- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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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.
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.
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.
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.)
25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on
I know someone with adaptive cruise control who technically turns it on, but only when there’s no car in front of them…
Nearly 18 percent steer clear of lane-keeping assist
I suspect these are also people who don’t like to use turn signals. They don’t like the car fighting their ill-advised lane change.
21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking
I’ve never experienced actual automatic braking, though I did have a car that had a fairly high false positive rate on the collision alert that could have inspired someone to turn it off, and could easily imagine it if the car actually did brake. There’s also people that are afraid it might have a false positive and turn it off pre-emptively.
Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.
I’m shocked that number is so low. I have so little interest in what my car’s voice assistant can do for me. In a family car I gave it a spin because it purported to be “fancier” but I didn’t like it and it was also pretty useless. I don’t see this as a big “meant to save their lives” thing, it’s just a gimmick.
Augmented reality head-up displays fare no better: 17.1 percent of drivers who have one refuse to turn it on
I know someone in this boat, they don’t like their view being obstructed, and the car model they wanted had this as base equipment. I would also say this is more gimmick than life saving. A glance to a speedometer or nav screen isn’t going to be a super risk thing so long as those displays are appropriately located, they don’t need to be right on the windshield.
massaging seats, just 22 percent say they use them regularly
Ok, really off the topic of the headline now. I have sat in a “massaging seat” in a car and am not surprised. It vaguely vibrates a bit, hardly worth anything.
only 22.4 percent use AR head-up displays when fitted
But they said AR HUD was rejected only by 17.1 percent of drivers? Guess the question would be what the definition of ‘used’ is if they have it on but somehow don’t “use” it?
24.5 percent use remote start functions
In many cases, this is of pretty limited utility. If it’s a keyfob-only capability, you have to be close enough to the car that, by that point, well you might as well get in and start it instead of digging out your keyfob. If it’s got a gas engine, then it’s not something you probably want to do out of sight. I will say for an electric car with internet controllable remote ‘start’, it’s nice to get it going while you are getting ready to leave at the end of a workday or when you are paying the check at a restaurant.
45.7 percent of respondents say they regularly use reversing cameras
I actually saw someone this week who spent years ignoring his backup camera finally decide that his back up camera was handy. He’s also the worst at parking I know, so here’s hoping he starts backing up with his camera and gets better…
41 percent use heated windshields.
So what do the rest do when their window fogs up otherwise? This seems… hard to believe.
This title is so misleading as to be incorrect
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Pictures are expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate, especially at a distance in a variable environment
Cameras inside the vehicle? Those might be worth mining for data. You can easily detect if there’s a person in frame, and snapshot all the passengers. Insurance and law enforcement would be interested in that
Cameras outside? You could search for human faces or license plates and upload them off peak hours… But how much is that information valuable? What percent of the time is a car even driving? Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?
Flock cameras just yield much more useful data… They’re designed to sit somewhere and capture those pictures. Even if public outcry gets them removed, they’re just going to wait until the public gets bored and then put up less noticeable cameras… We really need to fight this forever
All that being said, I have a car with no cameras and I’d only budge on that if the car reliably could drive itself. I don’t like having cameras pointed at me
Pictures are expensive (data wise)
not really. you don’t want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it’s not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.
expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate
debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes.
tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.But how much is that information valuable?
plenty valuable for “partners” like clearview AI and flock, or if you want to become a competitor in that field.
What percent of the time is a car even driving?
that’s a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.
Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?
how the fuck no. It’s less data than what people upload daily to youtube, funded from government money basically.
and then put up less noticeable cameras…
like cameras appearing nowhere any time, like camera cars.
to add to the image processing, first gen ryzen desktop CPUs can handle basic object classification on live camera feed. not effortlessly, but they handle it, and performance has only ever improved with time.
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.
“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.
Headline should read “One in five drivers switch off ‘safety’ tech meant to appease lawyers in a lawsuit-happy culture”
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 speed indicator is 4-5km/h too slow, so I’ll be going 84km/h according to the indicator, 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 the indicator 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.
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?
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 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.
because they are awful!
I got a car 2 months ago and i’m incredible frustrated by the automatic cruise control. it has two modes “ICC” and “ACC”. I have no idea about the difference but the thing keeps switching between them and alerting me with a red alert every time!
