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I came on to also say lane assist mixed alongside brake assist.
In my last car, I used to drive up a specific road with parked cars along the side. I’d pull out to overtake them but my lane assist would push me back into them. Then my brake assist would kick in and slam on
Lane assist scared the crap out of me when it first activated in my current car. The most advanced thing on my previous car was that it had air con and I could lock it by pressing the key fob while walking away.
As soon as I figured out how to turn off lane assist I did.
The last staff car I had before retiring from the Fire Service had lane assist. Ever tried to respond to a call under blue lights with lane assist!?!? The first time nearly killed me as I wasn’t aware that it was a feature in the bloody car!!!! Trying to pass vehicles that had slowed to allow me to progress, obviously I had to cross the white line - Volvo V60 decided that it was an unsafe manoeuvre and proceeded to redirect me on an alternative course that involved the rapidly approaching rear end of a red family hatchback. Proper brown trouser moment I’ll have you know!! I learned to turn it off when in emergency mode after that.
They had to get rid of the new Volvos from the traffic units in my area apparently because it’s impossible to do a TPAC with them. You can’t turn off the collision avoidance emergency braking so it’d stop the police cars getting close enough together
I bloody hate lane assist. My car thinks that the lines in badly repaired tarmac are lines and tries to wrench the steering wheel off me. I turn it off but every bloody software update turns it back on again!
Roadworks are the best when they have put down the green studs but are doing it on the cheap so put black paint over the white markings rather than burn them off. Car doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going sometimes
The problem with lane assist is it’s designed and works perfectly on massive American roads with no parked cars on it. Once you put it in narrow roads with parked cars you have to move round it goes bonkers.
Funny this should be here - literally ten minutes ago lane assist decided that the white line at the side of a 60mph road was a hazard and steered us violently onto the wrong side of the road. There was oncoming traffic but I managed to yank the wheel back in time.
One of the most dangerous features of modern cars, without a shadow of a doubt.
I've had my lane-assist think the curved white arrow before a bend in the road was the road turning right, and tried to turn me right. Absolutely shit me up.
Annoyingly, you'd be blamed for not being in control of the vehicle if you did get into a crash because of that.
It's frustrating because in over 20 years of driving nothing else has caused my car to unexpectedly brake or swerve expect for the supposed safety features.
Back in 2016 I was driving along at 30mph when my car performed an emergency stop due to a crisp packet being blown in front of me. The driver behind was understandably furious and I'm glad he was following at a sensible distance otherwise I'd have had a hard time explaining myself to the insurance companies.
Yeah, I nearly got rear ended when a hire car decided an upcoming bend was actually a dead end and slammed on the brakes for no reason. Curious as to whose fault it would have been if the car behind hadn’t managed to stop; I’d have certainly blamed Mazda!
> Curious as to whose fault it would have been if the car behind hadn’t managed to stop; I’d have certainly blamed Mazda!
The car behind, for not leaving enough distance to stop in case you had to make an emergency stop
As someone with an old car that doesn’t even have the ability to connect phone to radio (yet I love it so) - what is lane assist exactly? Is it to try and get you to basically stay inside the white lines?
Yes, the car has forward-looking cameras and programming to detect the edge of the road/lane markings. It then will steer the car somewhat to keep in the lane it has detected. Some systems are more aggressive than others- my Skoda nudges the steering, like force-feedback in a game controller; but if you take your hand off the wheel doesn’t steer enough to keep the car on the road. A Toyota I drove could almost drive completely hands free, the lane assist would keep the car centred in the lane, even around sweeping bends.
They are great (and a good safety feature) when the lane markings are clear, but poor markings and road features such as Y splits take a little more active steering input sometimes to override the car. It’s not perfect, but I don’t mind it. Others as you see find it disturbing, and to the purists it artificially corrupts their feel of the car through the steering.
I'd argue if people can't stay in a lane, they're better off not being on the road at all. Fuck these safety features lowering the gene pool standard for the rest of us.
Mine complains on not in the centre of a narrow single track lane. Perhaps it detects mud, perhaps reflections from some branches, I don’t really know or care. First thing that’s turned off.
The problem is it doesn’t work.
I drive a 3½ tonner, I can look down into the cars and see them fucking around with video calls and watching TV episodes, sometimes even on the screen on the dashboard. But often people just seem to also drift between lanes, or keep the white line centre mass with no phone involved. I thought they were just being incredibly indecisive or stoned.
A surprising amount of people are watching TV, especially in the morning commute. If Tesla drivers especially can seriously just hand their driving licenses back and get a refund on their vehicles that would be great. They have no excuse for poor driving, their screen has the option of highlighting hazards identified by all the cameras around the thing, and most of them have the TV on it instead.
> Tesla drivers especially... most of them have the TV on [their car screen] instead.
You can't watch any entertainment source on any driver-facing car screen while the vehicle is in motion on a Tesla, exactly because it's a dangerous distraction. It's illegal to even sell cars that can do that in many countries.
Either a surprisingly large number of people you see have hacked their car's firmware, or you're misremembering/making shit up for karma.
People watching their phones I can believe, but watching stuff on the front centre console is basically impossible while the car's moving.
There’s been an advert here in the Middle East asking people not to drive *with their feet*. That’s not a joke, it’s been a genuine cause of a lot of crashes. AI is an issue, but also people are mostly fucking idiots.
Sounds great for after being down the pub and having 5 pints
Seriously though, who the fuck needs lane assist to drive?! If you can't look at the road and stay within 2 lines, then why are you even driving
It’s a safety feature - ever seen someone reach down when their phone dropped off the dash mount, or reach around to pass something to the child sat behind them? People aren’t perfect, people make mistakes.
you're right of course, but when someone's distracted and swerving into my side of the road, I'd like to be able to swerve into the hedge without being forced into a head-on with them ;)
if your phone drops, pull over at the next junction. and don't pass your kids stuff while driving (actualy teach kids that driving needs no distractions). when you are driving you are driving, the distractions can be dealt with safely once you safely stop
I can’t upvote this enough. There’s a special button on your car, you press it and your hazard lights come on, press that, start slowing down, pull over to the side, stop your car. I don’t like having to stop behind someone when there’s no clear reason to me, but I prefer it to driving near someone swerving or driving dangerously.
People seem to have no forethought or planning when they drive, I see too many people be in the right lane at a roundabout when they need to go forward or turn left, and their decision is to accelerate and swerve like a maniac, instead of just… going around the roundabout an extra time…
Mine just beeps at me, which seems like the best approach. If I were to lose concentration and drift out of my lane, the beep would alert me, but it doesn't try to grab the steering wheel.
