46 ms·

Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

• ruperthair 2mo ago
  > A Reddit user, u/premium_bawbag, who hired a Ford Puma for a week reported a similar experience. Lovely traditional Scottish name there. ;-)
• janpmz 2mo ago
  I wonder if they also have a seeker pointed at my face then, because I don't want that shining into my eyes.
• frollogaston 2mo ago
  Does it at least have more cupholders for your verification cans?
  • ryandrake 2mo ago
    "Mountain Dew is for me and you!"
• mr_toad 2mo ago
  To start your car please look into camera and repeat: "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
  • Aaargh20318 2mo ago
    Don’t forget to drink a verification can.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ColdStream 2mo ago
      Yep... gets a little less funny every year as it comes closer to reality.
      • dzhiurgis 2mo ago
        You going to hate this, but Tesla is adding facial recognition to start self driving. Whether it is to identify driver age, identify correct kid at school pickup, stop doll heads from attentiveness check bypass or determine license holder - you gotta admit it makes sense.
  • DeluluDon 2mo ago
    "Doritos™ just Dew™ it™!"
    • snapetom 2mo ago
      This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
      • kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
        I'm going to Taco Bell for some fine dining. Let them know I want a chilled bottle of Baja Blast waiting upon arrival.
        • King-Aaron 2mo ago
          Uh oh! Your vehicle subscription level doesn't include [BRAND]. Please tap the brake pedal twice to upgrade your subscription to Silverpremium for an additional $14.99 per month.
          • snapetom 2mo ago
            God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down. Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • altern8 2mo ago
    Brawndo is what your body craves. It's got electrolytes!
    • olyjohn 2mo ago
      You mean that it's got what plants crave.
      • altern8 2mo ago
        Yes of course. What else would you give plants, water out the toilet!?
        • ProllyInfamous 2mo ago
          This one goes in your mouth. This one goes in your butt. Or was it the other way around?
• tgma 2mo ago
  All these years we heard Germans are anal about privacy. Is that only when mass hysteria is pushed against internet companies? How are they okay with this?
• MemoryHoleHQ 2mo ago
  [dead]
• raumgeist 2mo ago
  This is a privacy nightmare that is making me speechless, I think, while staring at a phone with a camera pointed directly at my face.
  • poolnoodle 2mo ago
    fuk
• ptdorf 2mo ago
  Innovation? Who cares?? Regulation is where the real value is. /s
• sod 2mo ago
  It boggles my mind that some people are more concerned how much fun driving a car is supposed to be vs 60 people dying in the EU in car accidents every day. 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.
  • Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
    > 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. But according to the article it will ping when you glance at the scenery at 20 kph. If a system is annoying it will be a bigger distraction and source of frustration than what it's supposed to prevent, and people will find ways to turn it off.
  • bruce343434 2mo ago
    the optimal crime rate is non zero and the same goes for traffic death rate, because to bring them to zero would imply a dystopia where personal freedom is seriously limited
    • cbg0 2mo ago
      Personal freedom to fall asleep at the wheel or look at your phone while driving?
  • cloudie78 2mo ago
    60 a day for whole EU is a really good number. Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good. As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me. Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss. And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras? I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that. The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator. Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging. I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know. Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well. Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger. There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver) As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways. Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.
• jcarrano 2mo ago
  Meanwhile in Germany I see, quite literally, 12 traffic signs on a 100m stretch of road. I'm pretty sure that looking at all those signs adds up to a few seconds at least.
• flyingshelf 2mo ago
  New cars are painful to drive. So many alerts it's distracting. bing bing bing NOW what?
  • pornel 2mo ago
    Now you have to take your eyes off the road and look through three screens to find a new icon that showed up somewhere. Then keep not looking at the road and tap though multiple layers of settings screens to dismiss the false positive. Car makers are chronically awful at making software, and regulations that force them to write more such software are doomed to suck.
• vixen99 2mo ago
  Given an (admittedly) optimistic future forecast for remote assessment of parameters related to driver blood chemistry and physiology - will this then be an inevitable further add-on legal requirement for human-driven transport?
• clarionbell 2mo ago
  Sometimes I feel that EU has an unhealthy obsession with safety, at expense of almost everything else. This is one of those times.
  • cbg0 2mo ago
    Preventing car crashes and people dying in said crashes isn't an unhealthy obsession with safety.
    • capr 2mo ago
      but that's not what they're doing. that's just you believing the rhetoric
      • cbg0 2mo ago
        It looks like some of these systems do work, why shouldn't we try these systems too? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437525001525#s0100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752...
• Jazgot 2mo ago
  I'm wondering how it will work with various types of sunglasses?
  • cbg0 2mo ago
    It works, but there are mechanisms to also track your head position if it can't see your eyes.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• devn0ll 2mo ago
  As a European: Absolutely not. Never, will not comply, will do everything in my hacking power to not be subjected to this. 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!
• jarym 2mo ago
  Europe learnt nothing from the 1910-1950 era it seems. If the Stasi were around to see their dream rebuilt twice over....
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• yason 2mo ago
  The interesting part of this mostly bullshit is how it exposes a kind of reverse Goodhart's law scenario. When driving becomes less about attention to surroundings and focusing on driving and more about keeping the trivial beepers off, it changes the way people drive. 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.
• Skwid 2mo ago
  A little conflicted on this one. I firmly believe there is too much distracted driving going on right now. And yet, I find driving a modern car a hugely distracting experience. 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.
• dvratil 2mo ago
  I sometimes wonder how these systems are being tested on the road and whether there's any feedback from the test drivers, or what kind of morons are there saying "this is completely fine, exactly like intended" when they read the feedback... 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
  • Tade0 2mo ago
    I'm happy I wasn't able to activate cruise control in the Karoq that I rented some time ago. VAG interfaces were always confusing to me and this behaviour would be more so. I see signs recognized like that all the time, so use satnav as my reference. Unfortunately if it's not up to date (mine hasn't been for years now), it will suggest speeds which have nothing to do with reality.
    • silon42 2mo ago
      I wonder if I should install a popup 30 sign on a rear window for tailgaters in the future.
      • Tade0 2mo ago
        I'm curious as well, but I'm afraid they don't use such systems due to how they also keep distance as well as speed.
• jerrycat101 2mo ago
  wait are we as drivers required to have a camera? I mean its a good thing to have a camera but no idea how you set it up to record automatically.
• lousken 2mo ago
  Camera at your face should fix what exactly? It certainly does not fix allowance to use touch screens in car, so what the hell? Can we go back to 2010 and use the technology called buttons?
• ErneX 2mo ago
  I rented a car last weekend that had something similar to this and it didn’t work when I was wearing sunglasses. As soon as I put them on it said on the dashboard that I needed to take the sensor to service it or something along those lines. 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.
• jongjong 2mo ago
  In 5 years, every car will need to include a pack of adult diapers.
• roody15 2mo ago
  These features suck on the few American cars I have seen them. In Florida using a rental driving to Orlando area my vehicle constantly told me to get my eye’s back on the road or to take a driving break. I was on a highway driving completely normal. Just annoying dashboard warnings over and over. 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.
• upmind 2mo ago
  not saying what the EU does is a good thing but why don't I ever see any legislations like this from the US? we'd still have lightning on iPhones if it wasn't for the EU so some of what they introduce is net positive...
• elzbardico 2mo ago
  What about domestic accidents? Domestic violence? It is clear to me, that we also need cameras in every room in every home and office.
