Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
That’s interesting. OP implied they can’t be disabled but now I see it was specifically hardware vise.
Does the car still complain if the camera is covered when these are disabled?
I was very interested in this car and tested it for about a week, the first thing I did was put a piece of black tape over the sensor. It does not complain, it doesn’t notice.
If the systems are enabled, it warns you that it doesn’t work, which is every time you start the car until you press the button.
I have no idea what kind of data this car gathers but out of all the cars I’ve shopped for lately this one was definitely the least intrusive of them all. The fact that this car in particular shows up here is kinda wild to me.
I didn’t end up getting it because the trim levels are weird.