[dumbmrblah]

So to play devil's advocate... were you taking your eyes off the road for too long?

There are many many poor drivers and many many distracted drivers out there. I'm not accusing you of one, but maybe a little bit of self-introspection may be necessary.

[lawik]

My in-laws Kia did this for me. It got really shitty when it got darker and presumably had to use an IR camera. And I am tall so the angle might have been bad. It flagged me every minute. Even when I intentionally focused right ahead.

Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.

[pontussw]

There we maybe need some regulation that the system should be working, and the manufacturers of the cars should be forced to recall and fix the system if it doesn’t work!

The solution to bad implementation can’t be to just throw our hands in the air and say that Kia produces bad cars so therefore we cannot introduce safety regulation

[lazide]

Or, hear me out, just have a person drive and not try to micromanage them constantly with a shitty AI system?

[pontussw]

You mean the status quo?

> Each year road crashes generate about 120,000 fatalities and 2.4 million injuries in the European region of the World Health Organization. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults.

Whatever it is we are doing today, it is not working.

[lazide]

And from having used these system and having them almost cause crashes? And with the increase in traffic fatalities roughly corresponding with their increased adoption?

They clearly are not helping.

[pontussw]

Traffic fatalities and accidents have been going down, constantly. There is no increase in fatalities from adoption of these systems, at least not in the EU.

EU statistics show a continuous downward trend over the last 25+ years with pretty much the only thing sticking out being the Covid lockdowns. And all thanks to safety regulations!

The fact is hundreds of thousands of people are alive today thanks to traffic safety improvements, and probably millions have been spared from a life of suffering with major injuries.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

So, the fix to one bad regulation is another one?

[pontussw]

We can also do nothing, continue to have hundreds of thousands killed every year and millions receive life changing injuries. I think that’s a terrible idea, though, since we have been able to (in the EU at least) cut road deaths massively over the last 25 years. So I think continuing a successful strategy is what we should do.

[gotski]

I had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads.

The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner.

Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!

[afandian]

I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers.

They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.

[b112]

They can trivially determine if their tech is effective.

Can they? How many people real world test, and are they of all different heights and weights and face shapes too?

Besides that, when I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old movies on late night TV. Often these movies had car chases, and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason. I was always flummoxed, for we had no cliffs anywhere I'd ever been, and wondered where they were, and why people were always driving on them.

When I visited California I suddenly realised "oh, they're everywhere here, just driving home".

Another poster pointed out the alarm went off, if he looked to the corner he was driving towards. People dogfooding won't notice issues with that, if the local environment doesn't have such features.

Could you test for all these things? Maybe, after realising what to test for. You'd then need a sort of regression test, too. All with people.

[WalterBright]

> and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason

Obviously, you're not familiar with Toonces, the Driving Cat.

[b112]

That takes me back, thanks.

[WalterBright]

I miss the days when SNL was funny.

[giantg2]

"might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation."

Nah, you just get knee-jerk, feel-good laws because the masses never dig deeper and the elected only care about being reelected.

[cucumber3732842]

These laws are not driven by masses. The masses do not want this crap. These laws are driven by busybodies who think they know what's best for the masses. The politicians and their advisors think they can get "free" (statistically nobody ever voted for the other guy over something so little) turnout from these busybodies in their favor by promising/doing this stuff. It's a sick numbers game and we all lose. Just like everything else these days.

[pontussw]

I don’t think that this is true at all. These regulations are driven to reduce deaths and severe injuries that we have absolute and definitive statistics on - and do target the things we also know are the biggest drivers of accidents and outcomes such as high speed and lack of attention from drivers.

I can see there being lots of valid complaints about implementation, but acting as if traffic injuries is not a major problem to be addressed and is just in the interest of busybodies is a completely unreasonable take.

[giantg2]

If the masses were against this'll, the reps would be voted out or recalled.

[mothballed]

Why would the manufacturers care though? You will still buy a car and now the barrier to foreign competition is higher, increasing profit, and the price goes up to pay for the dooo dads which increases financing kickbacks even if margin is same.

[pontussw]

They aren’t for some weird reason being pressured to make systems that work. Even in this thread I see wild shit like people telling how the system completely doesn’t work for them, but no indication that they are pushing the manufacturer to fix it?? How can we have the kind of attitude that we let the manufacturers just get away with it if it’s a safety system? If the radio didn’t work, we’d be at the dealership bothering the service staff every day - but important safety tech? Blame the EU…?

[duskdozer]

I don't think any complaint I've filed with a company has ever led to the situation being fixed. I still do it because I like futile exercises, but I know it won't change anything.

[pontussw]

I don’t disagree with you there, and I do wish that legislators were also interested in that. How well the safety systems actually work in the real world should also be enforced by the law, not just their existence. With all the horror stories in this thread, it seems clear that manufacturers feel like they are able to get away with building the worst possible implementation of the system and then pointing the finger at the EU..

[frollogaston]

It'd be a bold strategy, cause in the meantime everyone says "never buy a Kia!" (or whatever brand, but Kia is the usual suspect)

[Tagbert]

more likely that this is a harder problem than regulators assume.

[chung8123]

I rented a car with driver monitoring and it made me take my eyes off the road instead. Every beep and warning is a distraction and it these systems don't work. Even if you are looking at the road and driving correctly it is flashing a warning up.

[monknomo]

yeah, my car doesn't like it when I look more than 2 cars ahead, or if I am looking uphill (because I am driving uphill)