Small rant about new car feature

So, I'm sitting here catching up on a few tv shows and half paying attention to the commercials.

Two different car commercials (Nissan Rogue and Subaru something).     Both commercials promoted users playing on their cell phones and other distracted driving.

Highlight of the commercials?    Automatic collision detection/avoidance.

Am I only the one that feels that these features are telling people to be berkeleying lazy unattentive drivers and it's ok?

Edit:   3rd manufacturer just played.   Thanks Chevy equinox.  

I can't wait until actual self-driving cars are here. Then those people can make sweet sweet love to their little glass screen and not unintentionally kill me.

I'm all for the 100% autonomous cars,   not the "the car will brake for me because I'm too busy texting"

Good! I've got time to get some popcorn before everyone wakes up.

I'm curious to see what everyone has to say, this specific topic has never been discussed on this forum before.

Time for a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers for encouraging unlawful and negligent behavior? 

Meh, whatever. Stupid people are stupid and autonomous vehicles won't save them from trying to kill everyone else. The only sad part is it's one less way for them to be able to take themselves out of the gene pool.  

In reply to Grtechguy :

What better way to encourage new vehicle sales than to help take old ones off the road though? As long as they're safe enough to survive the inevitable collisions, at least

The VW one where the kid is walking down the sidewalk and the car doesn't run him over disappoints and angers me every time I see it.

z31maniac said:

Good! I've got time to get some popcorn before everyone wakes up.

I'm curious to see what everyone has to say, this specific topic has never been discussed on this forum before.

We haven't? Seems like we get one of these "I hate new car feature XXX" threads every week or so. 

I hate the new Chevy one asking kids to "describe how the lane departure system works" etc.  Good job picking on kids, lol. 

I bet the "real people" guy asking the question couldn't tell you how it works either! 

Tom_Spangler said:

z31maniac said:

Good! I've got time to get some popcorn before everyone wakes up.

I'm curious to see what everyone has to say, this specific topic has never been discussed on this forum before.

We haven't? Seems like we get one of these "I hate new car feature XXX" threads every week or so. 

Can't tell if you're joining in with my sarcasm or not. 

There has always been a bit of an arms race, sometimes it feels like by making vehicles safer we are just lowering the bar and creating a better class of idiot. ABS, TPMS, ESC, and now AEB...

The one thing coming that excites me is driver monitoring, like the GMs with supercruise have where it is watching where your eyes and face are looking. Having a car that beeps at you for looking away from the road too long might move a needle. That said, if they arent careful you may not be able to wear polarized glasses while driving...  Most L2 autonomous systems have to have some level of driver monitoring, now GM uses an IR camera...  Tesla?  a torque sensor on the steering wheel...

Yeah, I've never looked at my cell phone while driving or made a mistake either.

Toyman01 said:

Time for a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers for encouraging unlawful and negligent behavior?

Yes, please!  Millions in fines, jail time for the executives that approved the ad.  It's time for meaningful change!

And yes.  I'm serious. 

Our provincial auto insurer now has a reduced rate if your vehicle has that emergency braking assist. I'm sure they will have further reductions for more nannies soon.  Or, surcharges for those who don't (just another way to look at it).

My '61 Chevy has nothing.  We die like real men.

Apexcarver said:

There has always been a bit of an arms race, sometimes it feels like by making vehicles safer we are just lowering the bar and creating a better class of idiot. ABS, TPMS, ESC, and now AEB...

I pointed out how these things helped me the other day. I was driving to work before the sun was up, dark, raining, 50 mph on NW Expressway. 

Check mirror, look over shoulder, good to go. Hit the turn signal to change lanes, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.......................someone was in the other lane, closing FAST with their lights off. Without that warning, because the OTHER DRIVER was being irresponsible, it saved us BOTH from an accident. 

These features are tools, your success depends on how you use them. 

Wait, "HEY CLOUD! GET OUT OF MY NEIGHBORHOOD!"

I feel like we are encouraging the public to be less responsible in everything they do. This includes driving cars. What happens when the systems fail, which they will as the vehicle gets older so the person that's used to all these features and it fails while they're driving will no longer have the ability/responses to drive the car safely.

