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

I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.

I wonder if they also have a seeker pointed at my face then, because I don't want that shining into my eyes.

That will definitely help their car industry.

This is not OK.

buying a new car gets less attractive every year.

(laughs in American)

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.

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

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?

proud to drive 2002 volkswagen golf in these creepy times

Europe gave us cookie popups on every website, and now... in Europe you get a camera watching you in your own car while driving.

Every new driver in the European Union must include a roll of electrician tape.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

legislate volume knobs

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

They'll do anything but address the root cause of distractions: the addictive nature of mobile phones/the apps on them

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.

They hate us for our freedom.

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?

Maybe would be the good time to create a company to sell webcam covers for cars...

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."

I'm buying 0 cars with this nonsense. And 0 cars without CarPlay support.

And Europeans think they have privacy lol

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.

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.

And here we go again :)

It's good to know that Big Brother cares about all of us.

This is just more evidence that the GDPR was just a set of protectionist laws for EU companies.

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.

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-devian...

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I seriously can't believe all the commenters here advocating for mandated ability to spy on people

If its closed looped its great. All cars should also come with alcolocks.

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.