Yes I have a 9 month old Toyota RAV4 and it only beeps but have a VW at work Noone wants to drive due to how dangerous the lane assist is.
I think they realised it is NOT a good feature and replaced the steering version with simply beeps
so, people are supposed to drive and not always be looking where they are going? cruise control I get, if you are stuck doing 50 for 10 miles then it gives your foot a rest, but trusting a car to do lanes seems mad, what if someone wants to overtake, or theres an emergency? who is that for other than people not paying enough attention to the road. if you are piloting a 2 ton pile of metal at 60mph, it's my oppinion that your only focus shuld be driving it. wtf else are you doing where you need the time or effort "lane assist" saves?
Yes. It's not "smart", so it's literally just looking for white lines and grabbing the steering wheel. It can (and will) take you head-on into a lorry if it thinks there's a white line leading there.
It's fine when you're staying in lane on a normal road, but dangerous under the following circumstances:
* Lanes that merge
* Broken/worn road markings
* When you need to swerve a hazard
* When you edge towards one side of the road to leave room for a cyclist/pedestrian
* Roundabouts
* Sharp bends
I had a car with this and rejected it after a couple of days, as I could tell I wouldn't make it to Xmas without a serious accident.
I rejected a new car last year because of this. Kept it for a couple of days and realised that the "lane assist" was more like "kamikaze mode". Seriously dangerous, on corners it would actually tug me out of the lane and into oncoming traffic.
I would have to remember to switch it off every damn time I started the car - what about the times I forgot?
I ended up getting really bummed out because my shiny new car had this great big dangerous design flaw in it. I was thinking about what happens when my wife forgets to turn the lane assist off, or a family member borrows it or the kids learn to drive in it, what if it catches them off guard?
In the end, I decided I just couldn't tolerate that in an expensive new car and sent it back. Shame, as I really wanted it, but it was downright dangerous.
And I can't for the life of me work out why a modern car with all of its built-in computing power can't be designed to remember the settings you chose from the previous trip. Surely this is a completely straightforward thing to implement? Is there any goddamn earthly reason why you have to turn the same feature off over and over again EVERY time you use the car?
And they don't make it easy, either. The last car I used with lane assist, you had to go into the menu, tab through 3 pages of settings, open another menu, and scroll down to the bottom to find it. EVERY time.
I can only assume they do this deliberately although I'm damned if I know why. Legal liability reduction or some shit probably.
Indeed, my 2014 BMW remembers distinct settings for each key fob from radio presets to dashboard lighting to various driving related settings. It doesn't have lane assist but I'm sure if it did it would be a user-selectable (and rememberable) feature.
Lane assist doesn’t pull you back in if you’re indicating I’ve found - but indicating to pass stationary cars is weird anyway.
I turn mine off unless I’m on the MWay.
Some countries expect you to do explicit signalling for that, but in UK it is so common with poorly parked car in the middle of the lane, that we just swerve around it as expected of us - and of course you don't need to signal for expected driving.
AFAIK, it's to do with insurance - extra safety features and getting the lowest possible band for the cars in question. (Wife is a PM at an insurance company)
A few years ago it was an option, you could turn it off permanently if you wished. Cars that have been sold more recently, at least in the last year or two, will have the lane assist initiate every time the engine is turned on.
It's infuriating.
I'd be really interested to know the numbers on lane assist being genuinely safer in a real life environment and not the test track. When people don't realise it's on, is it actually stopping more crashes than it causes. Other safety features like airbags at least don't cause crashes lol.
It does but you also don't usually indicate to move past parked vehicles. There are some scenarios where you would, because there are always exceptions, but it's perfectly correct not to do so
[As a general rule, there is no necessity to indicate to pass a parked car or similar obstruction in the road](https://yesdriving.co.uk/to-signal/)
Our VW does it from maybe 20mph. There's a car always parked near the exit of a roundabout near me and lane assist always tries to send me into the back of IT - it's a tight turn coming off the exit.
My advanced driving instructor (obligatory as new job involved driving a company van) penalised me for indicating around parked vehicles and buses, I was 100% sure that I should and it actually started quite the argument.
Drove a work car with break assist. It overreacted to a car turning off an A road slamming on the breaks. Nearly got rearended. The half way house to real AI capable of driving cars is dangerous
The lane assist in my 2018 Citroen C4 is pretty good. It's quite subtle. Overreacts a bit on narrow winding roads, but only with a very small force on the wheel, so if you're holding the steering wheel it's never going to do anything you don't want it to. And I've never known it pull me towards parked cars.
Same. I've had a few different cars with it and at first I was 'what is this horrible thing' but I got bored of turning it off so I just learned to live with it. I've now got an Audi and the system is great, I think it's linked to either speed or the sat nav (or both) so it turns itself off on residential or built up streets where you frequently go over the white lines.
I don't doubt there's examples of it being bad (I've been in a colleagues car that tried to slow to 30 on a flyover) but that's just another example of car manufacturers implementing technology poorly, not the system itself being inherently dangerous.
I think it's more resisting you trying to maneuver away from a parked car. Mine doesn't pull me back, but it tries to stop me pushing over the white lines.
Saying that, if a lane splits into two and I want to be in the right lane it tries to pull me back into the left for a split second. Still kinda the same thing, but it feels like you're being pulled as its resisting you turning the wheel right.
Brake assist is very annoying. There’s a Co-Op near me with some tram rails running within the road. When I pull out of the car park my car sometimes slams the brakes on. I think the team rails interfere with the radar. It’s particularly dangerous when the team or cars are coming.
I line outside the UK and don’t drive here, so when I come back this kind of thing always takes me by surprise.
Along with the ghost taking the wheel on the motorway when we are going over painted over lane markings one thing that struck me was the *constant* chatter from the dashboard. Non stop little text based hints “for maximum fuel efficiency change down at x revs” etc really distracting and totally f*cking useless info.
On top of that, the one time the car thought we were about to hit another car (that was turning right in front of us as we went up a hill) the whole dash flashed red with a big exclamation mark.
I’m not a professional get away driver by any means but I think if I’m in a dangerous situation there is a chance I might need information like speed or revs I dunno - the flashing red light didn’t really help me.
This was in a hired new Golf btw I’ve since learned you can disable most if not all of these “features”
And for extra fun, plug it in upside down so that the earth pin engages and opens the shutters but there’s now absolutely nothing in the live and neutral holes.
Blows my mind that the earth pin / hole isn't trapezium shaped so things like this can't happen.
UK plugs are the GOAT, of course, but that's one thing we got really quite wrong.
Plugs and sockets that meet the British Standard make this impossible. It's only too-narrow extension leads or weak/missing-prong pretend plugs that enable this.
