My car is a 2017 base with stick shift. No lane assist, just abs and traction control.
Git gud.
Lane keep drives me of the fucking road when it’s sunny and the cameras can’t see straight.
Automatic braking loses it because of shadows but misses the goddamn elk.
I really love adaptive cruise, but i can see how many people (especially with lane centring) tune out - and make it a liability.
What most people don’t do is drive many vehicles. The difference between safety features on cars - and it’s not always price that is the differentiator - is staggering. Stability control isn’t the same between a Toyota and a BMW. Not halfway. A $90,000 GM and a $15,000 smart car are generations apart - the smart wins, at least on traction control. Unfortunately it’s not easy to test all these features empirically.
It’s no wonder people turn it off.
My favorite was when a car runs a yellow light at the same time I ease my foot off the brake to get the engine started in preparation for going forward. The autostart and brake assist had a little tiff of errors and stalled the vehicle… I had to turn the engine off and restart it to reset it.
That was great.
So lane assist is off, adaptive cruise control is off, driver attention is off (with some electrical tape over the fucking stupid thing) and brake assist is off. The only things on is the blind spot monitoring because that sort of works and the backup camera.
Last time I was had a rental car, I was driving down a rural curvy road with no traffic. So I cut the corners whenever visibility allowed it. The computer freaked the fuck out and finally turned off after tossing a “Maintenance needed error”. I laughed my ass off over that one.
The study found 58.3 percent of buyers say they couldn’t live without Bluetooth connectivity
Strange, when smartphones no longer come with 3.5 mm sockets… The consumer never asked for the majority of these “features”: they already had access to most of them (through their smartphone or other standalone device), or was easily and cost-effectively installed as an aftermarket gadget. All of these “safety” features, that coincidentally also happen to constitute a (future) privacy-nightmare, were pushed for by: legislators, insurance companies, and the automotive industry itself. Consumers effectively got conned into buying a duplicate of products they already owned, but which are instead subject to terms and conditions dictated by aforementioned stakeholders.
I can deal with every other safety feature, but lane assist can fuck right off.
Most of this tech is way to intrusive, and a good chunk of drivers have become to reliant on it in some cases.
Hell, I know people that have no idea how to reverse a car if it does not have a rear view camera. Completely forgot how mirror functioned, and this goes for both older folks and the younger drivers.
Adaptive cruise control emergency braked when a vehicle in the lane next to me slowed. Turned that right the fuck off. Lane assist confused trying to go straight on a bend in the road. Turned that right the fuck off.
Every time it intervenes, it makes things worse. They have a 99% false positive rate.
The lane keeper fucks up and tries to drive on the shoulder, driver turns it off, research group acts surprised that it’s turned off
I had a few times where my lane assist thinks I’m turning when coming up on a left turn lane for some reason.
I’m never turning that shit off though. I’ll deal with the random beeps and resistance if I get too close to the line or something.
I remember reading a reddit thread a couple years ago where someone legitimately asked “what if there’s a bicyclist on the road?” I replied with the proper precautions to take when that happens, and the same dumbass replied with “but the beeps are annoying if I try to go over the line when lane assist is on!”
I was driving home from the dealership after buying my last car, and the second I felt the wheel jerk out of my hands to take a corner on the highway differently than I typically do (I still stay in the lane, ofc), that shit got turned off and will never be reenabled. One of the most dangerous things is the car doing something unexpected while someone is driving and they try to correct/overcorrect for it out of shock/surprise and cause a crash.
Yeah this happened to me too when I drove my ex’s car. Cars should not be jerking the wheel. The sensors are notoriously inaccurate at sunrise/sunset when the sun is glaring right in the sensors, and it causes glitches. Especially in wet conditions where the road is slippery and there’s reflected glare as well… almost spun out from that shit once when I tried to turn and the car said NOPE and jerked me back into the straight lane. This was with indicators, mind you.
I also remember one time we were driving on the freeway and the car suddenly spotted an “invisible fake ghost pedestrian”, and SLAMMED on the brakes. Like screeching halt from 80kmph (50mph) in the middle of the busy road. Dunno how on earth we didn’t cause an accident; the people behind us were locked in or something.