• DivingForGold 2mo ago
  Wear a halloween prankster mask
• nereid 2mo ago
  Already requirement in China
• bwb 2mo ago
  How does this work with sunglasses?
• commiepatrol 2mo ago
  We were just in Sicily for vacation and got a new BYD for rent. At first I was excited, coming from US I never tried a Chinese car and wanted to check it out. Excitement was quickly replaced with annoyance, that thing would beep for every damn reason. "keep eyes on road", "you are tired, consider taking a break", etc. Then all the damn safety features that a couple of times almost caused me to slam into another car. After a couple of days, I blocked the camera monitoring me and then would spend the first minute after getting in the car turning off all these "helpers", luckily most of them I could still disable. Camera couldn't be disabled in settings but just covering it up worked well. I thought about getting scotch tape but never got around to it.
  • patentatt 2mo ago
    Especially since if you were driving in Sicily you must have your head on a swivel 100% of the time. There are probably multiple fiat pandas trying to drag race around you on the one lane road that somehow has traffic going both ways, lol.
• Danox 2mo ago
  Nanny State at it’s worse, The problem is not necessarily getting a warning. The biggest problem is sharing that information with someone else. Incredible.
• yonatan8070 2mo ago
  Reading all the comments here about how awful new cars are really reinforces my choice to buy a 2016 Nissan Micra as my first (and currently only) car. 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.
• rcpt 2mo ago
  My comma.ai does this but when I have sunglasses on it beeps too much. That's fine with me but wow I can't imagine how most of the population will react
• mikewarot 2mo ago
  Relevant Peter Girnus post, satire, sort of https://x.com/gothburz/status/2074902503599059357 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
• Crowberry 2mo ago
  I hate this.. I have to turn off the beeping feature of my car EVERY time i turn it on. It will beep if I drive above the speed limit, only it won’t always read the signs right.. 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
• mcv 2mo ago
  > the car warns you with some combination of a light, a sound, or a vibration. 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.
• phyzix5761 2mo ago
  Is it just HN or is Europe really a surveillance state? Seems every article posted on here is about how different governments in Europe are passing more laws to spy on their citizens. 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?
• subarctic 2mo ago
  What on earth, this is the first I've heard of this. I thought the EU was all about privacy?
• zftnb666 2mo ago
  Car: watches you drive. Phone: watches you exist. Soon: your fridge judging your snack choices.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• m1coti 2mo ago
  proud to drive 2002 volkswagen golf in these creepy times
  • WarOnPrivacy 2mo ago
    Ditto for 1992 Buick, 1996 Toyota. Also 1961 Sunliner, weather permitting.
• jstsch 2mo ago
  The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.
  • Schiendelman 2mo ago
    My Tesla is quite accurate about whether I'm looking at the road or not. What car specifically had this issue?
    • zamadatix 2mo ago
      That's the trouble with automating cars - being quite accurate is not really that great over 100k miles. On Tesla's specifically I find the "hands on wheel" attention detection a bit iffy.
      • AbsurdCensor 2mo ago
        For FSD, at least in the US they long dropped the hands on the wheel thing, unless the attention monitoring isn't functioning. At least the folks I know that have it, they absolutely love it.
        • zamadatix 2mo ago
          The current docs still say issues with the camera detection results in the hands on wheel prompts https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GUID-2CB60804-9CEA-4F4B-8B04-09B991368DC5.html#:~:text=If%20the%20cabin%20camera%20does%20not%20have%20clear%20visibility%20of%20the%20driver%27s%20hand%20and%20arm%20locations https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GU... but yes, it was nice when they removed the requirement to have the hands on the wheel even when the camera was working right. I liked the Tesla progress & road trips but my real bar for joy is the Waymo style promise/start of delivery. There's no fallback to wait for improvement there, either it does everything it promises or it doesn't do anything!
    • 2mo ago
• ryandrake 2mo ago
  So, 1. yet another beep/boop in the car contributing to alert-fatigue, and 2. another stream of data inevitably sent off-device and monetized in god knows what ways by god knows which third party "partners".
• nickslaughter02 2mo ago
  The EU is quickly becoming the surveillance capital of the world.
  • gf000 2mo ago
    For not letting people snooze off behind the wheel?
    • aliasxneo 2mo ago
      Death by a thousand cuts. It never stops at just one thing.
      • gf000 2mo ago
        Slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason. No, they even mandate fastening the seatbelts! Oh my, this tyranny!
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      • wpollock 2mo ago
        Car: You look tired. There's a motel in 3 miles. Car: You appear to be suffering from acne. Try Zit-away, available at the convenience store in 2.4 kilometers. Car: Facial recognition failed. Car is now disabled. Contact your car dealer to reenable vehicle.
        • gf000 2mo ago
          The last one sounds eerily similar to what a for-profit company would do in case of a terminated subscription, that would be perfectly fine in the US, but would get purged by fire in the EU by proper laws that meant to protect the public. I guess it's just hard to imagine that the government may work FOR the people?
        • rapnie 2mo ago
          Car: You are politically active for the wrong party. Doors locked. Battery will now catch fire.
• A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
  All new cars. 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.
  • nathias 2mo ago
    yes I can't understand how anyone buys these
    • pmontra 2mo ago
      Because there is nothing else left to buy. I only buy second hand cars but sooner or later I'll have to buy a post 2026 car.
  • pavlov 2mo ago
    I just took delivery on a new European made car (DS no 8) last week and it’s been great. The driver assist features are useful, automatic lane switching works perfectly, and the driver awareness nags are very modest. I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me. It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).
  • vim-guru 2mo ago
    For speed-limits, I believe most of these new cars use multiple sources; so likely information found in the map at your location and cameras to spot signs. For some freak, unknown reason, the map-data is usually more trusted with the car vendors then the camera's it seems. Just don't rely on map-data for speed-limits and this would be a solved problem I think.
  • deleted 2mo ago
• Bender 2mo ago
  Gadget Idea: Small display with a lens that can be mounted over the camera that hooks into the material around it, plays an AI generated video of $RANDOM_CELEBRITY singing karaoke off-key and driving very carefully. I am unsure what would be the most annoying song for the remote viewers to listen to when off-key.
• SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Black vinyl tape over the camera?
  • kirykl 2mo ago
    You need to splice in a looped recorded video like in a heist movie, otherwise the camera detects blockage from the tape and incessantly beeps
    • dest 2mo ago
      Disconnect the beep
      • stellalo 2mo ago
        You’ll fail the mandatory inspection
• awakeasleep 2mo ago
  Ford has had that since Blue Cruise 2.0, or thereabouts. It really shocked me how often it catches my attention being diverted. Things like talking to my passengers, adjusting the climate controls, or eating- I'm not even talking about 'advanced distractions' like my phone. 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.
  • CGMthrowaway 2mo ago
    Eye tracking
  • recursive 2mo ago
    It gives me false positives when I'm holding the wheel at the top and my wrist is blocking line of sight from the camera. On the other hand, sunglasses have never tripped it all.
  • Dries007 2mo ago
    My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea. The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road". Great system over all. 10/10 no notes.
    • borosuxks 2mo ago
      I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score. And who doesn't want the safest car?
• xvxvx 2mo ago
  I was recently in the Uk and one of the cars I was in would alert the driver if he was over the speed limit. Fair enough. But the alert itself is distracting. Are we to review every single alert from these cameras? Is that not just another distraction?