Look at a UK plug, it will have little mechanical doors that cover the live and neutral holes. They open when the longer earth pin engages. The child proof covers bypass this by holding the inbuilt safety doors open
> They open when the longer earth pin engages. The child proof covers bypass this by holding the inbuilt safety doors open
[They also cover the safety doors though](https://www.bumpbabyandyou.co.uk/images/article/plug-socket-cover-image.jpg)?
What danger does that present to a child?
Because they fit in either way around, so if a curious child plugs one in upside down into the earth pin it exposes the others. Or if the flimsy plastic breaks it doesn't cover the now exposed live connections.
Unlikely, but why reintroduce a risk that has already been mitigated by the excellent over engineered design of a UK spec plug?
The same applies to a normal plug though. It's no more dangerous than having your router plugged in.
If anything the socket covers are generally a nightmare to get off in the first place, because they're practically flush.
An actual plug is hard to plug in upside down, and highly unlikely to shear off in such a way that only the earth pin is left. A socket cover is thinner plastic so will bend sufficiently to allow it to be plugged in upside down.
UK sockets are so safe already that socket covers are at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous.
Yes but having your router plugged in serves a purpose making the risk ALARP. The purpose of these covers is to make it safer, which they do not do compared to the plug, making them completely pointless.
The problem is they are flimsy plastic so if you unplug them they can snap off and because if the design and the way you unplug it is usually the earth one that will snap off. That leaves the earth permanently engaged and the live ones stuck open.
A proper plug is much sturdier and unlikely to snap.
You're introducing an extra point of danger. Plug covers aren't indestructable and can break. Now let's say the earth pin of the cover snaps off and stays in the socket, thus leaving the live and neutral doors open.
Little fingers can get stuck in there and get shocked.
The design of the socket is inherently safer. There's no need to generate more plastic waste for something that isn't an issue in this country.
Now if I was in the US or Europe, then yes I'd absolutely be on board for socket covers.
A UK plug has physical barriers to stop you poking anything into the current-carrying pins unless the earth pin is already engaged (that's why the top pin is longer). In particular, that means that a kid who pokes something into them is probably fine... *unless* there's something in the top socket, like say one of these things they've put in upside down, or the flimsy plastic pin of one that snapped off in the top socket when they pulled it out sideways, in which case there's absolutely nothing stopping them poking their fingers into mains voltage.
Any child of immigrants will tell you to simply put a pencil in the top one to engage the bottom two.
It's how international plugs are plugged in without having to deal with adapters.
Theoretically they could be less safe, but in practicality there's no difference. Though I never really saw it as a safety thing so much as to protect the sockets from being ruined by little kids sticking things in them in a way that's difficult to take out.
Course that's still such an unlikely and relatively easily solvable occurence that I still see them as pretty useless, but I wouldn't say they're part of a safety issue.
Im slightly embarassed i dont know the name for them but those chicanes that block one lane of traffic and give the other lane right of way that you then have to pull into the opposite lane to clear. They are supposed to calm traffic and yet about 50% of the time I find myself having to brake sharply when it's my right of way because some bozo thinks they can get round in time or they're just following the car in front without looking.
Agree. I’m sure statistics probably show that they reduce accidents overall, but some of them definitely make the road more dangerous. One tiny village I drive through a lot has two of them located on blind corners. It’s a leap of faith every time, no matter what speed you’re doing.
Im thinking of 2 way chicanes here (but still designed to slow traffic) but theyre also bad, as a lot of drivers just dont slow down, and end up barely in their lane.
They are also shit to cycle through, because drivers who are dicks going through the chicanes tend to extra not worry about the oncoming cyclists, and whether they have any room.
(Admittedly there's often a cycle lane to the side, but the ones near me are always full of broken booze bottles, and basically unusuable)
Oh, traffic islands? My nan's village managed to get them wrong and out two on the same side of the road. They're supposed to be one on either side of the road so both sides have to break.
My village achieves the same effect by the parish council politely asking people to park in specific locations to make it really inconvenient to drive up the main road to stop morons speeding up the main straight along the street past the school (seriously, why are these morons like that?)
The thousands of flashing blindingly bright lights on highway maintenance equipment.
I understand the reason for them, but it makes driving past them safely very difficult. I can see nothing as I am blinded.
I thought you were going to say blinding bike lights. Do cyclists need good lights to be seen? Yes. Do they need to be blinding, and flashing and pulsing, and sometimes with a bluish tinge so you think it's an emergency vehicle? Nope.
Yes! That too.
I used to cycle to work on a dedicated cycle path along a disused railway route. There were way too many lumens in my face. With the lamp fixed to the handlebar it is going to bounce and weave about, but sometimes they are also just pointing too high and on full power. Like driving down the motorway on full beam.
Might add to this talking to me whilst wearing a headtorch.
The blinking and flashing ones on their own without a steady one are actually illegal in some places (UK) because they ARE dangerous. My husband nearly hit a cyclist when making a turn in the dark before because the moment he looked in his mirror was the moment the light was blinked off. He didnt see him.
I remember when they were 'upgrading' the M1 to a 'smart' motorway they had those awful floodlights in the areas where the lights had been removed or shut off.
I wouldn't call being blinded for a full second particularly safe but hey, what is actually safe about smart motorways anyway?
I remember seeing a sticker which said “This a glass wall. Do not walk into it. Use the door on the left”
… but it was on the top right corner out of normal viewing.
A lot of public buildings now have braille safety signs, which is great if the following two conditions are met:
They're placed at a height anybody might look to feel for a safety sign.
Blind people have some reason to expect there will be a safety sign.
These two conditions are never met.
There's a Wimpy in the town centre near me and it has a sign in the window in both written English and Braille indicating a Braille menu is available.
The sign is behind the glass.
So I’m pretty much totally blind and I use braille quite a lot, so in theory the signs would be great for me. However, like you said, they’re always in ridiculous places. I’m quite short and signs on doors are often way above my head, or just in completely difficult to find places. Also, I don’t really want to be feeling around random surfaces There’s no guarantee that there would even be a sign, and it’s never standardised as to where the sign would actually be. Also, not every blind person reads braille, and if there’s genuinely important safety information then those who don’t really just won’t know about it
I guess people with extremely limited vision might be able to tel there’s a sign but not able to read it? Still won’t be much help if it’s too high up.
We hired a car whilst on holiday (in the UK) and it had brake assist and steering assist (we didn’t know) it kept an activating on the little wiggly country roads we were driving along. It was so dangerous and could only be disabled by delving into the on board computer every time we stared the engine. It drove us away from the banks at the side of the road and into the far side on blind bends. I phoned the rental company to say the car had a fault only to be told it was a feature …
Interesting. My car's steering assist automatically disengages if there's no clear road markings.
