Now that I own a car that has any of these features…
25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on
Why? Lack of knowledge? With mine, I use it regularly on the highway outside of heavy traffic. It’s very nice, actually.
Nearly 18 percent steer clear of lane-keeping assist
Mine, I keep on for the most part. Theres an easy access button to turn it off when it becomes annoying though, which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking outright
I couldn’t tell you from memory where this setting is. It has only triggered once for me, which was when parking on a weird hill. I was only moving about half a mph though so whatever, and it let me override it.
Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.
Well, yeah. My options are fucking Gemini, Siri (but I have no iPhone), or Alexa. Fuck those all.
Augmented reality head-up displays fare no better: 17.1 percent of drivers who have one refuse to turn it on, and a further 7 percent don’t know how to operate it.
I’m sorry, what?
Having the current speed and relevant traffic signs in the windshield is amazing. It makes it so much easier and less dangerous to check the speed. Sure, you can eyeball it while driving, but there are times where knowing the exact speed is important, like when driving past speed cameras. Also, quick access to the speed limit is incredibly useful when driving in new areas.
The rest of the listed features are just as confusing to me. You bought a car with massage seats. You don’t use them? Seriously?
Remote start, I don’t use either, but I haven’t had a use for it yet. To begin with, there’s no benefit to idling the engine, and the weather here has been great so no need to ventilate the car or run the AC/heater.
45.7 percent of respondents say they regularly use reversing cameras
At least in the US, every new car has them. So are people going out of their way to ignore them? Or only that many people have cars with these cameras?
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.
… as opposed to what? The parking mode? Or is this automatic vs manual?
Adaptive cruise control generally sucks, it slams on the brakes when someone merges.into your lane and gets you going 20 under regularly. I’m shocked by the claim that 75% of people use it.
Lane assist is great though.
Very much vehicle dependent. Mine does fine with both, but my partner’s car sucks at lane assist. It feels like it is bowling with the bumpers on. Just bouncing in the lane between the lines
21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking outright
For HGVs and buses, the law changed to prevent drivers from deactivating them so they can driver closer to the vehicle in front.
Those changes were raised after crash inquiries which found some lorry drivers regularly switch off their AEB systems to drive closer to the vehicle in front. The regulation change will limit system deactivation to 15 minutes with automatic re-engagement after 15 minutes. - Wikipedia
I don’t know about their quality and false-positive rate in cars, and maybe car usage is simply different, but I’m sure automatic emergency braking prevents many accidents.
as opposed to what? The parking mode? Or is this automatic vs manual?
A lot of more modern vehicles have a bunch of modes you can select. Like “economy,” “sport,” etc.
I think that’s what they mean.
Edited because I forgot the word “vehicles”!
Oh, this makes sense. I don’t think I ever once used sport mode on my old car, and I rarely have a use for it on my new one (basically only if I feel like taking it to a track which is on my list but not anytime soon). Sport mode doesn’t make much sense outside of actual sport cars anyway.
I’ve seen eco modes, but those seem to be mostly on hybrids I believe? If I could have gotten one, I’d probably have it set to that the whole time for local driving, but hybrids are so popular here that it wasn’t a reasonable option sadly.
My car has eco, standard, and sport modes. In my case all they do is adjust the amount of initial acceleration available.
Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.
Well, yeah. My options are fucking Gemini, Siri (but I have no iPhone), or Alexa. Fuck those all.
Yea, gemini is fucking useless compared to Google Assistant - it takes for fucking ever (god forbid you try to send a text message right before something interesting is on the radio) and it refuses to work if your signal isnt the best (I cant actually close it when it loses signal - super annoying).
Why? Lack of knowledge? With mine, I use it regularly on the highway outside of heavy traffic. It’s very nice, actually.
Huh? Regular cruise control works just fine for that. Where adaptive shines is heavier traffic and off-highway driving. I basically use it everywhere: just set it to the speed limit and let it go.
Mine, I keep on for the most part. Theres an easy access button to turn it off when it becomes annoying though, which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
it is highly impractical every time some moron decides that the gap between you and the car in front of you is there waiting for him… if you are in control of your speed, you will react much more smoothly that the automatic (may depend on the car)
I think Toyota’s cruise control handles that situation nicely. It detects that situation (shows it on the display) and smoothly adjusts your distance and speed so you’re at a safe distance for the merger. I have it turned on probably about 90% of the time when driving.