  • simonbarker87 2mo ago
    There’s usually some kind of short cut action to disable that for the car. In a Mercedes you hold the volume down button in the steering wheel for 3 seconds and it “updates settings” which is basically disabling that annoying feature.
    • embedding-shape 2mo ago
      Recently rented BMW had the same, disable speed warnings by holding down "Options" button or something on the steering wheel. Annoyingly though, it didn't remember the selected driving profile after being turned off, but not sure if that's because I wasn't logged in to a BMW account, it was a rental, because the profile was the sport profile, or whatever, so had to tap around on an annoying touchscreen to select that every time I used the car.
      • numitus 2mo ago
        It's a strict legal requirement for all cars
      • dfunckt 2mo ago
        There’s a way to make a profile the default. I personally appreciate that it reverts back to it when turned off.
  • valleyer 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
• 73738384 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• dmitrygr 2mo ago
  This sort of nonsense is well studied in aeronautical world, and will lead to too many alerts, which, in turn, lead to predictable outcomes: https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/normalization-of-deviance/ https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/normalization-of-devian...
  • ajross 2mo ago
    Very different threat model though. Commercial aircraft aren't sensitive to keep-your-eyes-on-the-road failures with seconds-scale latencies, airlines require autopilot use, there is a copilot present at all times, the FAA very strictly regulates work hours and substance use, etc... Sure, don't nag a pilot who is already very well backstopped by the existing solutions. Your uncle coming back from the bar at 2am doesn't have any of that.
    • dmitrygr 2mo ago
      Repeated nuisance alarms have the same effect on all humans, not just on pilots - it trains them to ignore the alarms. Eventually this will lead to non-nuisance alarms being ignored and lives being lost.
      • ajross 2mo ago
        That depends on "repeated" and "nuisance". My experience in a Tesla is that the attention monitoring never has false positive alarms at all. And it 100% has caught situations where I'm head down in the cockpit on autopilot in ways that, honestly, I probably shouldn't have been. So there's a single data point saying you're wrong. This kind of counter-intuitive/smarter-than-the-obvious pontification is a HN smell to me. Most of the time the obvious solution is correct. Driver attention management is one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) contributors to accident rate, and IMHO probably deserves some assistive technology attention. If the reverse is true, it needs actual evidence and not an attempt to reason from aviation evidence (a regime where inattention is NOT a major problem!).
• drdebug 2mo ago
  Any one knows what happens when duck tape is being used to cover the camera?
  • speed_spread 2mo ago
    Car starts quacking at you
  • bdamm 2mo ago
    Expect an error but this will depend on the brand. "Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
  • zedascouves 2mo ago
    You can deactivate it, but has to be on every car start. It's so annoying having to tur off all that crap every single trip. Sometimes i forget the lane assist ON and get nudged randomly at high speeds, so so scary.
    • _rs 2mo ago
      Time to start jailbreaking car software
    • gmueckl 2mo ago
      Those nudges are gentle and totally safe in every car I've ever had. And no "random" nudges outside road construction work with dubious lane markings where you need to have a grip on the wheel anyway. A regular firm grip always overrides lane keeping.
      • aftbit 2mo ago
        I mostly agree in my 2024 Ioniq 5, but not in my 2019 Subaru Outback. You can definitely override the lane keep if you have a firm grip and are ready for it, but it tries to throw me off the road often enough that I don't use it anymore. The scariest was when I had to swerve into another lane to avoid some trash that was sticking into the road from the highway. It tried to force me back into it twice! Luckily I was ready but it gave me a fright for sure.
• 55873445216111 2mo ago
  "self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads" https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads-fool-tesla-autopilot-camera/ https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads...
  • zormino 2mo ago
    And you can bypass a seatbelt warning by just plugging in a buckle without the belt, but most people don't bother. It's not worth the inconvenience to circumvent, so it still has a positive impact on safety.
    • vitally3643 2mo ago
      A shocking fraction of people will simply ignore the seatbelt beeping for the entire drive
    • trinix912 2mo ago
      Seatbelts are actually heavily enforced around the EU, most people would rather just belt up than pay the fine.
      • baw-bag 2mo ago
        Toyota... When we look after a dog for a few days for a friend, it beeps. When I put shopping on the back seat, it beeps. Drives me wild. It "beep... beep... beep..." for a minute then "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP". I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.
        • aenis 2mo ago
          I once made the mistake of renting one of those cars, putting my backpack and some groceries behind me, and driving straight onto a freeway. This absolute sh*tbox was beeping so loud I was afraid for my hearing. I drove some 10 miles like this before I could pull over and move the things. I'd not set foot in one of those cars ever again (same goes for Lexus). I was dreaming of really bad things happening to people who thought it was a good idea to emit series of very loud beeps while the car is driving.
• drnick1 2mo ago
  1) Unplug the cellular modem. 2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens. 3) Enjoy!
  • w4der 2mo ago
    And remember to format the car before you take it in for a service.
    • drnick1 2mo ago
      As a rule, I do my own maintenance or take the car to an independent mechanic. I wouldn't trust a dealer given how misaligned their incentives are with my interests.
  • epolanski 2mo ago
    Both are illegal.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • trinix912 2mo ago
      Not really, it will still be fully road legal, at least in my EU member state.
    • frollogaston 2mo ago
      It's illegal to disconnect the modem? Where?
      • hollow-moe 2mo ago
        Ecall is mandatory, you'll eventually fail road safety inspections.
        • frollogaston 2mo ago
• wnevets 2mo ago
  Good thing we have those cookie banners warning us about websites tracking us.
• greatgib 2mo ago
  Maybe would be the good time to create a company to sell webcam covers for cars...
• lifestyleguru 2mo ago
  Ok I'm a citizen of EU country. I don't consent, I don't agree. I want a car without inside cameras, without systems beeping, blinking, nor vibrating at me. Don't you ever move the steering wheel under my hands. Why I'm screaming into the void?
  • prmoustache 2mo ago
    Thanksfully there are plenty of vehicles in the second hand market.
• throw0101d 2mo ago
  I have a manual 2003 Golf TDI (purchased in 2003; has a tape deck!) that's slowly rusting, and I'm not looking forward to when I have to replace it. 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.carsized.com/en/
  • leoedin 2mo ago
    Mazda managed to avoid the touch screen plague until relatively recently. Their latest models seem to have adopted Android based infotainment with touchscreens though. I've got a CX-5 that's 3 years old and it's pleasingly touch screen free. Also the driver aids are mild and unintrusive.
  • yoyohello13 2mo ago
    Yeah I have 2002 Honda accord and I’m dreading the day I need to get a modern car. My wife has a 2021 car and there is not a single feature it has that is necessary. In fact, many of them are actively bad. I’ve been driving every day, accident free, for 20 years and have never once needed lane assist, attention tracking or whatever the fuck. I wish there was a car that just had no additional ‘features’ beyond actual mechanical/efficiency improvements.
    • aucisson_masque 2mo ago
      Then these features are not for you. They are for your kids when a distracted driver would crush their small skull with a 3T SUV.
      • throw0101d 2mo ago
        > Then these features are not for you. Which could (maybe) be fine if they could be permanently turned off (and not reset-to-on on every startup). Heck, even if it was a dealership-only change it would be something. See recent driving 4 answers video on the silliness of some of these features: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-S76WEl25k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-S76WEl25k An alert that causes you to look down every time to enter an intersection/roundabout when you most need to be looking up? Warnings when you put on sunglasses?
• INTPenis 2mo ago
  As a pedestrian I love this. 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.
