alt Hacker NewsEvery new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
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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.
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.
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?
"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."
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.
To start your car please look into camera and repeat: "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
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).
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
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?
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.
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.
Does it at least have more cupholders for your verification cans?
Wonder what the regulations have to say about a small, strategically placed piece of sticky tape.
"self-driving safeguards fooled by $30 doll heads" https://electrek.co/2026/06/15/chinese-drivers-plastic-heads...
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 :)
Goal - make driving so annoying that customers will be begging for fully self driving cars!
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the EU still blocks self driving cars which would make this unnecessary.
Weird dark surveillance state stuff. I thought EU was trying to champion privacy?
Smart cars are the new Smart TVs
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.
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?
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?
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.
Every new driver in the European Union must include a roll of electrician tape.
What happens if I cover the camera?
Phone use whilst driving is a huge problem so not surprised.
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.
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.
Modern cars are user hostile
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.
Good thing we have those cookie banners warning us about websites tracking us.
Every year it feels more surprising how motorcycling is still allowed. No seatbelt, no ABS, no problem...
owning a new car gets less and less attractive every year.
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.
Any one knows what happens when duck tape is being used to cover the camera?
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
I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.
We should make an open source one that provably doesn't transmit anything except the distracted driving warning signal.
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.
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".
1) Unplug the cellular modem.
2) Unplug the camera or put a piece of blackout tape over the lens.
3) Enjoy!
That is a good initiative however what ever data is being recorded needs to kept in a responsible and safe manner
The EU is quickly becoming the surveillance capital of the world.
That will definitely help their car industry.
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.