alt Hacker NewsIt sounds awful, but it might not even make the top-5 of the most annoying/concering things you'll get in a new car (bought in the EU at least), many of which are now mandatory by regulation. What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road, an alarm when you drive over the allowed speed limit as determined by a camera, an alarm plus a mechanical yanking of your driving wheel when you're approaching the side of your lane without a turn signal on. As a cherry on top it's unclear what happens with all the data generated by these systems. And I'm probably forgetting a few.
I'm wondering what a good cutoff date is when considering buying a used car.
Replies
My 2015 has none of these things. It has a rear camera, no telemetry, physical buttons, no internal nav, and no giant tough screen.
What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road
Coming to you thanks to the assholes who fiddle on their phone while driving. As a cyclist, I still see this happening regularly where car drivers are fiddling on their phone while driving for just a few seconds, leading to almost-collisions (well, probably I've been lucky to only witness almost-collisions, including almost getting hit myself), etc.
Same problem on bikes and electric bikes. People are so attached to their screens that they are fiddling on their phone while cycling. This was already bad when people cycled 15 km/h on a regular bike, but now we have kids who cycle on a fat bike with the 25 km/h speed limit removed, tinkering on their phone while cycling 35 km/h in small city streets. Not surprisingly, accidents have gone up a lot.
I hate in-car cameras as much as you. But I also hate the totally irresponsible use of phones while driving/cycling.
These systems are such a pain in the butt. These can’t be saving lives. My brain completely filters away the speed limit beep. The auto-steering mostly tries to drive me into other vehicles (in the countryside it steers you towards the middle of the road ). And I am pretty sure the eye tracking thing wont prevent me from selecting a spotify song.
cutoff is officially mid 2024. I don’t know if some older cars have been firmware-updated to have these features turned on by default.
I get all of these with more or less recent (2023) Mazda here in Japan, but all of them can be turned off in settings. Are they always-on in EU?