Technology

I can deal with every other safety feature, but lane assist can fuck right off.

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.

This title is so misleading as to be incorrect

I still trust drivers more than I trust tech.

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.

My car is a 2017 base with stick shift. No lane assist, just abs and traction control.

Git gud.

I can't back up my own driveway with "maneuvering assist" enabled or it slams on the brakes every time it gets close to a completely harmless fern on the passenger side. Every time it happens it's so infuriating that I could actually scream. So it's now off.

Yeah, if it's anything like the assists in the Sprinter I've used for work, that shit can get annoying and I don't blame people for disabling them. Yeah I keep them enabled most of the time, but these systems fail to have any nuance. For instance the lane assist doesn't realise I may have a reason for drifting out of the lane be that an obstacle, a bicyclist, construction or otherwise. The car jerking the steering wheel around doesn't help me to drive very well, does it, but it has caused me to try and counteract it with bad steering inputs. The blind spot sensor is more useful and yet it still cries wolf by beeping at me in double turn lanes or in the rain or sometimes on a sunny day while 2m from a traffic post... so I have started to put much less stock in it.

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.

In this topic, people not being able to spell 'brake'

I turn off all that shit for one reason: too many electronic nannies mean less attention is required to drive. I rarely even use old cruise control.

I deliberately sought out a car without that stuff when I had to buy a new(er) car recently. It's usually quite annoying - the worst was a rental car that had an alarm buzz whenever I activated my turn signal while there was another car anywhere near my blind spot.

IMO the only technological improvement from the last decade and a half that's worth having is a backup camera, and that's only because I must shamefully confess to being terrible at parallel parking without one despite having years of practice. (I was tempted to buy a Miata since they still have real dials, but ultimately I did settle for a car with a digital display instead of an instrument panel.)

This driver wouldn't touch a car that had this shit in it.

None of my hyundai safety features are turned off. Some of these complaints I'm reading in the comments do happen but infrequently and it's never been something I needed to wrestle with the car to correct. 🤷

As in, the correction is so light that you can overpower it with a single finger

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.

I know a couple people who one could describe as “twat” who turn off traction control and abs, thinking they are going to be rally drivers on the way to McDonalds. They tend to end up in the ditch.

Subaru has been good. The lane warning was the only thing we turned off because it was just obnoxious. If something is beeping constantly and erratically, what’s the point? The lane centering had a tendency to pull towards semis when passing but that seems to have been fixed in an update. The only other thing that is more a quality of life is a way easily and preemptively to turn off the backup warning and breaking assist when pulling a trailer.