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 can’t back up my own driveway with “maneuvering assist” enabled or it slams on the brakes every time it gets close to a completely harmless fern on the passenger side. Every time it happens it’s so infuriating that I could actually scream. So it’s now off.
Yeah, same. And this article is playing like thats on us.
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.
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.
One interesting finding relates to driving modes. While almost all new cars have them, just 27.3 percent of respondents say they regularly use their vehicle’s driving mode. Those aged 25 to 34 were more likely to use them, at 38.3 percent.
so what, all these people are always driving in reverse…??
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!
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.
I had way more issues with phantom braking in the 3 months it was enabled than I’ve had with actually crashing in 20 years of driving.
I want graded licences so people who have no crashes don’t get forcibly subjected to bad technology just because those that can’t drive need it.
Some of the safety tech has tried to kill me twice, due to glitching itself, so I have had to turn it off. 🤷♂️
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’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.
In this topic, people not being able to spell ‘brake’
If it’s a white suburban kid with a blonde millennial mom it’s spelled Breighkh
give me a brake!
Well, we are trying to brake the record!
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.
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.)