A couple of months ago on a business trip, the rental car (I think a Kia) suggested I pull over for a rest after some time on the road.
I might not be explaining it well. Sometimes in construction zones they paint new lines on the road to get you around the area under construction. When I drive in those zones and follow the new lanes, my car scolds me for veering out of my lane, thinking I should be staying in the old lanes.
Hm, sometimes the permanent lane pattern in an area looks like lane changes. Does your car complain about those, too?
When they’re poorly done, yes, it can. Generally, mine won’t make a mistake a human wouldn’t also make, i.e. the construction crews sometimes need to do a better job.
Given that most cars now run all audio alerting layered in digitally with the rest of the car’s sound system, the only way to disable any given beeper is to remove/disconnect all the speakers. Technically it will work to disable that alert, but now the sound system and every other alert is disabled.
My 2020 Subaru Outback has a “Driver Monitoring System” that beeps at you if it thinks you’re falling asleep at the wheel.
The problem is, it generates an EXTREMELY ANNOYING amount of FALSE POSITIVES. Furthermore, it often misinterprets where I’m looking if I’m wearing glasses – and it doesn’t have to be sunglasses, it can be ANY kind of glasses.
And most annoyingly, while you CAN turn the system off, it requires a minimum of 3 presses on the touchscreen, and it will not REMAIN off if you turn off the car and come back later. I need to turn it off EVERY TIME I start the car.
You know what a lot of Subaru drivers have resorted to? Putting a piece of OPAQUE BLACK TAPE, like electrical tape, across the scanner on the dashboard, so that it can’t detect the driver.
If the car’s safety systems are run by the same computer as the entertainment system, that in itself is a problem. But even if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be hard to then install an aftermarket stereo.
Point is, I don’t think there’s any technological way to stop people from bypassing these systems. If you want to stop people from bypassing them, you need a regulatory solution, not a technological one. Like finding the driver at fault if they’re ever in an accident with the system disabled.
That could still be an issue if the system works so poorly that lots of people are routinely disabling it, like @tracer describes. In that case, the solution is to improve the systems, and not implement the regulations until the technology is ready. Which appears to be what’s happening, with the deadline being pushed back.
Aka, turn on the audio of your phone and play it through the phones speakers, or a cheap Bluetooth speaker.
My car (2025 kia Niro) sometimes complains that I’m not holding the steering wheel. It did this reliably when i was testing the automatic lane keeping feature (with my hands just millimeters from the wheel, but good for it) but it also complains sporadically for no reason i understand, when both hands are on the wheel. It doesn’t happen very often, and i just ignore it.
The other alerts are based on what the car is doing, not what I’m doing, to the best of my knowledge. Like if i cross a white line without signaling, or if the car in front of me moves away or slows suddenly and it doesn’t like the change in distance. It if I’m very close to something, like when i enter my garage. Those are mostly useful.
The “driver is tired” feature is correlated with fewer accidents, iirc. (I go to a lot of professional presentations from the iihs, which follows the data.) If it complains about your driving a lot, you might want to figure out what you are doing that it is picking up on.
Do you have any evidence to support this supposition? As noted these systems are widely used already, many of us have experience with them, and I am completely unaware that the data is saved or has ever been used in such a way. It is part of the enhanced safety packages. Not fundamentally different than lane drift warnings. Which I also have never heard of being saved and used as evidence…
I’ve seen cases where insurance companies were able to get some of that data. I went to a whole presentation on fighting with Tesla to get its excellent video of the seconds leading up to the accident, and how that data can be used when it’s available. I think it will become more and more used in the future. And i think that’s a good thing. Currently, they mostly use eye witness accounts, random security/ring cameras that happened to be available, and skid marks.
But the “most likely” use of this data is to prevent accidents. And the evidence so far is promising.
Sure, but now we’re well outside the land of snipping a wire to a beeper. TBH, adding an aftermarket stereo to any of our last few cars would be a titanic pain in the ass. Everything is integrated into the infotainment screens and systems. May as well strap a boombox into the back seat like my good old days if I’m going to try to avoid the convergence of functions into one central computer.
As i said upthread, it’s pretty easy to play music from your phone, with it without a little Bluetooth speaker. You didn’t need to take up a lot of space, like you did in the boombox days.
Anecdotally, I regulary seem to hear of court cases where that info, including video, audio and vehicle data are used as part of both lawsuits and criminal proceedings. A quick google search on the topic produces several pages of accident and personal injury law firms giving advice on how to preserve all recorded data for future proceedings, again including car video and audio.
The problem is that the 99% false alarms are training the driver to ignore the 1% that are real. Or to just disable the system.
As a person who tends to keep cars for decades is that these sensors are one more thing to break down. Car is working fine but won’t let me drive because the left hand driver facing camera has a smudge on the lens or a wire has become disconnected. Maybe the tech is reliable enough on a new car, but after 20 years and 250k miles?
And @puzzlegal confirmed that data from various safety systems have been used. I am now aware.
Point remains that there is no more reason for concern regarding the attention alert systems than any of the other extant safety systems.
FWIW I do already consent to my insurance company’s monitoring my driving (which means they could also know where I am when) by of the “Drivewise” app on my phone, for a discount, and I would have no issue with additional evidence of my safe driving being shared with them. I am thrilled that my vehicles have the safety systems they have. The attention one is the least useful of the bunch to me but I accept @puzzlegal 's information that statistically it seems to help some.
I would think the not staying in your lane repetitively would be a bigger trigger to having a vehicle automatically slow down and pull over presuming the driver is impaired (be it substance related or a stroke seizure or heart attack) than eyes on the road, and they don’t do that yet. I wouldn’t be adverse to a system that did.
None of these systems are yet automatically sharing real time data with any Big Brother (excepting my phone app for the discount).
Finally, my fantasy is that! And more! I would love it if we required cars to have transponders that communicated current position and speed both to a central source that could aid in traffic control, and vehicle to vehicle giving drivers additional warning of vehicles around corners and approaching intersections at high speeds. Cars being able to autonomously act on that information to avoid a collision? Great! Cars using V2V communication to form virtual trains in tight formation at highway speeds … would love it.
The fact that so much is readily known about me by whatever Big Brother exists, via AI or government, is of some concern; my turning my head to look at a billboard for a second is not in that realm and seems sensational.
Wile E. Coyote’s worst nightmare.
Except that’s probably the least reliable of the systems. If you swerve on an empty road to avoid an animal, or a pothole. If the lines are poorly painted. It’s the only modern “safety system” that doesn’t appear to reduce accidents. (The data isn’t statistically significant, but it might reduce driver fatalities, probably because it awakens drivers who feel asleep, something that direct monitoring of the driver does better.) The version that vibrates the wheel works better than the version that beeps out loud. Probably because it’s less likely to startle you when something weird is going on in the traffic.
Never mind. I’d not refreshed and there were another 20 posts unread posts between yours and mine.
Classic piece of terrible content free reporting. Does anyone have the actual text of the regulation that goes into force in 2027?