My car has adaptive cruise control and will automatically adjust speed based on speed limit signs. I was on a highway at 130km/h and the car read a 60km/h speed limit sign that was on an exit shoulder (already separated by a concrete barrier from the highway, so technically a different road altogether) and started breaking really fast - I was pretty close from getting tailgated by the driver behind me, who did not (rightfully) expect me to suddenly start breaking with nothing in front of me. Luckily this can be permanently turned off, so I can continue using cruise control without being afraid of every single speed limit sign.

Recently I had rented a Skoda Karoq (very new one, probably 2024/2025) which adjusted the cruise control speed not even based on signs, but probably based on data from built-in maps? I don't know - but it would randomly decide that I entered a 20km/h zone while driving on a 90km/h road. And this couldn't be turned off. So I just turned off cruise control completely, because wtf, how can anyone think this is improving road safety?

Edit: typo

At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.

The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.

So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?

But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.

Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.

P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.

P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?

I'm listening to an audio through a webpage, as soon as I change the volume it starts my last music. This is really annoying. I should guess the right volume, unlock my phone, resume my audio. Old physical volume knobs only changed the volume, not start one of the few apps they know about.

Oh and if I've been listening to loud music and now someone's in the car, I can't lower the volume without starting the music. I want to start with a low volume and then increase it.

These are some of the many stupid UX decisions. I would still not drive an old car. Especially ICE. But would pray that the equivalent of Frame.work appears, I can get an open source car with an open source infotainment.

With Chevrolet starting to sell DIY EV packages and the general simplification of the mechanics of EV cars, I believe such a thing would eventually happen.

It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.

It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.

"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."

Of cause, I had never experienced such a beep before, so I had to take my eyes off the road tp look at the screen to see what the reason for the beeping was.

Then, on a multlane highway, I would indicate to signal my intention to change lanes. The car then started beeping at me. After a couple of days I figured out it was warning me that there was a car in my blind spot. WTF! The whole point of indication is to signal my intention to move, so that the car in my blind spot creates room for me to merge into their lane.

So - if you have to ignore beeps in order to drive safely - then the beeps are making the car more dangerous than not having them.

Also, the cruise control +/- controls, would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. Such a joke, because if the speed limit is 110, your only options for cruise control at 105, 110, or 115. I won't use 110, because as soon as I go downhill, it will creep over 11, but 105 is too slow.

It was such a relief to arrive home and return to driving my 2006 Suburu Forester. It felt much safer, didn't beep at me... and the cruise control +/- were in 1kmph increments.

After that experience, my current plan is to keep this 20yo car running as long as possible.

The problem was it routinely misclassified where I was looking, so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more.

I returned it after a day and asked for a new car.

(Worst offenders: Japanese cars since they seem to take the regulations most seriously. Least annoying: generally BMW, Volvo, though they are both getting worse each year).

From that article:

"Like DDAW systems, ADDW systems must function without the use of biometric information, including facial recognition, of any vehicle occupants. It must also operate within a closed-loop system, only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function."

The most recent regulatory disaster that blew up a bunch of startups was mandatory lane keep assist for trucks in overseas western markets, which meant all new startups needed fancy steering racks which are very much not off-the-shelf, and it virtually tripled the cost of the software stack too

>Article 6(3) of the GSR states that the system should be designed in such a way that it does not continuously record or retain data other than what is necessary for its purpose

I get that there are problems, but it doesn't sound that bad to me? Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people every year in Europe. If we can improve this 25% (more realistically, 10%) it's a huge step forward.

It goes off all the time. And each time, my hands are on the steering wheel.

It doesn't actually detect contact - it checks to see if you're actively adjusting the steering wheel.

Except I don't need to! The lane keep assist is so good that it's rare I have to give it additional help.

So - I kid you not - I've gotten used to giving a nudge to the steering wheel every so many seconds to prevent that warning (you cannot disable it).

Imagine a car gave you cruise control, and then checked if you were paying attention by requiring you to press down on the accelerator every so many seconds. Does that make sense?

I don't have a garage/drive way, and so have to park on the street, which makes me leans towards another short [1] vehicle: currently thinking about VW Golf, Mazda 3, Mazda CX-30, Kia Niro.

From what I've seen from almost all cars, lots more screens and lots fewer buttons.

[1] https://www.carsized.com/en/

https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...

If it truly is like this how are you Europeans ok with this? Do you really trust your politicians to have your best interest at heart?

The only feature I like so far is the slight shake of the wheel if crossing over a lane.

Either this tech is janky/new or is just honestly not needed and distracting.

> They found it fires on ordinary driving, not just distracted driving.

> Glance away from an empty highway to take in the scenery, or look at the infotainment screen to change a song, and the warning goes off anyway.

Like, isn't that the point, that if you aren't looking at the road it should go off?

Tangential, but I’ve never seen so many people fiddling with their phones while driving as I did in the US. It was pretty worrying.

You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?

If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.

In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars. On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.

I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.

My wife got a new Volvo recently:

1. You can only open it with your phone (find it in purse, unlock it, find the app, wait, click) or a card that can only open on the driver side (can’t open the trunk). What was fucking wrong with keys?