Some of the features on cars now or just downright stupid. Example, lighted gauges. I drive around at night quite a bit and every night I will see at least one car driving around without lights on.  To make matters worse I will  flash my lights directly facing them in the other lane and they cannot determine that they do not have their lights and they continue to driveway in darkness. This is not someone that needs a car  that takes away the responsibility of driving but they need to learn to be more attentive when they're doing a task such as driving. They don't even know enough to put the automatic light function on their vehicle to prevent this situation.
 

Raining or  foggy weather is the worst. People fail to put their stupid lights on in bad weather and apparently the automatic lighting systems are not sensitive enough to come on when it's foggy or raining. Trucks are especially difficult to see a car coming up alongside you in the passing lane when it's raining.

I venting a bit here but what we really need is better training for driving a car. I think everyone should be retested in some form maybe every 10 years or whatever it might be to insure that were capable drivers. Putting driver assist nannys in the car is only gonna teach people who are bad drivers now to continue as bad drivers. I dread being next to one of these people when the driver aids fail which they will as the car ages.

z31maniac said:

Apexcarver said:

There has always been a bit of an arms race, sometimes it feels like by making vehicles safer we are just lowering the bar and creating a better class of idiot. ABS, TPMS, ESC, and now AEB...

I pointed out how these things helped me the other day. I was driving to work before the sun was up, dark, raining, 50 mph on NW Expressway. 

Check mirror, look over shoulder, good to go. Hit the turn signal to change lanes, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.......................someone was in the other lane, closing FAST with their lights off. Without that warning, because the OTHER DRIVER was being irresponsible, it saved us BOTH from an accident. 

 

These features are tools, your success depends on how you use them. 

 

Wait, "HEY CLOUD! GET OUT OF MY NEIGHBORHOOD!"

I'm on the fence about these nannies that cars are getting, these days. On one hand, they protect stupid people from themselves, which I oppose. On the other hand, they protect innocent people, like z31, here, from those same stupid people that should be culled from the herd.

A few years ago, a woman died from a head-on collision, just up the street from my house. She was hit by a guy that was berking around with his phone. One of these nannies could have potentially saved her, at the expense of sparing him. 

You know while watching the Rolex 24, I noticed the Weathertech cup phone commercial condone this behavior about distracted driving. It starts with a dude almost slamming into an oncoming 18-wheeler with his Jeep Grand Cherokee while fumbling with his phone and then shows him driving with the cup-holder phone attachment, just slightly less distracted because of it's new location and holder. 

SkinnyG said:

Our provincial auto insurer now has a reduced rate if your vehicle has that emergency braking assist. I'm sure they will have further reductions for more nannies soon.  Or, surcharges for those who don't (just another way to look at it).

My '61 Chevy has nothing.  We die like real men.

I would be willing to bet that the insurance compaines are the driving force behind most safety regulations. 

Also on this recent cross country road trip I did, the Honda sensing adaptive cruise control was a nice feature to have during long stretches of boring road. You can adjust the sensitivity of when it starts to brake for a car or object in front of you, it would brake hard like going into the hairpin at Sebring which wasn't pleasant but at least it's doing it's job. The lane keep wasn't that great, it would hug the left side of the lane no matter what. Nice nannies to have for a long trip but I would never rely on them for day to day driving. 

DirtyBird222 said:

You know while watching the Rolex 24, I noticed the Weathertech cup phone commercial condone this behavior about distracted driving. It starts with a dude almost slamming into an oncoming 18-wheeler with his Jeep Grand Cherokee while fumbling with his phone and then shows him driving with the cup-holder phone attachment, just slightly less distracted because of it's new location and holder. 

I love how they present this has some sort of perfect solution.  Cup holders are designed for cups (shocking) and cups as so are best placed low and near where you hands might rest, which of course means you are gaurenteed to have to look down to see the phone, exactly what you don't want to do.

Unless you happen to have cup holders on the top of your dash, it's a horrible place to mount a phone!

In reply to aircooled :

But it will sell to people that normally drive with one hand reaching over the passenger floor because their phone fell off the arm rest. 

SkinnyG said:

My '61 Chevy has nothing.  We die like real men.

I have a '61 Pontiac, pretty much the same deal.  Manual transmission, manual steering, manual brakes.

Jay Leno jokes about his 1955 Buick:  "You get in an accident with this car, they just hose off the dash and give it to the next owner."

Bit from Rowan Atkinson's The Driven Man about distraction, attention, etc... Just brought to mind by this unfortunately unsolved and significantly pandered-to human tendency...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4OlODAnDls

I remember when Road and Track told us we didn't want airbags.