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.
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.
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’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.
“Safety tech”. OK. I was visiting a mate in the states, and the rental gave me a Nissan. Apparently, there’s a lot of construction going on in that state, and the Nissan tried to literally run me, at 100kmh, into a median, because it recognized the (clearly) scratched off lane markers and not the (clearly) newly painted lane markers. I had to use nearly all my upper body strength (whatever little of it I had left after a 13hr trip), to force the wheel to the left and away from death. And that fucker bitched at me the entire time! would have 100% died. All because of their fucking “safety” tech. I turned that shit off as soon as I parked. All of it. I’m still so angry at them for that shit.
I hate lane assist, its so irritating. Worst thing is: in my skoda you cant turn it off for good, every time you shut of the engine it resets to default, which means lane assist on.
After my skirt with death because of this thing, it’s a ‘no sale’ feature.
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.
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!
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.)
Maybe if half of it didn’t spy on you …
Lane keep assist has been around since about the 00s I believe and adaptive cruise and emergency braking since the 90s. That’s not the tech that’s spying on you lol
When it was created, this was true. However, now cars have systems that log just about everything you do and send it to the manufacturer, who then sells it on to insurance, ICE, anyone with money.
So it started off ok, but now I would imagine that if your car has a sensor, it is reporting data back to that central telemetry unit which is sending it up up and away.
Then they’ll just report to the insurance that you turned it off and also report all the sensor data anyway.
And you can just rip out the antennas for the telemetry and that won’t magically make your safety systems stop working.
You can switch off the safety systems if you want to, but don’t pretend you’re doing it for privacy reasons.
Lane assist makes people complacent and inattentive. If you aren’t going to pay attention to driving then don’t sit behind the wheel.
So you are sure that no one can access the cameras used for that?
It’s more “is it practical to access the cameras” than “can someone access the cameras”.
Look at it this way… How are “they” going to access your cameras? Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle, and upload realtime video data from multiple cameras in real time? Maybe for one car, but to do it for every car, they would end up choking out all the cell towers in an area. What about storing your data in the car and accessing it later? Well, storage is relatively cheap, but when you add in the compute required to encode that video, and depending on how much you want to store, it could easily be a few hundred dollars to include all that, and let’s face it, manufacturers want to cut costs, so who is going to pay for it? To top it off, if this repository of compute and storage existed, computer nerds would have found it and publicized it, so it seems unlikely to me that it exists for most cars. Finally, what data would “they” hope to get from real time-video of your car that is not already documented in other ways? The GPS unit can log your position and velocity with ease, your phone is an active listening device that follows you everywhere, so there are simpler and cheaper ways to get the same useful data as a realtime camera feed of the side of the road that don’t involve some huge conspiracy.
Well, the cars all have modems and quite a lot of processing. They don’t need to send a lot of data anywhere to check if it has seen familiar faces.
Modern cars are literally cameras with wheels.
I will admit that changing the settings on the safety tech changes nothing in this regard.
Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle
Yes, they have a mobile broadband connection in your vehicle. Selling your data more than covers the cost for them.
Cameras sound like a really expensive and inefficient way to gauge distance and speed differential between yourself and another object. I doubt many cars (besides, famously, Tesla) use cameras for LKAS or ACC.
I’m not even sure if they use cameras for driver attention systems.
Cameras are always used for LKAS, even things like Waymo mix cameras with LIDAR. That’s the only way to see the lines on the road, etc.
Now for ACC that’s always radar except for newish Tesla. Same with blind spot monitoring and parking sensors unless those are ultrasonic or something, but not cameras except for Tesla.
See comma.ai how one can basically do LKAS and adaptive cruise with one camera, but IME it typically uses the radar based ACC built into the car already.
They are used, not exclusively except by Tesla, but yeah. Lane keep is legit hard to do without a camera, acc is OK but using a multi sensor system is a lot more reliable.
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.
This makes me sound like I’m irresponsible. I’m not, I just happen to have a car with dangerously poorly designed “safety tech”.
My car has sign recognition, cruise control, and lane keep assist. I use a single one, and one I can’t turn off permanently.
Lane keep assist insists on making me drive way too far left, so I turned it off after it tried to kill me by forcing me into a super wide load truck coming towards me.
Cruise control keeps wanting to switch setting to the recognised speed limit. But it picks up all sorts of stuff. So driving by a highway on ramp will make it suggest that I put the speed limiter to 130km/h, on a 70km/h road. But turning off sign recognition requires me to go through several menus and is reset when I park.