2. No behind the steering wheel screen, only a large tablet center of the car. No way to know your speed without looking to the side.

3. No physical buttons aside from the ones on the steering wheel.

4. And the infamous speed limit beep sound. You can turn it off with a shortcut button on the steering wheel. Which is so dumb if you think Europeans spent millions creating and implementing this rule. A friend of mine has no shortcut (kia) so he just starts driving then look away from the road to the screen to tap a few times. I’ve seen this many times now.

Overall cars are more dangerous to drive because of all this shit. Europe is spending millions creating laws to protect us on the road and making driving shitty. While Youtube, social networks and movies keep promoting cigarettes and alcohol.

That could be more distracting than the distraction it's trying to detect.

Our car warns you when it thinks you're about to crash into the car in front of you, and it does so with a very loud and annoying noise. I hadn't noticed it for years until it suddenly went off several times in a couple of days, so maybe there are circumstances where it gets overly sensitive.

Of the 3 times it warned that I can clearly remember, 1 was correct: I was indeed getting close to the car in front of me (I was aware of it and was already about to start braking when the alarm went off. The other two were I think the shadow of a viaduct I went under, and probably a parked car next to the road.

It also seems to detect max speed based on signs next to the road. Fortunately it doesn't do anything annoying with that information, because it's frequently wrong.

2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.

3) Enjoy!

It is capable of beeping, but only does it if I leave the handbrake up or start driving without a seatbelt.

I don't have modern comforts like a backup camera, cruise control, or those fancy motorized seats some cars have. But it does it's job. I push on the go pedal and it goes, I push on the stop pedal and it stops.

I also recently installed an Android Auto capable head unit, so I don't need to illegally interact with my phone to navigate places.

I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.

bing bing bing

NOW what?

https://x.com/gothburz/status/2074902503599059357

I just know insurance companies are going to use this to try to weasel out of doing their job

If 60 people died because an airplane falls of the sky every day we wouldn't shrugg that off either, wouldn't we?

And a voice that tells you to keep your eyes on the road when going 200 on the autobahn is one of the least offensive intervention I can think of.

It felt like total security theater, which a huge surveillance tech vector as well. I will do my damnedest to never ever buy a car with this anti-feature. If I ever have to I'm sure those beeps will either get disabled one way or another, or eventually be completely filtered out by my brain like other predictably useless sounds are.

End of story...

Honestly, I'm all for more automated system while driving because I drive but I also bike and walk. Some people are complete nuts that shouldn't have their license and the least you can do is hold their hand, with as much algorithm as you can, like they are toddlers driving a 3 Tonne car.

Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.

My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?

Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing

Lovely traditional Scottish name there. ;-)

how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?

Is that only when mass hysteria is pushed against internet companies? How are they okay with this?

But my 12 lb bucket of brain cells guiding itself, and other lives, is the wrong tool for the job of staying in between the two bright lines.

Self-driving, here we come.

Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?

First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.

Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?

Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.

Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.

On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.

I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.

Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.

I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.

My eyes wander a bit and it scolds me.

I was in a rental car recently that was filled with random chimes going off. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it was sure a nuisance and took my mind off the road.

I also recently discovered that I must periodically accept the terms when turning on my car, or else carplay won’t work. This isn’t every time but I think it’s on a timer as it’s at least every new day I’m driving it.

What the hell is this, who is expected to reread the terms every time they start the damn car

Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.

The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.

Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.

And I triple hate that we've helped develop the technology that powers it.

In hindsight, it was inevitable.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

This is invasive, the others like Lane "assist" is just outright dangerous. Yanking my steering wheel while I'm driving? WTF? The lines on the road, in many EU cities, are mere suggestions. Especially during road works. I've had two times where I almost killed the bicyclist because the STUPID KIA SPORTAGE thought it knew better.

And now I'm filmed during driving? No. NO!

It is clear to me, that we also need cameras in every room in every home and office.

Considering how many mk7 golfs were made over the years it'll be easy to just get another one for the next decade. I'd also consider the Hyundai ioniq 5 or 6 which have a shortcut on the steering wheel to just disable all the nanny crap.

Interesting priorities...

Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the same place as well, and in relation to the marked edges of the road, which often isn't the natural placing in curves and so on. As a consequence roads likely need maintenance more often, and as a proficient driver that does not let the car have opinions about placement on the road one commonly has much smaller margins when placing the car in the nice trajectory through a curve due to the sunken lanes from the assisted cars.

And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.

It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.

1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.

Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.

2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.

Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.

And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.

The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.

Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.

In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.

I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:

>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.

>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.

my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494

I actually suggested a solution like this 2 years ago, because so many drivers are bad at signaling. I wanted a camera that used machine learning to learn a driver's cues when they're making a turn, and eventually it would be able to activate the signals for the driver.

I'm sick and tired of standing on the side of the road with my dog and waiting for a car just for it to make a turn. FOAD

I am rarely in a rush, if a car signals I will allow it to turn, I will stand back and wait, no problem. But 80% of them are really bad at this.

It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.