“Oh no a slight bump in the road. Better shout about it and slam the brakes lmao”
If I’m at a t-intersection with a car parked on the side of the road in front, I’ll start turning, car thinks I’m about to t-bone someone, red lights and alarms everywhere. Scares the fucking shit out of me. The first time it happened I slammed the brakes on and fortunately didn’t get rear-ended.
That system has never done anything but cause me to almost have an accident and to turn it off is buried away in the settings each time I start the car. And the lane keeping assist is so dumb at understanding how people take an apex on corners, or dealing with the faded lines. “Give me the fucking wheel back!” tug LURCH “Fuck!”
It’s like learning to drive with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat all over again, flipping out and unexpectedly trying to intervine over nothing she thought was something.
One of the main reasons I still like older cars. I consider it harassment when I get ding donged to death for not wearing the seatbelt for a two minute drive down the road, if this shit ever happened to me the car is getting fuckin sold ASAP
I’m so glad to see I’m not the only one with issues with those “driver nanny” systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I’m “supposed” to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn’t an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn’t help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can’t it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn’t hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn’t trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - “WHAT IS THAT NOISE?” Salesman: “Oh it’s just the driver seat belt alarm.” “Oh.” Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It’s to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we’re going out of town, I will take the pickup. It’s more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn’t have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won’t have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we’d buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years…which may indicate those safety features aren’t helping, or maybe they’re making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
A close friend of mine also hates her new Mazda for all the “helping” it tries to do! It sounds like they really botched that. I’d be demanding a refund for an undrivable car.
Some of it must be regulatory… car chimes when you open the door and stuff I know is NA-only, even brand new cars in Europe know to STFU unless they have something actually meaningful to say. In my experience even the seat belt alarm doesn’t turn on under a certain speed (somewhere around 10-15 km/h on my car I think, at least it shuts the fuck up when maneuvering in a parking lot).
False alarms on the nannies is highly brand dependent. On my 2018 VW I’ve had it freak out maybe 10 times over 60k km, it’s rare and almost every time it was understandable why it would freak out (and never did it actually hit the brakes for me for a false alarm). So I’ve never felt the need to disable the nannies.
