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.
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.