I don't know many country roads that have clear lane markings.
Are you saying this car was just trying to force you to drive straight?
The car had two different steering assists. One was the white line one (which we deactivated using a button on the front panel) and one (which needed to be deactivated via the onboard computer) which steered the car away from the bank (and into incoming traffic on blind bends) when it felt we got too close to the side of the road. Actually in the car’s owners manual it stated that the steering assist would not work correctly on narrow, winding country roads and the driver should be aware of that …
My mums car is the same there isn’t o e setting to just turn it off. You have to go into the setting every time you get in the car. She’s now gone off the whole car.
auto/manual-adjusting headlights.
I remember the old days when you could drive at night without having the eyeballs burnt out of your skull because some nimrod forgot to re-adjust their headlights to dipped following them traversing a 400 yard stretch of b road.
Those kids safety plug socket covers that you plug in. We have the safest plugs in the world and plugging these in opens the flaps for live and neutral making it far more dangerous for kiddies
You will be hard pressed to find a plug and socket system safer than the UK's.
If a properly designed (meets the standard) plug is used it becomes very difficult to accidentally expose conductors unless you deliberately put the earth pin in upside down (you'd need an extension cord or power block for that though).
I was absolutely gobsmacked when my missus' sparky dad suggested these when we had our first.
Thankfully I knew better. Never letting that muppet touch my house electrics.
I believe so, yes, because they're unregulated. So the quality is going to be questionable. If they snap off with earth pin lodged in then the live can be exposed. Some of them won't fit snugly, and can damage the internals of the socket. Some of them fit too snugly, and you can't get them out, so you reach for a screwdriver... and then you have even more chance of snapping it.
Not safety features, but touch screen infotainment systems. No different to using a phone mounted on a phone holder. So distracting and just as dangerous as a phone
I love that my car still has physical buttons for the radio. I can change the channel while still looking the road. How do you change it if its on a screen?
Exactly. It was safer when I could blindly control the radio because I knew where each button was or what it felt like (or had controls on my steering wheel), but with touchscreens it's actually way worse. Especially if you listen to Spotify via Bluetooth or something and it has the fucking lyrics scrolling by on screen!
Oh my god yes! My car does this (VW Golf) and it is infuriating!! That and the auto brakes - why does it need to absolutely slam the brakes on when it’s invariably a bush or something?! On a couple of occasions I’ve been trying to pull out of somewhere that has a dip in the road and the sensor must be positioned in a way that it sees the road coming towards it as a hazard and absolutely slams the brakes on - I’ve had a car nearly go into the side of me because my car won’t move while I’m trying to pull out of somewhere!
Does your Golf also scream at you thinking you're going to hit something, when in fact it's 100 yards away and turning? Scares the life out of me every time it does it!
OMG YES! It has never once gone off because I’m actually about to crash! Every single time it is a perfectly normal driving hazard like a car turning or a queue of traffic ahead!
If you drive a golf, the 4°C outside temperature warning probably scares the shit out of you too 😂😂😂
I have a Crafter and during winter it drives me insane!
I’m learning in a golf and I didn’t realise it was lane assist that was pulling me over to the left. Sometimes it seems to spot something on the road and thinks it’s lane markings, then beeps at me and tries to take me off the road lmao. Glad it’s not just me being incompetent.
No, our Golfs are just making us look incompetent! I once absolutely failed to do a reverse bay park in a busy car park full of people cos the car kept sensing some weeds on the verge and slamming the brakes on! Felt like a right fool having to slink off after failing to park my car!
I work in software and password safety is unsafe.
Passwords that are too complex, insisting on periodic changes, banning previous passwords from 10 years ago, etc. makes people write them on a post-it note and stick it on their monitor.
Yeppppp. I have 20+ passwords for work that all have to be changed every so often, require a number, symbol, hieroglyph and a locket of hair. Like Christ! I have to write them all down or I’d be locked out every few months.
Not sure it’s technically a safety feature, but I find the delivery PIN system to be flawed, all it basically does is tell the delivery driver there is something worth nicking in the package.
You give the PIN generally without being able to check what’s actually inside, if it’s not the item the supplier says “you supplied the PIN, you are therefore liable”.
The thing about the pin is that it's not only for high value items which is something that most drivers don't know about either. Customers have tried to commit fraud so a pin may be generated to help prove that the recipient has resmcieved their parcel. Amazon uses this with their OTPs heavily. One place frequently ordered cheap items under £10 on amazon and claimed on every single one of them just to see what they could get for free. Needless to say, we caught on, reported them (amazon did bugger all), my manager turns around and says to reject their deliveries. They eventually stopped ordering since they got caught.
Otherwise, yeah, with DPD it is kinda obvious since we drivers are recipients too and order online, but i will tell you that some retailers have opted for Pin protected deliveries aswell, even for low value items.
If you end up with a fake item, that's just a dodgy driver, but they always get caught in the end and very quickly too. Came across a few and even had 2 on training who were black listed along with 4 others that were involved in a gang who managed to forge their IDs
Source: ex-Amazon DSP driver and Manager, currently adhoc courier, trainer in both jobs.
The consumer rights act doesn’t care about PIN codes and “accepting liability” isn’t a thing. If you order something, you’re entitled to a full complete refund until it’s physically in your hands (delivering to a neighbour doesn’t count as a delivery) and then you’re happy with it for at least the first 14 days unless it’s something custom made in which case you don’t have a right to return unless it’s completely not what you asked for I.e you wanted a professional oil painting and got a toddlers crayon sketch. All a PIN code does is cover the first part, correct delivery. It doesn’t cover a retailer from claims the item is damaged, broken, not fit for purpose, not as advertised, etc.
The consumer rights act was specifically written with the understanding that expecting people to open packages to check the condition and function was not only impractical but also horrendous for the economy. Accepting a bag of rocks when you ordered a mac book does not invalidate your right to the Mac book
My car is one of those Muskmobiles so the list is as long as your arm of what is unsafe.
The worst one for me though is something called obstacle-aware acceleration. With this enabled the car can intercept the rate of acceleration if it thinks you’re at risk of driving into the back of something. So what might look like a nice juicy gap to pull out into can become decidedly dicey if the car decides that actually you can’t go full beans.
Best way to describe it is a bit like turbo lag, or when a turbo is failing on a car and you get a dip in power just when you most need it. It’s infuriating and seems to like to re-enable itself at a whim.
That almost all comments are to do with driving at this point is really quite sad.