But that the best cruise control I have experienced so far. I’ve used other cars that would be very slow to react and adjust the distance after the merging, and also one that would just automatically slam the brakes whenever someone merged in front of you. Both situations are not something you’d want to happen in heavy traffic, when there might be someone driving close behind you.
well my skoda detects the obstacle and brakes aggressively to increase that gap as fast as possible. if i do it manually, i see our speeds and how much of that distance i can sacrifice to make the breaking smoother, but the computer just brakes hard. it is probably better from the safety standpoint, but it is very uncomfortable - esp. if you have passengers who don’t follow the traffic so they don’t understand what is happening.
By heavy traffic, I’m referring to bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’ve found that I can’t get it to stop anywhere near the car in front of me, always preferring to leave several cars of space. Sure, it’s safer that way, but it’s annoying when the person behind you is laying on the horn while people constantly cut you off.
Driving myself in those situations is generally just less stressful.
Oof, bad on your car manufacturer then. My car (Kia Niro Wind) lets me adjust the following level and it adjusts the following distance based on your speed. Bumper to bumper keeps me as close as I’d be doing it normally. Only time I need to override is getting back up to speed from a stop, it doesn’t accelerate quite fast enough for my taste and leaves room for people to cut in.
Mine lets me adjust follow distance as well, so I don’t actually blame the car. It’s just not the right feature for me when I have no idea if the car 3 lanes over is going to cut across the entire highway to take an exit at the last second. Or for when I’m zipper merging and I have the dipshit who tailgates the car merging in front of me. And so on.
Why? Lack of knowledge? With mine, I use it regularly on the highway outside of heavy traffic. It’s very nice, actually.
unusable in city, highly situational outside. very annoying when someone merges just in front of you.
Mine, I keep on for the most part. Theres an easy access button to turn it off when it becomes annoying though, which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
sooner or later it will stop working, because it will have trouble reading the lines. people are terrible at monitoring automatic system, that is the lesson we learned from airline cockpits, and i will rather drive my car, than anxiously wait for the moment what the half-assed system stops working. on top of that, my car start obnoxious alarm once it decides i am not holding the steering wheel tight enough, which is about 20 seconds after activation of this function.
which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
ehm, are you using your turn indicators?
21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking outright
false positives
Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.
it actually surprises me that 82% of people uses it.
I’m sorry, what? Having the current speed and relevant traffic signs in the windshield is amazing
windshield is for looking out of the car. if someone cannot tell speed of their car without checking, or is unable to glance at the dashboard when needed, they have no business to operate potential murder weapon in public. (i admittedly don’t have personal experience with such system)
At least in the US, every new car has them. So are people going out of their way to ignore them? Or only that many people have cars with these cameras?
i guess not everyone drives new car, and it depends on the situation a lot. the camera is great for estimating the distance to the bumper of the car behind you, but for evaluation situation around the car when parking or reversing on street, mirrors are much better.
which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
unusable in city, highly situational outside. very annoying when someone merges just in front of you.
I agree with this, which is why I find myself mostly using it on long stretches of highway.
sooner or later it will stop working, because it will have trouble reading the lines. people are terrible at monitoring automatic system, that is the lesson we learned from airline cockpits, and i will rather drive my car, than anxiously wait for the moment what the half-assed system stops working. on top of that, my car start obnoxious alarm once it decides i am not holding the steering wheel tight enough, which is about 20 seconds after activation of this function.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but at least on my car, lane keep assist only corrects you when you’re drifting out of the lane. The system that keeps you centered in the lane is called “active lane keep” which is only enabled for me when I also have cruise control turned on.
I rarely use active lane keep, but when I do, it’s on a mostly empty highway. Also, I’m not the kind of driver who does shit while driving, so it’s quick at least for me to correct it if it’s wrong (and it occasionally is).
ehm, are you using your turn indicators?
When another lane merges into mine? No. The car still has no idea where my lane is though because the line on my right (for the US - I assume left in the UK?) disappears for a short time.
(i admittedly don’t have personal experience with such system)
Maybe some experience would do some good then? All it shows me is a number for my speed, a speed limit sign, and sometimes it’ll pick up school zones or no passing zones. It’s tiny and at the very periphery of my vision.
