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.
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.
I don’t mind the alarms for things that are actually issues - open the door and the keys are in the ignition, or I left the lights on, or even the seat belt reminder when I start the car. But when I’m rolling along and everything is fine, a loud screeching alarm out of nowhere is extremely disturbing…and doubly so when I realize that there was actually nothing I was doing wrong. It really is like having a backseat driver screaming at me, and it pisses me off. I have screamed at the car to shut the fuck up on a few occasions. God I hate it.
And, I promise, I’m not driving aggressively or anything like that to trigger this shit. I’m really not. I’m a pretty careful driver; our other car is from 1999 - I bought it new and still own it and drive it, so I must be doing something correctly. I’m not saying I never make mistakes, either. I just try to keep them small enough to not have huge consequences.
Yes, one time I did get a little close to the vehicle in front of me that was turning and triggered the BRAKE alarm (not the actual brakes, just the alarm)…okay, I don’t do that any more. But I think that might be the ONLY time it has actually alerted me somewhat correctly…and even then things were well under control and I wasn’t going to hit them; it was just closer than it liked. The rest of the time…it’s like “I know more than you.”
I understand some people are busy doing other things instead of driving and need that stuff. Fine, they can have it. But why do I have to pay to have it in my car? And any minor crash is going to cost that much more to repair, too.
Yeah I have screamed at the car a few times as well for backseat driving (and I’m also someone who disables the satnav voice because I hate being interrupted by someone yelling at me), but at least with VW it’s extremely infrequent despite having driven quite aggressively for a couple years before I stopped commuting by car.
It just take one time of it slamming the brakes for one pedestrian to make up for it 100 times over, so I’m fine with it.
(Also specifically the minor crashes will not break the emergency braking systems thankfully, AFAIK it’s made up of a battery of sensors on top of the windshield, a computer, and hooks into the braking system alongside the ABS/ESP)
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.
It’s extremely irritating. I didn’t get into the frustration with the adaptive cruise (at least they fixed the nauseating issues it had originally) and other irritations I have with that car.
But, I will say: When I turn things off in the Mazda, like the thing that steers the car back toward the center of the lane, it fucking stays off. I’ve heard a lot of other vehicles turn that shit back on every time you start the car. Christ.
This really is a bad trend of half-baked half-measures between human drivers and fully autonomous vehicles. There isn’t a lot of room for “semi-autonomous” operation - humans generally expect to either be fully in control of the situation, or to relinquish all control to another (ignoring backseat drivers). Anything else can be annoying and unexpected unless done very subtly, carefully, and correctly.
My new VW has all of these sensors and safety features, but manages to not freak out until something is truly imminent, obviously properly accounting for speed and trajectory, and with only gentle nudges when the situation is less dire (e.g., lane drift), but more aggressively in the face of real danger (backing up into incoming traffic).