• amelius 2mo ago
  Smart cars are the new Smart TVs
• Invictus0 2mo ago
  I would rather die in a car crash than get nagged like this. Europe is the nanniest of nanny states, its inconceivable that people actually want to live like this.
  • TacticalCoder 2mo ago
    It's incredible that comments similar to yours are getting actively downvoted. People cannot even criticize the surveillance state: we're at that point. It's "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys, always ever state-loving. "ChatControl 2.0 ain't that bad because it's not mandatory" "A camera in every car ain't that bad because the recordings won't necessarily be shared" It's sickening. I'm tired of you people.
  • gogusrl 2mo ago
    ouf yeah, I agree. I had a lot more to say about this but the ICE checkpoint found my smuggled kinder egg and now they're sending me off to alligator alcatraz. It's all good anyway, statistically I'm 3 times more likely to die on the way there than those nannied europeans so freedom wins in the end.
    • Invictus0 2mo ago
      you're more likely to die from heat exhaustion as well, because you nincompoops still haven't figured out how to cool the air
• antondd 2mo ago
  Before you comment or engage with the OP, check his comment and submission history. Make of it what you will.
  • headsman771 2mo ago
    Being concerned about the trend of laws in the EU doesn't make someone a bad actor.
    • antondd 2mo ago
      A sus posting history, grammar peppered with typical machine translated russisms, and an occasional ‘russia good’ slip does.
  • frollogaston 2mo ago
    To make things fair, I looked at both yours and his. Guess he's concerned about privacy especially in the EU, and you like to call anyone a Russian bot for complaining. I probably qualify as Russian bot too, brb changing Lada oil.
    • antondd 2mo ago
      I’ll take that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442503#48444168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442503#48444168
    • ang_cire 2mo ago
      Holy heck, you weren't kidding. Not 3 comments before a string of Undercover Russian accusations. You wonder if some people can't conceptualize other people disagreeing with them in good faith, without being part of some shadowy influence campaign.
      • antondd 2mo ago
        A string is a stretch, let’s not get wild here. If you include references to the most successful implementation of communism and all that it entailed to the masses, then, sure.
• avaer 2mo ago
  "The cars have all have cameras checking for bad behavior, why shouldn't your phone and laptop?" said the esteemed lawmaker. "Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
  • zeratax 2mo ago
    seems categorically different to have something beep vs informing law enforcement or w/e. and also don't think politicans are going to get cars without this installed
  • FunHearing3443 2mo ago
    I think part of this acceptance of the "well if it saves one [usually child's] life..." - it's extremely powerful but is deceptive as it devalues the value of freedom (or some similar trait).
    • einpoklum 2mo ago
      Another variant of this is: "What, you don't want to catch the pedophiles?"
      • Integrape 2mo ago
        "Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
    • hoherd 2mo ago
      Yeah, "think of the children" is a rhetorical technique but also a logical fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
  • ivanjermakov 2mo ago
    I think they forgot about children safety!
  • deleted 2mo ago
• baggy_trough 2mo ago
  Many of these warnings are hazardous, especially in an unfamiliar vehicle. They are extremely annoying and often incorrect. They result in extended periods of distracted driving trying to figure out how to turn off the warning. 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.
• chaostheory 2mo ago
  This is just more evidence that the GDPR was just a set of protectionist laws for EU companies.
  • cbg0 2mo ago
    The GDPR protects people from companies keeping their data and using it recklessly.
    • chaostheory 2mo ago
      “protects EU companies from more competitive foreign companies” Tbf protectionist laws are everywhere now including the US. Globalism is dying. The spirit of the law was to protect people’s data from every entity including government bodies.
• 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2mo ago
  I have a 2012 Skoda Yeti, 170000 miles. Serviced every year, never had anything go wrong with it yet. If it starts costing me money I will buy a 2012 Skoda Yeti from Autotrader with 50000 miles on the clock. At my age that should just about do me :)
  • have_faith 2mo ago
    I’ve got 2017 Yeti (last year they were made) with 80k miles on it, will probably keep it for another decade. I wish I could buy an electric yeti but everything else about it staying the same.
  • cpursley 2mo ago
    I have nothing to add other than those are cool vehicles.
  • HDBaseT 2mo ago
    I'm 21 years old, I'm driving a 2010 car with the intention to keep driving it for at least another few years (well over 200,000km). I service it every 5,000 to 7,500km. I drive decently aggressive though. I'm scared that I'll never get to drive a "cool" car in my life. The future is grim and new cars are just NSA spyware with annoying beeps. I think I'll honestly kill myself before I have to sit in a modern car with a "driver monitor camera".
    • gogusrl 2mo ago
      and who would take care of your BMW when you're not around anymore ?
• cess11 2mo ago
  Designing this machine vision system is insurmountable. It will never be actually good at its stated purpose, because how much you can look through some window or glance back at your kids is decided by the outside environment and it will be impossible to fit accurate judgement of it in the computers in the car. 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.
  • gmueckl 2mo ago
    I have news for you: those systems already exist and they work. The "insurmountable" development work has already been done. How long you can safely look away from the road is determined mostly by physics and has hard bounds. More than ~5 seconds is never OK while the vehicle is on a public road. At speed, a single second can be a second too long. The problem isn't that the road looks clear now. The problem is that this can change instantly, without warning and in the most surprising ways at any moment. A kid running into the road from behind a car, an object falling onto the road, an animal jumping onto the road from the brush/ditch/tree-line... the list goes on. Forcing the driver to pay attention is good. There is no massive situational leeway.
    • cess11 2mo ago
      No it hasn't. There's some approximation of supposed assistance for particular situations. I don't think cars should whine about what I do or don't, because they suck at being drivers. As I understand it, this kind of crap comes from the US, which is a society that tries to force people to spend as much time as possible in the car regardless of whether they should be there or not, even allowing people to drive when rather drunk at 0.08% BAC. It's not something I welcome the spread of.
• malok4y 2mo ago
  A mandatory camera and a mandatory modem in every car is a privacy nightmare. The EU does not care about privacy of it's subjects, it cares about control. The US is not much different. It's over for freedom in the west. The frogs are boiling.
• reactordev 2mo ago
  Modern cars are user hostile
• miroljub 2mo ago
  And here we go again :) It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.
  • jsrcout 2mo ago
    In fact, he loves us!
• hollowturtle 2mo ago
  I purchased a new a hybrid car a year ago. It is impossible to deactivate permanently speed limit and lane alerts. They are useless, dumb and dangerous if you ask me. Detecting a 40km/h on the highway from a road sign on a near by road it's not safety. It's been a year of touching and correcting touches for disabling these two alerts, of course you have to do more clicks no way of accessing it from a quick menu or from quick actions on the steering wheel. The car works perfectly but this thing is so annoying to me that I'm seriously thinking of selling it. The touch screen is slooooow, when the internal temperature is higher is even more slooow for a ui that should be 1200fps for what it does even on a underpowered throttled by heat waves board chip. I either sell the car of take my time and find a way to hack that damn firmware. This is not the way to go, the way to go is autonomous driving not all this annoying BS
  • wincy 2mo ago
    The speed limit detection exists on my US Toyota vehicle, but it doesn’t beep or nag, just tells me what it thinks the speed limit is on the HUD, which is nice. Although when I drove through Georgia the interstate has all these minimum speed signs that look close enough to speed limit signs that fully half the time through Georgia it thought the speed limit was 40mph instead of 80mph. It would have been an absolute nightmare drive if it had beeped intermittently for 6 hours.