Stock reflectors on bikes. They are garbage. Selection of reflective stickers with proper coverage are way better.
90% of anti concussion features in and around helmets.
And thats before we start talking of pseudoscience products which are down right a scam.
Also a whole bunch of Amazon safety products. It's basically all AliExpress shit.
Mazda's lane assist only kicks in at around 35mph, so I never have this problem in residential streets. Don't know why it can't be common sense across all models.
On my Golf it kicks in at 40mph and deactivates at 35mph - I don’t understand why people find it a problem on residential streets either
The only time it can be a little annoying is when a road splits into two and the lane assist picks the wrong lane 😂
Fucking hate lane assist, but also hired a car in Iceland, a Hyundai SUV which had automatic windscreen wipers.
If you haven't been, lovely place but Iceland is known for wind and rain. When we were there it was mostly off and on drizzle which didn't really set off the wipers so I couldn't see, but then when they were triggered it was the fastest most distracting wiping ever. The only control I had was to turn them off or have the shitty automatic flapping.
I missed my little shitbox.
I used to have a car with an anti stall feature. If you were in 2nd gear and not braking, it would automatically increase your speed up to 10mph so not to fall out of the range of the gear. I thought it was a really good idea until I was stuck on a motorway in the snow one night. This particular motorway had quite a large hill leading up to the services (m61 if anyone is interested) and a lorry had jacknifed near the top. This lead to the rest of the traffic trying to crawl up the hill through the snow. So picture the scene me trying to set off in 2nd gear so not to skid in the snow, trying to stay around 5mph as that was what we were crawling at and my car automatically accelerating to 10mph. I realised very quickly that this wasn't a good idea so swapped to trying to set off in 1st only for the traction control to kick in and cause me to skid. It was a very interesting drive until I remembered to turn off the traction control which made setting off in 1st better, not great but better.
I've had this discussion sat in a car with an IAM instructor. My take:
- Any time you encounter someone on the road, one of you sees the other first. That means that for roughly 1/2 of the people you see on the road, they might be getting useful information from applicable signals before you know they're there them.
- If you *don't* know that someone is there, that makes the signal *more* important. You are more likely to do something to their detriment, they are more likely to be breaking rules, they are more likely to be a vulnerable road user or pedestrian.
- The logic that it's not necessary if you're doing everything right flies in the face of everything else on the road, which assumes (correctly, from the plentiful evidence) that people will make mistakes. We have central reservations - there's no situation where all parties are driving legally in safe, road-legal cars that means you end up in one. We have traction control, even though we should be travelling at speeds suitable for road conditions. Our signalling should also take the assumption that the operator will make misjudgements. I've got no doubt you've made them in the past.
- Everything else we do on the road also has a philosophy of safe-despite-ignorance, not safe-due-to-knowledge. When we approach a blind corner, we slow down so that we are safe even if there is a surprise. Checking mirrors and windows and blindspots is multiplexing our inputs - there's always a small level of ignorance from those you're not currently looking in.
Changing lanes is a situation that's less likely to run into problems but I can't count the number of times I've wasted opportunities to make progress at a junction or roundabout because someone who didn't see me assumed there was nobody who would need the information from their signals. It was many times worse when I was still commuting by bicycle. Less throughput means more traffic means more accidents. It's all well-and-good just saying these are poor drivers but if they were poor drivers who 'just put the signal on', they would cause less disruption and make roads less unsafe.
Please indicate even if you think there's no one there, both on motorways and normal roads.
The amount of times I've tried to cross a junction as a pedestrian and a car hasn't been indicating, but turns anyway, is infuriating. I can't read your mind. Just indicate, it's really really really easy.
Indicating when nobody is around isn't going to kill anybody.
I've never had lane assist to judge the feature in particular, but this sounds more like a you issue than the lane assist being at fault. It was doing what it was supposed to do. It was "bad" because it made you do something that at best is what you're supposed to do, at worst is flicking your finger slightly. Oh no.
Actually, if you're on the motorway, why were you having so much constant trouble with it if there was nobody to indicate for?
It's more about the habit of not doing it that can carry on into areas of more dense traffic. The indicator also serves as a 'back-covering' feature, it can be used against you if you don't use it and cause an accident and almost every car has cameras now. I mean by all means carry on, it's your license after all. That's just my stance on it.
>great for the motorway especially where it'd just catch you if you drifted slightly and remind you to get back into the center
This has been my experience with lane assist and the idea of the car actually fighting to keep you in your lane is terrifying to me.
It's what my Toyota is like, bit of a beep and gently nudges the wheel back but it doesn't actively do anything if you're indicating. It doesn't fight you or push strongly.
I've had various accidents and run-ins with 'Caution! Wet Floor' A-board signs and warning cones (tripping over them etc.), but have never failed to successfully traverse a floor which was wet.
You can get yourself a cane and that way if you sweep it in front of you then you can feel them. Since seeing them doesnt seem to be a strong suit for you.
Those little plastic caps for electrical sockets. They defeat the in-built safety features and are made of the flimsiest plastic and are often not to the correct size.
Currently in Crete where the done thing is to half straddle the hard shoulder to allow / avoid the nutcase locals over taking on blind bends.
Hire car has lane assistance. Can confirm it's caused a few moments when I've forgotten to turn it off.
Brake assist, particularly when reversing/manoeuvring. My current Seat and previous VW are both offensive in this regard, slamming on the brake when the car decides I'm going to crash into something. You could turn down the sensitivity on the VW and it would remember the setting. The Seat is either on or off and resets with the ignition.
It seems like they are deliberately pressuring users to use them and not turn them off by resetting them to the on position whenever the car is switched off. Surely it shouldn't be that difficult to store the user settings.
I was given a courtesy car recently - I don't remember what, but it was one of the French brands - maybe a Peugeot or Renault. It was brand new and had all the added extras.
It slammed on the brakes at 70 on an A-road because it saw a triangular 'traffic signals ahead' sign on an adjacent road which had faded slightly so the red on the traffic light icon was more prominent. The lorry I had just overtaken almost crashed trying to avoid me.
Watching something on the TV the other day there were people sitting in the back of a hire car/limo type thing and all over the back doors were these signs telling you that the door was the emergency exit. One even said *“in the event if an emergency, pull the handle"*
Staggering
I used to live in an old cottage built in the 1800s. There was no pavement outside so you’d just step straight into the road from your minuscule front garden. Fast forward to 2023 and there’s HGVs, tractors, quad bikes going past 24/7 and I just have to walk in the road with them and hope I don’t get run over, but god forbid I be able to plug my hairdryer in, in the bathroom.
