All new cars sold in America will soon be required to be spies, performing nonstop biometric surveillance on the driver.
1.Is this only an American requirement, or will it become the international standard?
2.Does anyone here have hands-on, practical experience with this?
How strictly does it monitor your eyeballs?
I’m not concerned if biometric Big Brother detects drunk drivers–that ain’t me.
And I’m not concerned if it detects somebody typing 15 lines of text on their phone while driving. That ain’t me.
But I am concerned about Big Brother detecting, well, ME. (ie. my driving habits)
I’ve been driving for a half century, and like every normal driver, sometimes my eyes wander as I drive past vairous distractions. .
Things like:
An unusual billboard overhead, a wrecked car overturned on the shoulder to my left, a fascinating antique car in the lane to my right, a girl wearing a bikini, anywhere, anytime . .
When my Waze app speaks to me, but I don’t hear it because of a loud motorcycle passing me, I look downs at my phone screen to see where I should turn. When I see the flashing red lights of a cop car behind me, I stare at the rear-view mirror long and hard to see if he’s pulling me over
Etc,etc.
So, to sum it all up, my main question is : How intrusive is this new Big Brother?
I’ve read that if it detects a drunk driver, it will shut down the car. .That’s a good thing. But what happens when it decides that I am drunk because I moved my eyes twice and turned my head once? What happens if the AI hallucinates and decides it doesn’t like my driving, for whatever reason?
Its an American requirement. Cars built overseas do not generally comply with North American requirements unless they are shipping to cars here. And then only to the specific cars they are shipping here, same model with different software.
And what does it do with the monitoring data? Is it constantly reporting it back to some central database, or is it just rolling over the last few seconds and only permanently recording it in the event of an accident?
Meh. The article is full of "may"s and "could be"s. Nothing currently in the law or in the technology that reports anywhere, records, or shuts the car down. It is a sensationalism bit IMHO.
Both our cars have the eye monitoring bit. It is annoying because it works poorly. A hand on the top of the wheel blocks the camera and gets the “inattention” notice. Not ready for doing the taking over bit, like the automatic braking on collision detection or the avoidance of pedestrians bit.
My Jaguar has it, and it only reminds me to stop and rest when I’m really tired. Surprisingly accurate. Maybe once per year I hear the beep and see the coffee icon
About ten years ago, I had checked a car out of the motor pool at work to drive to a distant meeting. There had been a snow and ice storm the night before, and lots of drivers hadn’t bothered to clean their cars off. So lots of cars were sporting thick sheets of snow/ice on their hoods and roofs.
After I’d been driving about two hours, one of these sheets flew off the car about 100 yards in front of me, high into the air. I slammed on the brake to keep from being where it landed. This prompted the monitoring system to light up with a warning to stop and have some coffee. It had apparently assumed the sudden brake slam was due to me dozing off and waking suddenly.
An unusual billboard overhead, a wrecked car overturned on the shoulder to my left, a fascinating antique car in the lane to my right, a girl wearing a bikini, anywhere, anytime .
Well, if looking away for fractions of minutes dings the monitor, they will have to stop selling advertising then, wouldn’t they =)
[and I am another that doesn’t text and drive, doesn’t tend to watch everything except the road, and I do not drink and drive ever. ] I think it is a bad decision. There are as noted plenty of reasons to NOT be looking straight out the windshield - if a horn blows or siren goes off, you can be damned sure that people WILL look at the disturbance.
If I engage the sorta-autopilot to lane follow, and I really quit paying attention, say ogling adjacent cars or scenery and not looking forward at all, it beeps gently after maybe 30 seconds. If I’m driving entirely manually, that inattention warning system is dormant. I can drive manually while looking over my shoulder until I hit something. It’ll panic brake just before the crash, but it won’t bug me to watch the road.
As a separate matter there’s a long-term attentiveness feature that “wakes up” after maybe 2 hours of continuous driving and eventually pops up a message something like “Do you want a break?”. Which will get more frequent and insistent over the next ~30 minutes. But also has a “quit bugging me” option that makes it go away for another hour or so.
I do not know whether the “take a break” monitor is just timer based, or it’s watching what else I’m doing with my eyes, body, and the car’s controls. I do know that its reminders seem decently correlated versus my personal stamina and susceptibility to “highway hypnosis”. So either I’m close to typical humans in that, or it’s doing something more than just using a timer.
My bottom line:
It’s not intrusive in the slightest and is kinda handy to limit many of my worst transgressions.
I have no idea how much more or different driver monitoring / alerting behavior this new 2027 law will require.
Substantially all cars have been recording your driving behavior (e.g. speed, acceleration, braking, cornering) for 10-15 years now. But keeping the data onboard the car and only the last few minutes worth.
I have no idea how much more or different recording, tracking, and most importantly forwarding this new 2027 law will require.
The most likely use of such a system is in post-accident analysis, to help determine who was at fault. In that context, I can easily see having disabled one’s system being considered as presumptive evidence of fault.
Nearly anything can be hacked. The penalty for hacking it might be very severe. Depends entirely on what the law says. ETA: as e.g. @Chronos just suggested.
As a separate matter, in the last ~5 years car manufacturers have been greatly upping their game as to on-board computer security. The law may require that the manufacturers armor the feature to the point that it’s effectively undisable-able even to l33t auto haxx0rs.
Tampering with an FMVSS safety feature can void your cars warranty and be subject to fines and penalties for anyone involved to doing so. It will also make it more likley for you to be blamed for any accident where recorded vehicle information may be the deciding factor.
Its up to the dealership to determine if they will honor your warranty claim, even if it is unrelated mechanical failure. Most likley not, because they make good money on warranty claims. At the very least they will reinstall the correct software and tell you not to do it again.
No, it’d be really, really easy to disable it, and there’s no way they can stop anyone from disabling it. All you have to do to disable it is to paint over the camera that monitors the driver.
That might result in the system constantly beeping its alert. That, you can disable by cutting the wire that leads to the beeper.
You can easily disable your seat belts too, doesn’t mean their are not consequences.
It really depends on if this is an FMVSS mandated feature. Also on how hard the court or car companies wish to push back on deactivation of the feature.
Okay, from everything I could find, this 2027 change is complete misreading of what’s actually happening and everyone is just linking back to the same Yahoo article.
My understanding is this: The 2021 law required the NHTSA to create a rule requiring technologies to prevent impaired driving. That was supposed to be done by 2024. It wasn’t and they got an extension. That extension is ending soon and they still haven’t made a rule. In fact, their last report was basically saying the tech isn’t there yet for this.
So basically, no this change is not required and even if it does it won’t be in effect for 2027. They have to give time for automakers to adapt. For example, when they set the rule requiring backup cameras in 2014, it didn’t go into effect until 2018.
My newish car has this and a lot of other fussbudget features, and while they’re annoying, I’m happy to have them.
It beeps at me if it thinks I’m tired. It beeps at me if I change lanes without signalling, or take an exit without signalling, or drive through a new traffic pattern (e.g., through construction zones) without signalling. It beeps at me if the car in front of me slows down rapidly. It beeps at me if I’ve signaled a lane change and that lane has a car in it (or will soon). It beeps at me if I’ve just completed a lane change, and the next lane over has traffic in it.
It’s a lot of beeps. And if 99% of them are unnecessary, that 1% might prevent a collision.
. .