[gib444]

> constantly driving your attention away from the road

Absolutely agree! After a few minutes you realise you forgot to disable one of the 'features' and then get distracted trying to do that.

Lane keep assist is broken and dangerous

Auto high beam assist is broken and dangerous

Auto cruise control is broken and dangerous

Collision detection-avoidance is broken and dangerous (thinks you're going to crash quite often in our narrow, built-up areas in the UK)

Speed sign detection is broken

Hell, even automatic wipers, after all these years, is far from perfect. I feel they should have had to prove themselves with that before being given anything more important

[virgilp]

How are all these "broken and dangerous"? In my car (Volvo) they work rather well. Perhaps sign detection sometimes misses signs, but so do I so I can't fault it. The others though, I rank them all somewhere between "genuinely useful" and "absolutely awesome"

[gib444]

N.B. I didn't write /all/ were "broken and dangerous"

But some personal examples:

- Auto high beam assist saw a car at a side junction, turned off high beam, then turned back on, mimicking a 'flash' to let the car out, which they acted on by pulling out. I had to brake hard to avoid them. I was doing 60 mph

- I was on the motorway and a stranded vehicle was on the hard shoulder and the driver decided to exit from the side closest to my lane. I went to move over slightly to give space and avoid him, and the lane assist pushed me back towards him (there was too much traffic for me to change lanes)

- Driving in built-up areas with lots of parked cars and narrow sections, the collision avoidance has pre-activated with huge beeping warnings that massively distracted me, causing me to actually nearly hit something

These were all different modern (but not high end) vehicles

Auto cruise control doesn't take into account vehicles in other lanes etc. It encourages disengagement in dangerous situations/surroundings. It is by definition dangerous

edit: and speed sign detection is probably the most broken. The constant beeping and flashing. I mean, I don't have to explain that do I? Distraction -> danger.

[virgilp]

Admittedly mine is somewhat high end, and I have seen broken implementations (which is what I think you describe; e.g. for auto high beam assist mine will redirect the beams around isolated cars, won't completely switch to low beams except in heavy /heavier traffic; and when it does, it takes at least several seconds to switch back - which makes it impossible to do the kind of "flash" you describe).

But I'm kinda' surprised by the cruise control, I don't think I ever drove a car, even a rental, where cruise control wasn't at least "genuinely useful". Even the non-automatic one. How does it "not take into account vehicles in other lanes"/ what makes it dangerous?

[mnw21cam]

PSA: Flashing someone is never a signal that you're giving them priority. That is explicitly forbidden in the highway code and dangerous. Flashing someone, like using the horn, only means "I'm here, just in case you didn't see me". If someone flashes you, you should make your own determination whether it is safe to perform a manoeuvre, making no assumptions about anything that the person who flashed you might be seeming to be promising.

[simoncion]

> PSA: Flashing someone is never a signal that you're giving them priority.

Uh. I guess you've not many US highway miles under your belt. If nothing else, it's a very common nighttime signal to let passing truckers know that they've room to get back in the rightmost lane. I can't imagine that the signalling situation is much different in other places that have a large population of generally-decently-skilled drivers.

> If someone flashes you, you should make your own determination whether it is safe to perform a manoeuvre...

Sure. The operator of a vehicle is ultimately the person who's responsible for its safe operation.

Having said that, few drivers are interested in killing their fellow travelers. Especially at night, determining the "time of arrival" of oncoming traffic, or the distance between the end of your bigass trailer and traffic behind you can be quite difficult. If it's customary in your area to use headlight flashing to indicate to traffic ahead of you that it's safe for them to perform whatever maneuver that they may be uncertain about, then it's not unreasonable to assume that the driver that uses that signal isn't attempting to kill you with misinformation.

Automatic high-beam-togglers don't really care about anything, [0] so that's definitely one piece of malfunctioning tech that makes the roads less safe.

[0] ...yet!

[gib444]

Yes...but the "feature" is still broken and dangerous

[frollogaston]

The auto high beam blinds other drivers when it fails to detect them

[virgilp]

So do other drivers that fail to switch to low beams - even my old car was better than me in switching to low beams.

[frollogaston]

Nobody had ever angrily flashed their lights at me until the first time I drove a new car with automatic lights. On one occasion blasted someone 50-100' away, which there's no way I've ever done. There's a long dark road I drive on often where every time there's at least one car I can tell left its brights on too long, and it's blinding.

[virgilp]

Perhaps you're a better-than-average driver? I unfortunately am not, and have had the opposite experience (people flashing me because I forgot to turn off the high beams, or couldn't do it fast enough due to e.g. a corner, or drinking water with that hand, or whatever). In long straight lines it's relatively easy to do it, on windy roads not so much. On the other hand, with current car I don't remember anybody flashing me.

Personally, I just developed a strategy for dealing with too-bright-incoming-lights: just focus on the right edge of the road - that takes my eyes off the lights, and it's where the danger lies anyway. With that, late-commuting vehicles are a lot less of a nuisance than people who just have poorly tuned low beams or simply keep high beams on always. And those problems/ people are unrelated to the "automatic commute" technology - arguably the tech improves things on that front, even in the not-so-great implementations.