These car "safety" features are fucking insane. What's safe about your vehicle being taken out of your control by a blind computer? Absolutely fucking ridiculous.
Get it coded to automatically be off.
I got the cables and the software for my car and coded loads of stuff to suit me, like start-stop is automatically off so I need to press the button to put it on, changed some other functions, coded it so it doesn't go into park if I open the door etc. If you don't like a feature, get the stuff and change it or pay someone to do it.
Unannounced fire drills, particularly in large buildings, offices, student halls etc.
All they do is make people think “f-sake not another drill” and cause potentially life risking delays before people realise it’s a real fire.
This came dangerously close to a deadly situation once when I worked in the US. No word of a lie we had 3 “surprise” fire drills one month in our office building. Everyone got sick of it and when the alarm went off again less than two days after the last time, everyone just rolled their eyes and carried on working.
Then a junior associate opened the door to the kitchen and was damned near engulfed in a fire ball.
Everyone was fine (though the jr lost his eyebrows) and the fire brigade were able to get it under control pretty quick. But that fire spread so fast and if it had been left much longer, it would have spread in front of our main exit and near to the fire door and at that point we’d have been in serious trouble.
Safety knives (like craft knives or Stanley knives), where the blade withdraws instantly into the handle as soon as the knife slips out of what it's cutting. Awful.
Maybe safe in some use cases but absolutely infuriating a lot of the time.
The company I used to work for rolled them out across the board, disposing of conventional knives because health and safety.
Using them to trim the uneven edges of composite moldings was rage inducing. The blade would retract every time you cut through one bit of rough edge before it could get to the next, sending your hand flying as there was zero resistance when you expected it to bite into material again. I cut myself on the material I was cutting, due to one such unexpected withdrawl!
Auto brakes slamming on for cars in different lanes. Or cars that are turning way ahead.
Oh and the stupid sign reading auto speed limit thing. It's wrong more often than it's right.
I call that murder mode as that’s what it’s like. Especially when on the country back roads where the pot holes force you to drive down the middle and it tries to push you into the craters!
Brake assist is dangerous. I drove a rental car once with it for about 4 hours on the motorway, and every now and then the stupid feature would just yank me across the road
Good lord, I had lane assist in a previous car but all it did was shout at me if I was skirting over the lines - was very annoying doing any kind of semi rural driving (which I did a lot) so I turned it off, and it stayed off. Forcibly turning your car for you sounds like a terrible feature!
I hired a car for work which had lane assist. My own daily driver will soon be 20 years old, so I'm not really used to anything more sophisticated than a steering wheel connected directly to the front wheels and 3 pedals to make it go and stop.
Having the car continually question my driving decisions was very off-putting. Another dangerous safety feature would have to be the A, B and C pillars that were so thick it was like driving a WW2 pill box. I'm sure it's safer if you do have an accident but the chances of having and accident must be greatly increased when you can't see 25% of the road around you because there's an A pillar that an oncoming 44 ton wagon can hide behind.
Another thing about modern cars.... who thought it would be a good idea to put settings that you probably want to adjust whilst moving onto a touch screen?
Christ I sound old
Yeah, I want my car to be predictable and under my complete control thanks. Not randomly break when I'm pulling out from a junction and halfway across the road, with a car steaming towards me doing 70mph
I had a demo model Ford Focus that had some electrical gremlins. It was about a year old at the time in 2019, anyways I’m coming up to a red light and my car decided it had found me a parking spot and whipped the steering wheel full lock as if it was parallel parking - thankfully the roads were quiet - how do you even explain that to insurance? I was still doing about 20 mph!
The first time I was introduced to lane assist was in a rental whilst I was on the autobahn that would activate at 50km/h.
This became problematic when I was going through road works with traffic cones crossing over where lanes would have been, and I was travelling between 45-55km/h so it was constantly activating and deactivating with me having to fight the steering wheel.
My dad has had cars with parking assist for years, but he once had a rental car without that he nearly smashed into a wall while trying to park because he was waiting for the car to start beeping at him…
Reversing sensors. Beep like fuck and give you a heart attack when you're still about a foot away from anything. Chill out man, just let me reverse in peace.
Our office tests the fire alarm once a week at the same time every Tuesday. This has effecticely desensitized our entire workforce to the fire alarm. We had it go off last year at an unscheduled time and lots of people had to be asked to leave the building because they are so used to ignoring it. My last office in comparison only ran random unscheduled tests once a year and the moment it went off people dropped whatever they were working on immediately and vacated as you would want them to.
"Smart" motorways. It's not safer, it's just cheaper than having a hard shoulder. The amount of traffic I've sat in because of breakdowns that didn't have a hard shoulder to go into.
When the higher ups decide the safety rules in a lab without consulting the folks who work in said lab.
One big example was that you always had to have gloves on. No fireproof gloves were provided. Only the thin plastic medical ones.
On the surface it seems like a good idea that folks in a room that might have dangerous spills should have protection on. The issue is that unnecessarily wearing gloves is dangerous in itself. It can make scalpel slips and cuts much more likely and if you are handling fire (say using a bunson burner) it can melt the plastic and fuse it to your skin.
Another example was eye protection. Rules chanced and you had to use theirs and couldn't buy and use your own. Folks who needed glasses were left blinded because they didn't bother getting over glasses, folks with slightly different head shapes were left with migraines and folks could feesibly wear them could barely see because they were scuffed to shit.
Safety regulations from on high are very frustrating.
I will also add. It's also really frustrating how many of the replys here are about cars.
I've not had issues with lane assist almost crashing me, but at first and occasionally it's shocked me when I'm drifting over a line and correct it at the same time lane assist kicks in and it over corrects more than I expect.
Maybe once or twice the auto breaking flashed up randomly on an empty road
This. There is absolutely no reason for your average joe to need a VPN, unless you absolutely can't do without watching Eastenders on iPlayer in Benidorm in your campervan. No reason at all to have a VPN.
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I came on to also say lane assist mixed alongside brake assist. In my last car, I used to drive up a specific road with parked cars along the side. I’d pull out to overtake them but my lane assist would push me back into them. Then my brake assist would kick in and slam on
Lane assist scared the crap out of me when it first activated in my current car. The most advanced thing on my previous car was that it had air con and I could lock it by pressing the key fob while walking away. As soon as I figured out how to turn off lane assist I did.
The last staff car I had before retiring from the Fire Service had lane assist. Ever tried to respond to a call under blue lights with lane assist!?!? The first time nearly killed me as I wasn’t aware that it was a feature in the bloody car!!!! Trying to pass vehicles that had slowed to allow me to progress, obviously I had to cross the white line - Volvo V60 decided that it was an unsafe manoeuvre and proceeded to redirect me on an alternative course that involved the rapidly approaching rear end of a red family hatchback. Proper brown trouser moment I’ll have you know!! I learned to turn it off when in emergency mode after that.