On top of that the speedometer is 4-5km/h too slow, so I’ll be going 84km/h according to the speedometer, my GPS says I’m going 80km/h, and I’ll go by a sign and the speed limiter will pop up suggesting that I set it to 80. And btw that the speedometer is displaying a faster speed than I’m going, has nothing to do with wheel circumference. The car’s odometer is spot on. If google maps says a trip is 300km then the odometer advances 300km, not 298 or 302.
It’s mind boggling how poorly designed most of these systems are. These are multi-billion dollar corporations and they can’t do a simple thing correctly for the most part when it comes to these systems.
For example, I don’t know why this isn’t the top and foremost thing but a car should NEVER be able to override when the human driver is trying to do. Sure, beep and adjust if veering out of the lane but as soon as any resistance it met by the wheel it should immediately turn off and let the driver do what they want to do.
Oh fuck yeah, I’ll be driving the posted 130km/h and it suddenly catches a fucking 40km/h speed limit sign from a roundabout from fuck-knows-where and tries to e-stop in the middle of the highway. God damnit Nissan. Audi on the other hand works more or less flawlessly. From the lane control to the matrix headlights, I really like the systems on Audi.
My car is from the same group as nissan. Luckily it doesn’t get to set the speed limiter automatically. If that was the case I’d traded it long ago.
Infiniti? I hate that fuckin’ auto reset speed warning every single time I turn the car on. I’m so glad my personal vehicle doesn’t have that.
Nissan is a decaying company and has been for decades now. They stopped making cars people wanted in the mid 00s and don’t make reliable cars like the other Japanese makes mostly do.
Meanwhile the Quashqai here in Denmark is roughly $54k USD.
Yeah… If the Qashqai was under 20k €, it would perhaps be acceptable. But essentially, base model, you’re paying 30k€ for a shitty FWD hatchback that has comparable fuel economy to my more spacious and heavy 20 year old wagon. Which has about twice the power. And all-wheel drive. And will last much longer, if maintained*.
The last noteworthy Nissans IMO were the GT-R and the Leaf. The GT-R ended its 18 year production run (yes, 18 years of a single model) last year and the Leaf has been outclassed by other cheap EVs for years now.
I also drove the Armada when I was in the US a few years ago. That’s supposed to be their flagship, the big bad SUV. Sure it had a V8 with a nice sound, but at like 50k miles or 80k ish kilometers, it was already falling apart…
Things were made worse when they decided to partner up with Mitsubishi and acquired a large stake in that company. Another dying company that hasn’t made anything noteworthy in decades and closed down production of their iconic models. Neither company has innovated in any meaningful way lately. No real advancement in engines, transmissions, etc…
*Knew someone with the previous gen Qashqai. Less than 10 years and 200k km and the engine was considered toast.
Yeah, it’s not a great vehicle. I’m fundamentally very unimpressed with it. Tbh I liked the Renault Captur more than this vehicle. I’ve driven a lot of different models of rentals in the past year, and I’d rank the Qashqai slightly above any of the Mercedes and below the VW family van. Audi at the top of the list, followed by the BMW X1, followed by the Captur.
I adore cruise control. I would literally sell that car if I had it. (or get a scan tool that can make that change permanant). What car is that?
I drove a newer rental car and tried all the safety assist features. I felt the same way after less than at hour of driving and turned everything except cruise and emergency brake off.
Don’t even get me started on how useless the voice control system was. The car voice control is usually significantry worse than the Google provided version. I frankly do not understand how Google has done such a garbage job. Voice control on Google seems to have gotten worse since it came out, not better. At least for actually getting things done rather than just asking silly questions. I can’t even effectively take a note on my motorcycle reliably by voice.
Headline should read “One in five drivers switch off ‘safety’ tech meant to appease lawyers in a lawsuit-happy culture”
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.
This title is so misleading as to be incorrect
When I was in Australia last year I was overwhelmed by how much modern cars beep at you. The worst offender by far was a 2025 Kia Carnival that had different beeps for every possible thing the system might label a driving error.
It was more distracting than helpful to be honest.
How about cleaning the snow off your car properly? I’ve seen plenty of drivers, in the USA, with covered headlights, rear lights, windows and half of the front windshield. If these lazy asshats do not know how to use an ice scrapper, pull them over and take their FOB/keys away.