Never drove that car again, fuck that. My ex likes that unruly beast for some reason; though they also liked horse riding, which features vehicles that are similarly unpredictable and dangerous, so I suppose it makes sense. I’m ok with beeping, that’s fine and a sensible warning feature I can choose to ignore if it’s wrong. I’m not ok with the car wrenching control of the vehicle out of my hands
In our car, there’s three levels of lane assist.
- Hey, try to stay in the lines. If you start to veer, the steering wheel will do the smallest corrections and vibrate a lot.
- The car will actively help keep you in the middle of the lane. (I mostly turn this on if I’m swapping my prescription glasses for sunglasses, then it goes right off again).
- Same as #2, but if you put on a turn signal to change lanes the car auto changes when it’s clear. (If you put your signal on with all this off and a car is in your blind spot it freaks out with beeps and vibrations).
I fucking hate #3. The only good part is it forces you to turn on the turn indicator. It both wants your hands on the wheel for the maneuver, but also will cancel the change if it feels any “driver correction”.
There are two roads mine is always trying to turn down on my way home from work. I keep meaning to go that route during a not busy time of day to see if it actually makes the turn if I don’t stop it or if it will just jog to the right a bit.
There are a bunch of black squiggly lines on the road from repairs and it gets confused there.
I turn it on when I’m on the highway. In the city, our roads are way too fucked up for it to work.
I also have an auto emergency brake, and that’s gone off when it doesn’t need to once or twice, but I’m not disabling that one. I’d rather get rear-ended than hit someone.
I like the one that thinks wet potholes are pedestrians so it will just stop while I’m fucking driving in traffic. Absolutely beautiful technology you got there.
I especially love the ones that beep all the fucking time and shake my steering wheel into thinking I blew a tire cause these motherfuckers think my shitty roads with poorly marked lane dividers are me drifting off the road.
The real icing on the cake are the new cameras facing the driver who ask me to remove sunglasses when driving on a sunny day to confirm my eyes are on the road.
Holy shit, fuck car manufacturers! I am never buying any of these smart ass cars.
Source: I rent a lot of new cars with the shittiest features you can imagine.
That’s a great summary of why so many people don’t use these features.
The emergency braking I understand, I’ve driven some downright paranoid vehicles with that tech.
I can’t stand lane assist that tries to keep you in the lane by actually moving or vibrating the steering wheel. To me, it feels like the car is slipping. That shit gets turned off right away. But I have driven some cars where the lane assist just beeps, and doesn’t force the wheel at all, I can deal with that.
I find HUDs extremely distracting, they get turned off too.
Adaptive Cruise Control is extremely useful, I love that one.
Pro tip, if you signal when you change lane it stops the wheel vibrating. As a bonus it lets other drivers know what you’re planning on doing.
I drove a Transit that had the vibrating steering wheel. Hated it. The lane assist didn’t even work right anyway so that got turned off pretty quickly.
My daily driver is a 2003, I had to buy an aftermarket stereo to get Bluetooth. Recently I borrowed a friend’s Tesla for a week, and that was a god damned hostile experience. Shift into reverse - from a touchscreen, mind - and suddenly the entire cabin comes alive with beeps and pings, the dashboard changes to 3 different cameras, none of which show me what’s happening to the sides of the car. The 3d overview diagram does almost a good enough job, but is that a trash can, a person, or a telephone pole? The computer isn’t sure. On top of that, the blind spots are huge and the back window is tiny and heavily tinted, so I have to use the screens to some extent. If I was my car, I’d have turned half that shit off.
Or said another way, 80% of drivers leave them on/use them. That sounds pretty good to me.
Most people probably don’t know how to turn them off
It’s about finding the balance. If it’s constantly annoying and bothersome people will turn it off. If it’s in the background and ready when needed, then awesome.
My wife’s car (I’m sure a lot of others do too) lets you fine tune the help. I left on most of it after turning it down a bit - for me, she sets her own.
I still trust drivers more than I trust tech.
