this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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I have been saying this for years. The last thing your car should do is take your eyes off the road. This is a 1-3 ton box of metal hurdling at 60+ miles down the highway next to a bunch of other metal boxes that can all kill each other.
And car manufacturers seem to be in love with the idea of you forgetting you’re even driving. Add on all the bs lane assisting, warning bells, alerts, automatic correction, and the driver is convinced that the car will protect them.
These are all systems built on software. Last time I checked, that shit has never been reliable. If the software fails, the manufacturer can just hide behind “They weren’t paying attention!”
Mfer, YOU TRAINED THEM TO IGNORE IT. I don’t know what I’m going to do when all the cars from before touchscreens and digital gauges are no longer running or affordable because I hate the idea of having to look at a screen to change volume or turn on the AC.
Modern cars can suck a fuck.
I'd argue that the safety assistance tech is very, very good and should continue.
Fucking touch screens for HVAC and audio controls are a menace though. How do regulatory agencies allow this?
Then there's the fucking warning message not to look at your screen that starts every time I turn it on. 90% of the time I am not looking at the screen, so I don't realize I have to click through their warning message until I'm already driving. All they achieved is distracting me and making me look away from the road.
I was in a wreck three weeks ago that may have been avoided if I had not needed to look back and check my blindspot. I made damn sure that my new car had blindspot monitoring. 360° cameras is a bit much but just that little bit of tech can make a big difference.
Not in our Mazda. Frequent false alarms (and in that time, not a single "real" alarm triggered), a nails-on-a-chalkboard sound that irritates me every time I hear it, and the lane "assist" feature likes to steer me back toward obstacles I was trying to avoid, like cyclists, animals, large potholes, oversized loads...
I would like to see the statistics that demonstrate that that technology is reducing crashes and/or reducing the severity of crashes. Because I know ours has trained me to ignore that alarm. I haven't asked many people, but a few people I know have turned the alarms off.
My wife's old Volt would beep at fucking everything. Parallel parked and backing up? You'd think the car was about to explode. Put in drive with enough room to pull out? Same.
Really cemented my desire to drive my old beater into the ground.
I don't understand why some cars have these warnings and not others? I drive a Tesla Model S 2014. I never get any annoying warnings or distractions that pop up. My dad drives a Audi Q4 Sportback. It has an annoying popup every time you start the car and will also randomly notify you about stuff that you do not really care about while driving? My mothers old Subaru also has a popup every time you start the car that you have to press okay on just to use the fucking radio. So you can't get in and go you have to wait for it to display it's shitty little warning. Then press go, then start driving. And this is on old diesel. So it's not like this is new.
I understand not everyone wants a touchscreen / large display in their car but coming from a Kia Sportage 2012, I am very happy in the Tesla, even if it ment losing some buttons. Most things are controlled with the buttons on the steering wheel.
I find it stupid as hell that there are conditionary alerts and changed UI when in "car" mode on phone apps, as well as Bluetooth pairing being disabled while driving.
I get it, they want you to not use the apps while driving. But you know what's even more distracting than messing with a device while driving? Trying to troubleshoot unexpected UXs while driving
Not to mention that passengers exist. Convincing my friend to pull over and put the car in park so I can be navigator and DJ for our little road trip was certainly more distracting than just having an open and predictable UX