• josefritzishere 2mo ago
  This is not OK.
• afh1 2mo ago
  And Europeans think they have privacy lol
• hollow-moe 2mo ago
  > On the positive side, the regulations require the ADDW system to work on a "closed loop" without the use of biometric data. lmfao, the regulations required antipollution systems too didn't they ? Even if by some miracle this is the case for all manufacturers I'm betting my first son the software can helpfully be updated to be cloud enabled once insurances companies catch up or regulations are updated for more safety. Hope you like walking a lot.
• exabrial 2mo ago
  I'm buying 0 cars with this nonsense. And 0 cars without CarPlay support.
• jjcm 2mo ago
  This feels like a regulation whose effectiveness will expire in the next couple of years (as driverless cars become the norm), but which will set a precedent that this is the norm. This with the EU chat control coming up really set a tone.
• dagenix 2mo ago
  I have no idea how well such a system works, but, I found these lines pretty jarring: > 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?
  • ang_cire 2mo ago
    It's bad though because glancing at your side-view mirrors is good, but this will train drivers out of it by beeping at them because their eyes aren't perfectly forwards-facing. It's an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, that also coincidentally helps advance the surveillance state more than it does help prevent distracted driving.
• shevy-java 2mo ago
  They hate us for our freedom.
• mrtksn 2mo ago
  The headline is wrong. The article and the headline seems to be written in a way to cause outrage by giving the impression that the EU requires cameras which should be recording your face all the time and storing/sending it to authorities or something but what the EU actually requires is "Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System" which may be implemented using cameras and no recording or transmitting is required, in fact actually recording and transmitting would be a problem with GDPR.
  • DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
    I don't think it's misleading at all. Is it a camera that's aimed at your face? It seems like it.
    • mrtksn 2mo ago
      Nope, the laws require Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System and does not require cameras aimed at your face. Also, cameras are receivers. Nothing happens when cameras are aimed at your face, it is only significant when you are interested with the received image and it actually nothing happens, it is processed on device to see if you are tired/distracted/asleep. Here is the actual text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/2590/oj/eng They mention that cameras are required when testing the systems compliance but does not specify how these systems should work.
      • DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
        Yes, so it’s a camera aimed at your face. Of course it’s a receiver, I’m not sure how that is relevant
  • gib444 2mo ago
    I remember the brief period when they told us that the self service checkout weren't recording video. Then they just said oh actually they do now and nobody battered an eye lid If the tech is put there it's just a matter of time. They can't resist
• Aboutplants 2mo ago
  Goal - make driving so annoying that customers will be begging for fully self driving cars!
  • xtracto 2mo ago
    Good, hopefully in 10-15 years we will have mostly self-driving cars for most ground transportation requirements.
    • shye 2mo ago
      If we're allowed to dream, make it public transit, as private cars, regardless of how they are driven, are a climate disaster we can not afford.
      • Gigachad 2mo ago
        I imagine the ideal situation would be a hybrid. Trains for the bulk of transport and self driving cars for the large tail of odd trips. When you want to get home from your friends house at 1AM there is no traffic on the roads, and taking PT is a 1+ hour trip while uber is 10 minutes. There will never be super fast PT connecting every odd route that runs frequently all through the night. Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
        • hsbauauvhabzb 2mo ago
          Why not? Public transport follows static routes, but there’s nothing to stop personalised routes based on whose on the public transport, especially while off peak.
          • Gigachad 2mo ago
            Personalised routes is not really much different than uber pool. Maybe the government should run a public version of this. But I think there will always be some trips that are so low volume (particularly late at night) that it makes sense to just have a single occupant car rather than a whole bus moving one person.
• aljgz 2mo ago
  New cars are UX nightmares. I'm driving an electric Toyota bz4x. Lovely mechanics, but the general UX (some are because of Android Auto) is terrible. The remote's lock/unlock don't do anything when the car is on. Example: I'm by the trunk and it won't open unless I go back to the driver's door and unlock the doors. App's remote function has too many conditions to do anything. For instance, I'm resting in the back seat and want to turn on the car for some air conditioning, but it says: the doors should be locked, the key fab should be out of the car to start the car. 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.
  • wkjagt 2mo ago
    I hate that my 2020 Ioniq EV takes decisions for me, and just overall pretends to know better. I've turned off all the gadgets I could find (lane assist etc, I hate the feeling of the steering wheel wanting to move by itself) but some remain. Some examples: (1) I want to move my car a couple of feet in the driveway, but it won't let me without my seat belt on. (2) Sometimes, even after just a few minutes, it'll replace the whole main display (speedometer etc) with an image of a cup of coffee and tells me to take a break (3) It won't do cruise control under 30 km/h (which is ok I guess), but instead of refusing to enable cruise control under 30 km/h, it will set the speed to 30 and accelerate. (4) And the most annoying (but maybe not in the same category) : when I'm braking, and drive over a bump, it'll temporarily disable regen (ABS related?), causing a sudden loss in applied braking power. This was very scary at first, but now that I know, I scan the road for bumps when slowing down. All that said though, my wife's 2 year old Ioniq 5 is way worse with the gadgets and seems to be always beeping for everything. In other news, I test drove a Volvo 240 yesterday and am picking it up later this week.
• sssilver 2mo ago
  I hate this new world we find ourselves in. 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."
• gib444 2mo ago
  They'll do anything but address the root cause of distractions: the addictive nature of mobile phones/the apps on them
• satvikpendem 2mo ago
  This is already in Teslas for supervised self driving, not sure what the big deal is. People can be very distracted while driving and the Tesla OS makes sure to let them know.
• ronbenton 2mo ago
  Weird dark surveillance state stuff. I thought EU was trying to champion privacy?
  • noosphr 2mo ago
    The EU wants to be the only one who spies on its citizens.
    • akramachamarei 2mo ago
      Surveillance sovereignty
  • aenis 2mo ago
    Those are the same insane morons who came up with the cookie consent. Cottage industry of lawyers that push for those regulations and then collect lucrative retainers from companies wishing to not be fined. One of the reasons EU is so hopelessly behind on any innovation.
    • deergomoo 2mo ago
      Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
      • aenis 2mo ago
        This is a bit more nuanced than that. Under the GDPR provisions, strictly necessary cookies are exempt from the consent screen. But the way the exemptions read prompts all the lawyers to "well, maybe it's sort of necessary for you to have a session_id, but its so, so much safer to have the damn consent screen, so please...". I worked in technical roles at large companies that had completely honest-to-god private, strictly necessary cookies - where compliance people forced the cookie consent screens, there was no space for a discusion. At my latest company, despite being a CTO, I could not convince our legal team that going without the consent screen as we are really only using "strictly necessary" cookies was fine. Its "mate, you may even be right, but really, nobody is skipping the consent screen, and we won't risk a compliance issue on your say-so.". Sure, lots of companies - maybe even most - do shit things, and of course the real tagging of people and fingerprinting happens in sophisticated ways that actually defy GDPR, require no cookies whatsoever and so on - and thats another problem. Those moronic consent screens server exactly no real benefit for a while now.
• tokai 2mo ago
  If its closed looped its great. All cars should also come with alcolocks.
• KashifNY 2mo ago
  That is a good initiative however what ever data is being recorded needs to kept in a responsible and safe manner
  • dudul 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • AlexandrB 2mo ago
    Not to worry, Flock, Palantir, and whoever else has use for it will keep it very safe once they buy it from the car company for $1/driver/month. Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car. [1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    It isn't supposed to store any data, just process the real-time feed and output a Boolean signal for whether your eyes are on the road. Selling it to Flock makes you a criminal who needs to go to prison, but they'll probably find a way around that.
