs does not seem to give them a free pass to skip the sprawling driver assistance regulations.
End of story...
Honestly, I'm all for more automated system while driving because I drive but I also bike and walk. Some people are complete nuts that shouldn't have their license and the least you can do is hold their hand, with as much algorithm as you can, like they are toddlers driving a 3 Tonne car.
Because it'll beep.
If you cut a wire, expect the car company + insurance company to become aware of the "mod" you did. Expect the car to simply not start anymore. Expect the local authorities to be notified.
We need to stop this nonsense at the legislation level, not after the fact.
"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
I dunno if that'll fly going forward. I know I'll test it in every new car with this feature that I test drive though!
Sometimes i forget the lane assist ON and get nudged randomly at high speeds, so so scary.
The scariest was when I had to swerve into another lane to avoid some trash that was sticking into the road from the highway. It tried to force me back into it twice! Luckily I was ready but it gave me a fright for sure.
But my 12 lb bucket of brain cells guiding itself, and other lives, is the wrong tool for the job of staying in between the two bright lines.
Self-driving, here we come.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
3) Enjoy
I will start now but I think not for long. “For your own safety we disabled your car”.
This is precisely why you should not want an Internet-connected car. It isn't truly yours if it can be "upgraded" behind your back through a backdoor.
3) Do not buy car
3.5) Buy a different car
3.75) There are no different cars
4) Buy an old car from 2014 and maintain it carefully
4.25) Give up driving
4.5) Become a hermit
In general tampering with safety equipment is not legal, enforcement is another thing.
I'm not a fan of people giving poor advice online.
EU has a while to go to become the surveillance capital I think.
In the US, it is MY job and no one else's to make sure I don't fall asleep driving my own car. In the same way it's my job to make sure I don't leave my stove on and burn down the apartment building. Should we also install cameras on every stove in every apartment?
If the US government tried to force-install cameras into our cars to watch us, there'd be a revolution.
Car: You appear to be suffering from acne. Try Zit-away, available at the convenience store in 2.4 kilometers.
Car: Facial recognition failed. Car is now disabled. Contact your car dealer to reenable vehicle.
You have a camera aimed at your face when typing this nonsense post.
Not everyone is on their phone, or a laptop.
On a site for tech enthusiasts, there are a shocking amount of folks with very "tech is what you get at the Apple Store" mindsets about.
I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
Interesting priorities...
It felt like total security theater, which a huge surveillance tech vector as well. I will do my damnedest to never ever buy a car with this anti-feature. If I ever have to I'm sure those beeps will either get disabled one way or another, or eventually be completely filtered out by my brain like other predictably useless sounds are.
Selling it to Flock makes you a criminal who needs to go to prison, but they'll probably find a way around that.
Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.
[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
Considering how many mk7 golfs were made over the years it'll be easy to just get another one for the next decade. I'd also consider the Hyundai ioniq 5 or 6 which have a shortcut on the steering wheel to just disable all the nanny crap.
You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?
If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.
In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars. On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.
I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.
The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.
Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.
In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.
I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:
>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494
"New government mandate paves way for additional government mandate" is about as straightforward a slippery slope argument as you can get.
Slippery slope arguments don't require the eventual fear (e.g. cameras recording you) to be present in the current form, otherwise it wouldn't be a slope.
also: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+slippery+slope+mea...
Also, cameras are receivers. Nothing happens when cameras are aimed at your face, it is only significant when you are interested with the received image and it actually nothing happens, it is processed on device to see if you are tired/distracted/asleep.
Here is the actual text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng
They mention that cameras are required when testing the systems compliance but does not specify how these systems should work.
If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
And I triple hate that we've helped develop the technology that powers it.
In hindsight, it was inevitable.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I was in a rental car recently that was filled with random chimes going off. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was sure a nuisance and took my mind off the road.
People cannot even criticize the surveillance state: we're at that point.
It's "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys, always ever state-loving.
"ChatControl 2.0 ain't that bad because it's not mandatory"
"A camera in every car ain't that bad because the recordings won't necessarily be shared"
It's sickening. I'm tired of you people.
It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the same place as well, and in relation to the marked edges of the road, which often isn't the natural placing in curves and so on. As a consequence roads likely need maintenance more often, and as a proficient driver that does not let the car have opinions about placement on the road one commonly has much smaller margins when placing the car in the nice trajectory through a curve due to the sunken lanes from the assisted cars.
Sure, don't nag a pilot who is already very well backstopped by the existing solutions. Your uncle coming back from the bar at 2am doesn't have any of that.
I actually suggested a solution like this 2 years ago, because so many drivers are bad at signaling. I wanted a camera that used machine learning to learn a driver's cues when they're making a turn, and eventually it would be able to activate the signals for the driver.
I'm sick and tired of standing on the side of the road with my dog and waiting for a car just for it to make a turn. FOAD
I am rarely in a rush, if a car signals I will allow it to turn, I will stand back and wait, no problem. But 80% of them are really bad at this.