posted in Technology
One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives
www.carscoops.com/2026/08/unused-car-features-study/
Replying to @sanitation@lemmy.today
This makes me sound like I’m irresponsible. I’m not, I just happen to have a car with dangerously poorly designed “safety tech”.
My car has sign recognition, cruise control, and lane keep assist. I use a single one, and one I can’t turn off permanently.
Lane keep assist insists on making me drive way too far left, so I turned it off after it tried to kill me by forcing me into a super wide load truck coming towards me.
Cruise control keeps wanting to switch setting to the recognised speed limit. But it picks up all sorts of stuff. So driving by a highway on ramp will make it suggest that I put the speed limiter to 130km/h, on a 70km/h road. But turning off sign recognition requires me to go through several menus and is reset when I park.
On top of that the speedometer is 4-5km/h too slow, so I’ll be going 84km/h according to the speedometer, my GPS says I’m going 80km/h, and I’ll go by a sign and the speed limiter will pop up suggesting that I set it to 80. And btw that the speedometer is displaying a faster speed than I’m going, has nothing to do with wheel circumference. The car’s odometer is spot on. If google maps says a trip is 300km then the odometer advances 300km, not 298 or 302.
I drove a newer rental car and tried all the safety assist features. I felt the same way after less than at hour of driving and turned everything except cruise and emergency brake off.
Don’t even get me started on how useless the voice control system was. The car voice control is usually significantry worse than the Google provided version. I frankly do not understand how Google has done such a garbage job. Voice control on Google seems to have gotten worse since it came out, not better. At least for actually getting things done rather than just asking silly questions. I can’t even effectively take a note on my motorcycle reliably by voice.