For me at least, and I love cool tech, so it has to be broken or too costly (in terms of money or privacy) for me not to use it:
Adaptive cruise control: I live in a medium sized city and there’s rarely a case where I don’t have to be extremely quick to react to people who are aggressive and dangerous, so I need to change speed way too often for it to be useful. But even driving outside the city it’s rare that there are any significant stretches of road where there aren’t people camping in the left lane and causing lots of big groups of cars piling up together. And many highways don’t have enough long stretches of straight road. So it’s rare to be able to drive long enough stretches where I’m of constantly turning it off and on.
Lane keeping: mine only works over 45 and so only on highways outside the city mostly or for short stretches inside the city. I do turn it on most of the time. But it has one really major flaw. If you’re driving in the right lane and come to an exit and there’s even the slightest bend in the road, it’s about a 50/50 chance that it’s not going to try to pull me off the exit and scream at me when I stop it from doing that. Also, the safety feature that determines the person has their hands on the wheel gets tripped if you hold the wheel in one place for too long. In the places I most would find it useful like long stretches of straight highway, it’s constantly complaining and shutting itself off thinking I’m not holding the wheel just because I’m going straight the whole time.
Automatic braking: mine doesn’t actually brake, just screams at you and flashed a huge warning. Problem is it triggers when someone is turning and will be out of my way significantly before I get there because I don’t tailgate, so there’s no need to slow. Or it will suddenly trigger when there’s an odd narrow shadow across the road from something above the road like a pedestrian bridge, and it mistakes that for a car or something. Haven’t figured that one out. It’s not too common, but the fact that the car has both camera and radar my wild guess is on hotter days, the areas of asfalt in the shade are giving off less heat and possibly the air above has slightly different density than the areas in the sun. Wild guess though, but if the car did have auto braking, it would be braking randomly for no reason and causing accidents or near accidents too often.
Voice assistants: screw LLMs
Augmented reality: I don’t have that, but I might understand that being a distraction. I’m ADHD so I’m not sure how that would affect my distraction especially commuting when I’m too tired or not enough stimulants in my system.
Massaging seats seem possibly distracting or too relaxing which then causes distraction. I don’t have it, but font blame buying a car with some feature and not using it since a lot of cars have packages of features and it might not be an option to not have that but still have some other useful feature like heated seats. I do love my heated seats in winter so if it was both or neither I’d choose both and ignore the massage feature.
Remote start: I’d be afraid of opening it up to theft vulnerabilities and I don’t like wasting gas and generating pollution for some minor convenience.
Backup cameras: I use mine in the daylight, but there’s no night vision so the quality is really poor at night if there’s not street lighting or if there’s too much glare from a bright light, basically useless in a lot of conditions.
Driving Mode: I think this refers to the modes that change the sensitivity of brakes, acceleration, power steering, struts, etc. My partner’s car has 3 modes and I can definitely see switching being distracting. It would be like getting used to driving three different cars. Just choose one and use that. Might be useful if it’s an off road mode that increases the shock absorption and gives more torque while off road and gives more “feel of the road” while on well paves roads.
25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on Why? Lack of knowledge? With mine, I use it regularly on the highway outside of heavy traffic. It’s very nice, actually.
It’s nice when it works, until it doesn’t and it turns itself off. Then you need to disable it to get normal cruise.
“Meant to”
That really depends on your definition of meant to save your life, vs meant to mitigate any possible liability for the manufacturer.
Now if you turn anything off (like that stupid autobrake that brakes for cars in the left hand turn lane beside me), they’ll use that to say “it’s not our fault, the driver turned it off!”
Stupid crap.
Now if you turn anything off (like that stupid autobrake that brakes for cars in the left hand turn lane beside me), they’ll use that to say “it’s not our fault, the driver turned it off!”
Don’t try and spin this as a convenient liability-limiter for manufacturers.
Unless it is an actual failure of a safety critical system, with no warning, that then directly leads to harm, manufacturers are in no way responsible for how you operate the chunk of metal and technology that you bought from them.
All this stuff absolutely helps to reduce the overall risk of injury when operating a vehicle. Is it also a pain in the ass sometimes? Sure it is. Can you turn it off? Sure you can. But sometimes that shutoff is just temporary, because governments - not manufacturers - mandate that some things are now required, because they’re sick of hosing body parts off of highways.
Why would you turn off the auto-brake?
Because, as I explained, it doesn’t fucking work right.
It autobrakes for cars that are next to me stopping in a turn lane.
Clearly this showed up on testing, and if it didn’t then they did a real shitty job testing it.
And this isn’t on a cheap car.
because it has A LOT of false positive errors (meaning it triggers when it shouldn’t)