• lasky 2mo ago
  I love driving. 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.
• aenis 2mo ago
  If I hate anything about the EU, its the morons writing regulations for cars. My car constantly distracts me with some beeps, sometimes loud enough to be dangerous. Its surely one of the reasons far right is on the rise -- with things like 'drivers party' in some European countries winning serious votes. I spend 1-2hrs in the car each day, and I hate what those regulations did to driving. (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).
  • preisschild 2mo ago
    On the other hand, as someone living in a city with good public transit, I think cars should be regulated more. Cars make living in such a city a worse experience. They are loud and produce pollution (including EVs).
  • davemp 2mo ago
    Totally insane that they enshrine this stuff in law without a reference design and corresponding data to validate its effectiveness.
    • dpark 2mo ago
      Problem is do you trust the government to produce a proven reference design and test data? I have doubts that the best automotive engineers are working for any governments. More likely any reference design would come from a private company and the regulation would end up establishing an effective monopoly. Everyone has to implement the reference design because the liability is too high for not implementing the government-blessed one.
  • thi2 2mo ago
    More than once did my lane assistant try to run me into the barrier in a construction zone. You can turn it off, however its on again after on the next start... And all this comes with insanely high priced repairs that you cant really DIY anymore.
    • 2mo ago
• edwinjones 2mo ago
  This is why I like modern Renaults/Dacias. They all come with a single button to turn all of this stuff off, or to a preset of your choosing. No need to fiddle with a screen, nothing you cannot disable. Bliss.
• 2III7 2mo ago
  I'll keep my 2014 golf mk7 thank you. Euro5, no adblue bullshit. Still gets good mileage, is still cheap to maintain even after 260k km (the biggest expense has been the dual mass flywheel with a clutchpack) and the only high tech feature is a radar based adaptive cruise control. 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.
• aucisson_masque 2mo ago
  What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ? 0.1€ cost, can be removed in case of control otherwise you can pretend the camera wasn't working. 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.
  • lodovic 2mo ago
    I have the same sentiment. Who assures me this video isn't sent to the manufacturer for "quality control" reasons? Can it be used in court in case of an accident? Will my insurance ask access to monitor my driving? Can it be used for detecting phone use? Therefore, these cameras get a sticker, or a small printout of my head, looking alert, put in front of the camera. These systems only cause extra distraction, they do not reduce it - it feels like having a constant driving exam.
  • ur-whale 2mo ago
    > What prevent you from putting a sticker over it ? Because it'll beep.
    • jaggederest 2mo ago
      That sounds like a hardware issue that might be soluble in "wire cutters and a bad attitude", or at minimum "hot air resoldering station, microscope, and a bad attitude". I wonder what their software stack is like, too.
      • HDBaseT 2mo ago
        Until you realize these aren't isolated systems. This is one of the 30 different sensors used to monitor drivers. If you cut a wire, expect the car company + insurance company to become aware of the "mod" you did. Expect the car to simply not start anymore. Expect the local authorities to be notified. We need to stop this nonsense at the legislation level, not after the fact.
• templar_snow 2mo ago
  (laughs in American)
• tjwebbnorfolk 2mo ago
  Maybe I'll get downvoted for being off topic, but when we try to say "EU has too much regulation", this is the kind of shit we're talking about. Nobody is arguing for zero regulation. But seriously, forcing people to pay extra for their own surveillance in their own car?
• fsuts 2mo ago
  Phone use whilst driving is a huge problem so not surprised.
  • spaqin 2mo ago
    Funny how that became the solution instead of I don't know, banning massive tablets on the dashboard and enforcing buttons.
• owenversteeg 2mo ago
  For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system: 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560494
• richwater 2mo ago
  I seriously can't believe all the commenters here advocating for mandated ability to spy on people
  • willmadden 2mo ago
    Politics on this site is as astroturfed/censored as reddit, and the moderators are interchangeable. It's good for tech news.
  • aftbit 2mo ago
    Modern HN is all about the nanny state. If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide ... right? It's not like a future government might decide that just existing as a certain race or accessing health care as a certain gender is a crime...
    • hparadiz 2mo ago
      It's weird how the discourse on X is so much more high brow compared to HN these days.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• toephu2 2mo ago
  Europe gave us cookie popups on every website, and now... in Europe you get a camera watching you in your own car while driving.
• BeetleB 2mo ago
  I love the warning about not having hands on the steering wheel. 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?
  • illusive4080 2mo ago
    I do this too. Want to get a comma.ai device just so I don’t have to wiggle the steering wheel.
    • BeetleB 2mo ago
      comma.ai will not disable the warning. This is a warning that's on all the time.
  • comradesmith 2mo ago
    You should buy a dumber car
  • brikym 2mo ago
    My Nissan does check both hands are contacting the steering wheel making lane centering basically useless if I want to do anything with one hand like adjust my glasses, change the audio etc.
  • anonymousiam 2mo ago
    I have the same issue in my 2020 AMG. With lane assit on, the way it detects that your hands are on the steering wheel is by sensing your inputs to counter its inputs to the steering wheel position. It even seems to deliberately steer you off the center of the lane to see if you react. That is a seriously broken control system. It should be keeping you in the center of the lane and not make you fight against the car.
• nixpulvis 2mo ago
  If they make cars irritating enough, people might give up the joy of driving and pivot to more economical transit modes. I have mixed feelings about this, and I doubt the car companies are thoughtfully doing this, but I do wonder sometimes.
• rurp 2mo ago
  I test drove a Subaru (in America) with this feature and absolutely hated it. The amount of false positives was ridiculous. Often I was literally staring straight ahead, driving on a straight road, and getting beeped at to pay attention. 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.
• inigyou 2mo ago
  We should make an open source one that provably doesn't transmit anything except the distracted driving warning signal.
• modzu 2mo ago
  legislate volume knobs
• DrProtic 2mo ago
  That will definitely help their car industry.
• throwaway63467 2mo ago
  Good. The amount of people I see looking at their smartphone while driving, completely oblivious to what’s happening on the road is concerning. I don’t see why that footage needs to be transferred anywhere and GDPR should ensure it won’t be, so no need to spin this as a privacy nightmare cars have tons of sensors already and there’s probably little commercial interest in filming people’s faces while they’re driving so I don’t see what’s so controversial about this.
• sunshine-o 2mo ago
  One of the very dangerous side effect of this is it pushes a lot of people out of the ability to own a decent car legally. The camera, AI chip and all supporting electronic supporting it will raise the price of the entry level Dacia (a Dacia Spring is already more than 15k euros). So people will keep old cars as long as they can. 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.
• 0x000xca0xfe 2mo ago
  Every year it feels more surprising how motorcycling is still allowed. No seatbelt, no ABS, no problem...
  • waynesonfire 2mo ago
    because when crashing on a motorcycle, it's only the cyclists face that's turned inside out and in such a way that it's not a burden on society to treat a vegetable.
  • fckgw 2mo ago
    Motorcyclists don't usually kill an entire generation of people when they T-bone a mid-sized sedan in an intersection. That's the problem.
    • 0x000xca0xfe 2mo ago
      True, but there are quite lightweight cars and heavy motorcycles. Lower damage potential of small and light cars compared to SUVs does not seem to give them a free pass to skip the sprawling driver assistance regulations.