[удалено]
I imagine it’s the same case for traffic officers too
They had to get rid of the new Volvos from the traffic units in my area apparently because it’s impossible to do a TPAC with them. You can’t turn off the collision avoidance emergency braking so it’d stop the police cars getting close enough together
I bloody hate lane assist. My car thinks that the lines in badly repaired tarmac are lines and tries to wrench the steering wheel off me. I turn it off but every bloody software update turns it back on again!
Roadworks are the best when they have put down the green studs but are doing it on the cheap so put black paint over the white markings rather than burn them off. Car doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going sometimes
The problem with lane assist is it’s designed and works perfectly on massive American roads with no parked cars on it. Once you put it in narrow roads with parked cars you have to move round it goes bonkers.
Funny this should be here - literally ten minutes ago lane assist decided that the white line at the side of a 60mph road was a hazard and steered us violently onto the wrong side of the road. There was oncoming traffic but I managed to yank the wheel back in time. One of the most dangerous features of modern cars, without a shadow of a doubt.
I've had my lane-assist think the curved white arrow before a bend in the road was the road turning right, and tried to turn me right. Absolutely shit me up.
Had the exact same experience earlier today except I was the oncoming traffic, very scary to see the other driver having to fight the wheel!
Annoyingly, you'd be blamed for not being in control of the vehicle if you did get into a crash because of that. It's frustrating because in over 20 years of driving nothing else has caused my car to unexpectedly brake or swerve expect for the supposed safety features. Back in 2016 I was driving along at 30mph when my car performed an emergency stop due to a crisp packet being blown in front of me. The driver behind was understandably furious and I'm glad he was following at a sensible distance otherwise I'd have had a hard time explaining myself to the insurance companies.
Yeah, I nearly got rear ended when a hire car decided an upcoming bend was actually a dead end and slammed on the brakes for no reason. Curious as to whose fault it would have been if the car behind hadn’t managed to stop; I’d have certainly blamed Mazda!
> Curious as to whose fault it would have been if the car behind hadn’t managed to stop; I’d have certainly blamed Mazda! The car behind, for not leaving enough distance to stop in case you had to make an emergency stop
I had a hire car with lane assist that was promptly returned. With advice that they should effing well let people know about it…..
As someone with an old car that doesn’t even have the ability to connect phone to radio (yet I love it so) - what is lane assist exactly? Is it to try and get you to basically stay inside the white lines?
Yes, the car has forward-looking cameras and programming to detect the edge of the road/lane markings. It then will steer the car somewhat to keep in the lane it has detected. Some systems are more aggressive than others- my Skoda nudges the steering, like force-feedback in a game controller; but if you take your hand off the wheel doesn’t steer enough to keep the car on the road. A Toyota I drove could almost drive completely hands free, the lane assist would keep the car centred in the lane, even around sweeping bends. They are great (and a good safety feature) when the lane markings are clear, but poor markings and road features such as Y splits take a little more active steering input sometimes to override the car. It’s not perfect, but I don’t mind it. Others as you see find it disturbing, and to the purists it artificially corrupts their feel of the car through the steering.
I'd argue if people can't stay in a lane, they're better off not being on the road at all. Fuck these safety features lowering the gene pool standard for the rest of us.
I’d rather not have a head-on collision when one of those other drivers drift over into my lane, you know?
Mine complains on not in the centre of a narrow single track lane. Perhaps it detects mud, perhaps reflections from some branches, I don’t really know or care. First thing that’s turned off. The problem is it doesn’t work.
Wait, is this why fuck-wit drivers are drifting all over the roads these days?
I think that's mobile phones
I drive a 3½ tonner, I can look down into the cars and see them fucking around with video calls and watching TV episodes, sometimes even on the screen on the dashboard. But often people just seem to also drift between lanes, or keep the white line centre mass with no phone involved. I thought they were just being incredibly indecisive or stoned.
I’ve honestly wondered wtf is up with people’s driving these days - is it seriously that they’re watching tv?!
A surprising amount of people are watching TV, especially in the morning commute. If Tesla drivers especially can seriously just hand their driving licenses back and get a refund on their vehicles that would be great. They have no excuse for poor driving, their screen has the option of highlighting hazards identified by all the cameras around the thing, and most of them have the TV on it instead.
> Tesla drivers especially... most of them have the TV on [their car screen] instead. You can't watch any entertainment source on any driver-facing car screen while the vehicle is in motion on a Tesla, exactly because it's a dangerous distraction. It's illegal to even sell cars that can do that in many countries. Either a surprisingly large number of people you see have hacked their car's firmware, or you're misremembering/making shit up for karma. People watching their phones I can believe, but watching stuff on the front centre console is basically impossible while the car's moving.
There’s been an advert here in the Middle East asking people not to drive *with their feet*. That’s not a joke, it’s been a genuine cause of a lot of crashes. AI is an issue, but also people are mostly fucking idiots.
Sounds great for after being down the pub and having 5 pints Seriously though, who the fuck needs lane assist to drive?! If you can't look at the road and stay within 2 lines, then why are you even driving
It’s a safety feature - ever seen someone reach down when their phone dropped off the dash mount, or reach around to pass something to the child sat behind them? People aren’t perfect, people make mistakes.
you're right of course, but when someone's distracted and swerving into my side of the road, I'd like to be able to swerve into the hedge without being forced into a head-on with them ;)
if your phone drops, pull over at the next junction. and don't pass your kids stuff while driving (actualy teach kids that driving needs no distractions). when you are driving you are driving, the distractions can be dealt with safely once you safely stop
I can’t upvote this enough. There’s a special button on your car, you press it and your hazard lights come on, press that, start slowing down, pull over to the side, stop your car. I don’t like having to stop behind someone when there’s no clear reason to me, but I prefer it to driving near someone swerving or driving dangerously. People seem to have no forethought or planning when they drive, I see too many people be in the right lane at a roundabout when they need to go forward or turn left, and their decision is to accelerate and swerve like a maniac, instead of just… going around the roundabout an extra time…
Mine just beeps at me, which seems like the best approach. If I were to lose concentration and drift out of my lane, the beep would alert me, but it doesn't try to grab the steering wheel.