I stopped using it after two weeks
Did your car come with a manual you can read? I’d give it a once over if I were you, sometimes you’ll find unexpected things about your car.
I had to look these up, and it looks like it’s Adaptive Cruise Control (regular distance based), and Intelligent Cruise Control (ACC + lane keeping). Most likely it switches between if it can’t find the road lines.
I only have ACC in mine, and there’s still situations where I turn it off like in heavier traffic. It reacts too slowly so it ends up braking harder than it needs to, and then waits to accelerate and leaves a huge gap. It effectively makes traffic worse than if I drive manually.
I’ve also turned the lane departure system to warning-only because I’ve had it try to push me off the road before while I was towing a trailer. On narrow windy roads, it’s basically required to hug the lines so I don’t end up clipping trees with the trailer.
it switches between them because it decides i am not moving the steering wheel enough (on a straight line). If I shake the wheel a bit the ICC reengages after a couple of seconds.
I get it is a failsafe so people don’t treat it as autopilot, but the thing complains constantly with both my hands are holding the wheel. mostly on straight lines or long constant curves
I had a literal rage out over that. It kept prompting me to keep both hands on the wheel and I was doing exactly that. It ended up shortening the duration between prompts and then eventually just started beeping loudly at me so I decided to drive like I had Parkinsons, just fucking shaking the wheel constantly through the slop zone until I could find a safe place to pull over and figure out how to turn the fucking thing off.
- adaptive cruise control
- AR HUD
- driving mode
None of these were meant to save lives
Also, both lane assist and auto emergency brakes are mostly poorly implemented. Even the ones that aren’t really bad don’t fare well with the chaos of the roads.
Also, voice assistant is bullshit. You know what would be better? That’s right, physical buttons.
I was driving a newer Skoda on vacation last winter and the windshield started fogging up as I was passing through a narrow little village in blowing rain bordering on snow. In my car at home (and probably most of the cars ever made) there are three knobs to control the heat which can be operated by purely tactile means. In this particular car, I had to go through pages of menus with no tactile feedback on the touchscreen while driving. I was only seconds away from having to stick my head out the window and limp it to the next safe stopping spot. I am glad it didn’t happen on the motorway at 140km/h. Who thought this was smart? The only modern car I drove that didn’t suck was a Mazda with their multi-axis joystick and physical climate controls. The touch screen disables at speed and the tactile joystick is a comparative delight. The display sticks out of the top of the dash so when you are looking at it you can still see the road beyond it.
My partner and I test drove a Honda with no volume knob. You have to use the touch screen. Wtf? I am so glad we didn’t buy that car. I now have two base model standard transmission cars, mid-2010s, neither of which suck and both of which are in good condition. Never gonna trade these cars in. Not even for a Bentley!
I have a 2020 CX5 and really appreciate the physical buttons. I like the dial as well. They went to touch screen for the 2026 model though and removed the dial. Dumb.
Yeah, fuck that shit. I don’t need a light to come on every time a car is next to me, I can see them with my eyes. Yes I departed the lane, shut up.
I am 54, so not a boomer, but I’ve been driving me entire adulthood with any of this crap on my car. I think I know how to drive without it. My client car is a 2005. So no I don’t need any of it I turn out all of in rental cars too. I hate it
The safety tech is not mature enough, simple as. People turn it off because of the false positives and general nagging behavior
Really depend on the safety tech. My partner’s Honda Civic is so bad, that turning off CMBS (Collision Mitigation Braking System) and LKAS (Lane Keep Assist System) is essential to operating the car safely, as accidentally leaving these systems on has almost wrecked the car on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the same systems on my fake Mustang work great. Sometimes backing out of the driveway, it will panic and warn me that I might crash into the ground, but it doesn’t slam the brakes. The hands-free driving is actually really good, and a feature I would continue to use if it wasn’t several hundred dollars a year. In comparison to Honda, Ford’s safety tech is much more predictable and reliable.
This is my personal experience with two cars that I drive relatively frequently, so other people may have other opinions and experiences that are completely valid.
For me they have often created a more dangerous situation than the one I was already working on unfucking
This is the correct answer. Most of this stuff is half baked at best.