    • HDBaseT 2mo ago
      Wearing a seatbelt or not doesn't also prevent a family getting killed, yet its strict in cars, but not on bikes? What gives?
  • SugarReflex 2mo ago
    I don't know about other countries, but public transport buses in Australia don't have seat belts on them. Even as a kid, I remember wondering why there was such a fuss made around seat belts in cars when you couldn't use one if you wanted to on the bus. It was funny, when I went to the Philippines for the first time, I got into a cab and was trying to put my seat belt on when everyone laughed and said "no no you don't need to do that" - and it ended up feeling super normal to not wear a seat belt there anyway.
    • 2mo ago
• wolvoleo 2mo ago
  I'm so happy I don't need a car anymore. It sounds like hell driving these days with when the car second-guessing you the whole time.
• leipie 2mo ago
  My Hyundai Ioniq 6's "safety" systems have caused several near accidents and scary and distracting moments, as soon as I forget to turn them off. I have to disable these every time I start the car.
  • brikym 2mo ago
    I find my Nissan Leaf similar. The A-pillars are so thick to keep me safe but I can't see pedestrians very well. So now I have to move my head around like a party parrot. Then the regen brake sort of has a dead spot where I feel pressure on my foot but it doesn't actually brake making it hard to stop quickly and smoothly. On a purely hydraulic brake what you feel is what you get. Then the camera doesn't see people as well as it sees bigger cars. I've nearly hit some people because of these factors. Sometimes I really need it accelerate hard so I can get into traffic but the software decides too close to the car in front so it cuts the power when I need it most. A lot of these safety features are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
• WalterBright 2mo ago
  I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.
• jongjong 2mo ago
  My car would start beeping randomly and one day it wouldn't stop beeping. Turns out it was because we have a baby seat in the back on a window seat but it would slightly touch the edge of the middle seat. The solution was to clip in the seatbelt on the middle seat even through there was nobody sitting there.
• zero0529 2mo ago
  The overregulation and the constant attempt to destroy any notion of privacy has really pushed me towards being anti EU. I wonder if ressources are spent seeding that sentiment.
  • awepofiwaop 2mo ago
    To be clear, this will also happen in the USA. The destruction of privacy is perhaps the only issue with full throated support across the political spectrum.
    • akramachamarei 2mo ago
      > with full throated support across the political spectrum. Which is to say, from the authoritarian left to the authoritarian right, but not the other half of the compass.
  • Narishma 2mo ago
    The destruction of privacy by technological and regulatory means is unfortunately a world-wide phenomenon.
• aetherspawn 2mo ago
  This stuff is a nightmare for new manufacturers and is usually lobbied-for by large OEMs or to keep startups out of the market or as a patent trap 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
• WalterBright 2mo ago
  Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms. 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?
  • footydude 2mo ago
    > But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about. Can't speak to all vehicles, but my VW ID3 clearly indicates what the issue is on the dashboard. So if it's the lane-keeping assist it highlights which lane(s) it is monitoring and it provides a written prompt on screen (e.g. "drive in the centre of the lane") if it's not happy. If the speed limiter is on it shows the current signed speed limit in the dashboard and it flashes that speed limit if I am driving over the speed limit. If the car believes I am not concentrating on the road and instead interacting too much with the touch-screen it puts a large warning in the middle of the touchscreen to pay attention to the road and prevents me using the infotainment system for a few second. I'd be surprised if most other modern/new cars didn't also include instrument display feedback like this alongside audible warnings.
    • ornornor 2mo ago
      You’d be surprised. A family member bought a 2025 utilitarian car (Dacia). It’s the one on the newer platform (Clio 6) so they can implement all the beeping mandated by law. The car beeps exactly the same way whatever the reason so you can’t tell why. It even beeps when it thinks the speed limit has changed (up or down)… it’s infuriating to drive this car, there is a beep about something every minute or two. You can’t even tell what it’s beeping about. Luckily there is a shortcut button near the dash that you can press to disable all these idiotic beeps. You have to do it every time you restart the car. It does make it feel like all these beeps are pointless since you can’t tell what they’re about and press the button to disable them all as soon as you start the car anyway…
• senfiaj 2mo ago
  What happens if I cover the camera?
• yalogin 2mo ago
  This is alarming. Very soon there will be no point driving because insurance is going to jump in and mandate strict rules around how to sit, hold the steering wheel and how I should be looking and the fun of driving will be gone. This is all converging towards autonomous driving without a steering wheel.
  • shye 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • christophilus 2mo ago
    > alarming Literally. It’s the windows visa-ification of cars. I hate it.
• puppycodes 2mo ago
  buying a new car gets less attractive every year.
• GardenLetter27 2mo ago
  But the EU still blocks self driving cars which would make this unnecessary.
• cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
  Wonder what the regulations have to say about a small, strategically placed piece of sticky tape.
• ReptileMan 2mo ago
  Every new driver in the European Union must include a roll of electrician tape.
• msm_ 2mo ago
  >Regulators are responding to a real problem: EU-funded research estimates driver distraction plays a role in 5% to 25% of car crashes >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.
  • pornel 2mo ago
    I'm certainly distracted by all the beeping and bonging the car makes.
  • osmukka 2mo ago
    All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light). Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
• jamesgill 2mo ago
  I found this useful: https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-advanced-driver-distraction-warning-addw-systems/ https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-advanced-driver-dis... 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."
  • pzo 2mo ago
    but also: "ADDW systems use cameras and sensors to track a driver’s head position, eye movements, and gaze direction" and "only recording and retaining data on the device that is necessary for the system to function" Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function. Also if they need to track head position and gaze direction those definitely have to be higher resolution camera and/or pointing directly at your head - so at least capable to store biometric information and hacked remotely since more cars are having telemetry.
    • ruszki 2mo ago
      > Not sure why such stuff would need to be retained to function It's quite difficult to know what happened in the previous frame without any kind of retention.
      • tencentshill 2mo ago
        I assume volatile memory isn't considered retention under these laws. There are no regulations governing data destruction for RAM, except at the highest levels of secrecy, where they shred or melt the entire computer anyways.
• allthetime 2mo ago
  Wish I could just buy a new car that was a car and not an app with wheels.
• cmxch 2mo ago
  [dead]
• stanislavb 2mo ago
  No more "making love" in the car. Sorry guys. That'd be left to Hollywood stunts.
• willmadden 2mo ago
  Fun fact: there are significantly more heat deaths in Europe than car fatalities. Interesting priorities...
• 1e1a 2mo ago
  I read a paper a while ago (which I have failed to locate) which used around binary masks, each in front of a single photodiode, as input to a neural network, which estimated the number of people in front of this effectively ~9-pixel "camera". The binary masks and NN weights were trained at the same time. Presumably, something like this could be used to detect lack of driver focus in a far less invasive manner.
• jonplackett 2mo ago
  What is the car’s reaction if you just block the camera. Will it still drive?
• natas 2mo ago
  fortunately I'm old, I drive a 2007 car, and won't live in this new world for much much longer!
• tempestn 2mo ago
  I like a fair bit of what the EU does, and in the past they've been behind some significant advances in vehicle safety, but boy do I hate most of what's coming out of there lately as far as driving . All these driver "assistance" features that arguably do more harm than good for competent drivers and are forced to be enabled by default on every drive. And now this. Bleh.
  • hsbauauvhabzb 2mo ago
    This is the part I hate, enabled for every drive? What kind of hostile cockroach UX is that?
• t1234s 2mo ago
  Does that mean every car sold must have Level 1 autonomy? Similar to how ABS, Air Bags and Stability Control are required.
• TheRealPomax 2mo ago
  Note that they must be sold with this feature. It does not say you have to keep this feature, you can aftermarket remove it or disconnect it just fine.
• jojobas 2mo ago
  In many EU jurisdictions (like Germany) continuously recording dashcams are banned. Mandating a potentially continuously recording camera pointed at you at the same time is ridiculous.
• extraduder_ire 2mo ago
  > Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.[1] Is the [1] meant to be a footnote pointing to the law or something? I don't see that anywhere on the page.
  • nebalee 2mo ago
    It's below 'Author Details' and above 'Related Articles' and links to the english text only. Here is the multi-language, multi-format page: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=PI_COM:C(2023)4523 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=PI_COM:C...
    • extraduder_ire 2mo ago
      Thanks! I think that was added after I made posted that comment. I remember using ctrl-f to search for "1" and didn't see it.
• rswail 2mo ago
  When FSD actually works 100% (or as close as possible), manual driving will become obsolete, we're 5-10 years away. how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?
  • denkmoon 2mo ago
    Yeah we were 5-10 years away from full self driving 15 years ago too.
• mrandish 2mo ago
  Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons: 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.
• dfedbeef 2mo ago
  Imagine reading this headline in 1999 lol
• andrewflnr 2mo ago
  All the repeated discussion and warnings about Chat Control in the EU, and this shit just snuck through?
• Humphrey 2mo ago
  I hired a Chinese Haval Car for a weekend last year (Australia). It started beeping at me for being distracted because I was checking for traffic in the other lanes - which is crucial when driving in a 4 lane highway. 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.
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    > 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. "a turn signal is not a question, it is a statement"
    • Humphrey 2mo ago
      A statement of what?
  • mrandish 2mo ago
    > would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5. I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
• oliv__ 2mo ago
  This can't be real life
• syradar 2mo ago
  I guess I’ll keep walking, biking and using public transport.
• CircuitSeuss 2mo ago
  Driver monitoring systems will be required in all 2027 vehicles in the US as well. https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-in-new-cars-by-2027 https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
  • Brybry 2mo ago
    If you read that article and check the latest status, the NHTSA was supposed to make a rule by 2024 and it's 2026 now. [1] In their latest report to Congress they are not any closer to a rule because, amongst other reasons, all of the impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use. [2] I personally think it's very unlikely they will pass a rule by 2027 and that it might never get made. I think they'll just keep sending Congress a yearly update saying the same thing: "Sorry, none of the solutions work so we can't make a rule." [1] https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NHTSA-2022-0079 https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NHTSA-2022-0079 [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-to-Congress-Advanced-Impaired-Driving-Prevention-Technology.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
• fnord77 2mo ago
  My bmw has this for the traffic jam self-drive (< 40mph) feature. My eyes wander a bit and it scolds me.
• silexia 2mo ago
  Orwellian. What an absolute nightmare of government control. Advancing technology is giving too much power to the government, do not let them have it or you will never get your rights back.
  • sculper 2mo ago
    Weird, because I remember you claiming that it was a moral imperative to lick the government's boot a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747587 Has anything changed your mind since then?
• kazinator 2mo ago
  It's completely idiotic. Technology should be assisting in performing the attention itself, not nannying the driver. Sometimes there really isn't anything that needs your complete undivided attention. You're on a deserted, straight highway flanked by open, barren fields.
• CalRobert 2mo ago
  For all the people complaining about driver distraction alerts… have you considered that perhaps you were in fact distracted? Looking at a passenger to talk instead of at the road, etc? It’s the kind of thing where, unless you’re way below the median, other people will hesitate to call you out on it.
• zombot 2mo ago
  Who knew that my decision to not own a car would turn out to be so prescient. That I can still be killed by a driver distracted by the anti-distraction feature is just the usual irony of existence.
• lemontheme 2mo ago
  According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted. 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
• vvoyer 2mo ago
  Cars are becoming shittier in Europe, dumb regulations and people building cars are clearly NOT driving them. 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.
  • vel0city 2mo ago
    I love phone as a key. It's an optional thing on my car, you can still carry around a physical key fob if that's your jam. But outside of a long road trip I don't normally care to keep a key fob with me. It's just another piece of junk to have to have on me when I'm out and about. It's really nice having one fewer things in my pocket while I'm out and about. The experience isn't as you list here though. It behaves pretty much exactly the same as a key fob. I just walk up to the car and it's unlocked, I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket or open any apps specifically or press any buttons on the phone.
  • pepperoni_pizza 2mo ago
    It is fascinating that you look at design choices that Chinese Volvo copied from American Tesla (except for the speed limit) and declare that European cars are the problem.
    • vvoyer 2mo ago
      Because Europe is basically what drives laws here in France for driving, I would expect them to do what's best for the drivers and clearly they are not. They should not allow car Manufacturers to sell cars when: - There's no physical knob to open it - The only place to read critical information like speed is a tablet on the side - The speed limit is a constant beep unless you disable it AT EVERY START by touching a screen on the side (their law basically)
• idonotcare 2mo ago
  i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more. -its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone -its a good security feature -the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more. -in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.
• like_any_other 2mo ago
  It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it. 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.
• EagnaIonat 2mo ago
  I rented a car that had this feature and instantly hated it. I forget the make, but if it detected you were not looking at the road for a period of time, it would slam on the brakes and release. A way to jolt you awake. 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.
  • woolion 2mo ago
    FWIW, the only time I ever had emergency brakes kick in are in spurious situations, like tight maneuvers or there is something ahead with plenty of headway to decide whether you should brake or not. A cyclist moved close to the traffic light fast and the car completely stopped. This one was a bit more dangerous because had there been someone behind, that driver would not have expected such an abrupt stop. >so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more Every time it happens, it hurts as I'm not prepared for it. Lane assist is also particularly bad as it handles some slight curves incorrectly, so it resists your driving. As a result with such cars I have my arms muscles tense up in anticipation of some turns.
  • bad_username 2mo ago
    What the hell. I had my last rental just beep at me, and was astonished. But this... sounds literally unsafe.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • JimmyBiscuit 2mo ago
    Theres already 3d models of heads you can print and attach to the rearview mirror to trick the ssensor! At least for the Teslas with Autopilot, but I can imagine it working just as well with other cars.
  • gib444 2mo ago
    These systems are always beta tested on real drivers for years. Sometimes the tech improves often it doesn't. It's absolute madness
• larelli 2mo ago
  The only time our 2025 Kia warned me about being distracted was about 30 minutes into a highway drive in Europe during heavy snowfall. The roads were covered in snow, people were generally cautious but traffic was still flowing and I was checking mirrors more frequently than usually to make sure lanes around me were clear and I was aware of everything going on. I guess staring straight ahead without situational awareness is the way the car prefers. :|
• arthurofbabylon 2mo ago
  There's considerable cynicism in these comments and I have to suspect a puritan bent in most of them. No, no one is watching you. No, these cameras are not here to catch you doing bad things. 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.
  • tavavex 2mo ago
    > 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. The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since? It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
    • arthurofbabylon 2mo ago
• noja 2mo ago
  “Your driving data has been sold before” - that was in the US though. Not the EU.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• codingconstable 2mo ago
  Guess i'm keeping old faithful a little while longer
• Escapade5160 2mo ago
  Fuck this