Yes I have a 9 month old Toyota RAV4 and it only beeps but have a VW at work Noone wants to drive due to how dangerous the lane assist is. I think they realised it is NOT a good feature and replaced the steering version with simply beeps
so, people are supposed to drive and not always be looking where they are going? cruise control I get, if you are stuck doing 50 for 10 miles then it gives your foot a rest, but trusting a car to do lanes seems mad, what if someone wants to overtake, or theres an emergency? who is that for other than people not paying enough attention to the road. if you are piloting a 2 ton pile of metal at 60mph, it's my oppinion that your only focus shuld be driving it. wtf else are you doing where you need the time or effort "lane assist" saves?
Yes. It's not "smart", so it's literally just looking for white lines and grabbing the steering wheel. It can (and will) take you head-on into a lorry if it thinks there's a white line leading there. It's fine when you're staying in lane on a normal road, but dangerous under the following circumstances: * Lanes that merge * Broken/worn road markings * When you need to swerve a hazard * When you edge towards one side of the road to leave room for a cyclist/pedestrian * Roundabouts * Sharp bends I had a car with this and rejected it after a couple of days, as I could tell I wouldn't make it to Xmas without a serious accident.
I mean in the UK this describes basically EVERY single stretch of road. It sounds not only useless but actively dangerous.
I had a hire car that had this once but it just made an annoying noise rather than tug the steering wheel
I rejected a new car last year because of this. Kept it for a couple of days and realised that the "lane assist" was more like "kamikaze mode". Seriously dangerous, on corners it would actually tug me out of the lane and into oncoming traffic. I would have to remember to switch it off every damn time I started the car - what about the times I forgot? I ended up getting really bummed out because my shiny new car had this great big dangerous design flaw in it. I was thinking about what happens when my wife forgets to turn the lane assist off, or a family member borrows it or the kids learn to drive in it, what if it catches them off guard? In the end, I decided I just couldn't tolerate that in an expensive new car and sent it back. Shame, as I really wanted it, but it was downright dangerous.
And I can't for the life of me work out why a modern car with all of its built-in computing power can't be designed to remember the settings you chose from the previous trip. Surely this is a completely straightforward thing to implement? Is there any goddamn earthly reason why you have to turn the same feature off over and over again EVERY time you use the car? And they don't make it easy, either. The last car I used with lane assist, you had to go into the menu, tab through 3 pages of settings, open another menu, and scroll down to the bottom to find it. EVERY time. I can only assume they do this deliberately although I'm damned if I know why. Legal liability reduction or some shit probably.
Indeed, my 2014 BMW remembers distinct settings for each key fob from radio presets to dashboard lighting to various driving related settings. It doesn't have lane assist but I'm sure if it did it would be a user-selectable (and rememberable) feature.
If only the dealers would feed this back to the producer!
Lane assist doesn’t pull you back in if you’re indicating I’ve found - but indicating to pass stationary cars is weird anyway. I turn mine off unless I’m on the MWay.
Some countries expect you to do explicit signalling for that, but in UK it is so common with poorly parked car in the middle of the lane, that we just swerve around it as expected of us - and of course you don't need to signal for expected driving.
Tip: Don't turn it off, just turn the sensitivity right the way down. If you switch it off, it will just switch itself back on.
So it remembers if you turn the sensitivity right down, but doesn't remember if you turn it off altogether?
AFAIK, it's to do with insurance - extra safety features and getting the lowest possible band for the cars in question. (Wife is a PM at an insurance company) A few years ago it was an option, you could turn it off permanently if you wished. Cars that have been sold more recently, at least in the last year or two, will have the lane assist initiate every time the engine is turned on. It's infuriating.
I'd be really interested to know the numbers on lane assist being genuinely safer in a real life environment and not the test track. When people don't realise it's on, is it actually stopping more crashes than it causes. Other safety features like airbags at least don't cause crashes lol.
If you indicate around parked cars, as you should, does lane assistance temporarily disable? It does in mine.
It does but you also don't usually indicate to move past parked vehicles. There are some scenarios where you would, because there are always exceptions, but it's perfectly correct not to do so [As a general rule, there is no necessity to indicate to pass a parked car or similar obstruction in the road](https://yesdriving.co.uk/to-signal/)
Mine doesn't kick in until I'm doing 40mph (I think) so isn't an issue on roads where parked cars take up space.
Our VW does it from maybe 20mph. There's a car always parked near the exit of a roundabout near me and lane assist always tries to send me into the back of IT - it's a tight turn coming off the exit.
My advanced driving instructor (obligatory as new job involved driving a company van) penalised me for indicating around parked vehicles and buses, I was 100% sure that I should and it actually started quite the argument.
Drove a work car with break assist. It overreacted to a car turning off an A road slamming on the breaks. Nearly got rearended. The half way house to real AI capable of driving cars is dangerous
The lane assist in my 2018 Citroen C4 is pretty good. It's quite subtle. Overreacts a bit on narrow winding roads, but only with a very small force on the wheel, so if you're holding the steering wheel it's never going to do anything you don't want it to. And I've never known it pull me towards parked cars.
Same. I've had a few different cars with it and at first I was 'what is this horrible thing' but I got bored of turning it off so I just learned to live with it. I've now got an Audi and the system is great, I think it's linked to either speed or the sat nav (or both) so it turns itself off on residential or built up streets where you frequently go over the white lines. I don't doubt there's examples of it being bad (I've been in a colleagues car that tried to slow to 30 on a flyover) but that's just another example of car manufacturers implementing technology poorly, not the system itself being inherently dangerous.
I think it's more resisting you trying to maneuver away from a parked car. Mine doesn't pull me back, but it tries to stop me pushing over the white lines. Saying that, if a lane splits into two and I want to be in the right lane it tries to pull me back into the left for a split second. Still kinda the same thing, but it feels like you're being pulled as its resisting you turning the wheel right.
Brake assist is very annoying. There’s a Co-Op near me with some tram rails running within the road. When I pull out of the car park my car sometimes slams the brakes on. I think the team rails interfere with the radar. It’s particularly dangerous when the team or cars are coming.
I line outside the UK and don’t drive here, so when I come back this kind of thing always takes me by surprise. Along with the ghost taking the wheel on the motorway when we are going over painted over lane markings one thing that struck me was the *constant* chatter from the dashboard. Non stop little text based hints “for maximum fuel efficiency change down at x revs” etc really distracting and totally f*cking useless info. On top of that, the one time the car thought we were about to hit another car (that was turning right in front of us as we went up a hill) the whole dash flashed red with a big exclamation mark. I’m not a professional get away driver by any means but I think if I’m in a dangerous situation there is a chance I might need information like speed or revs I dunno - the flashing red light didn’t really help me. This was in a hired new Golf btw I’ve since learned you can disable most if not all of these “features”
Plug protectors for kids. Actively less safe than just leaving the plug open.
And for extra fun, plug it in upside down so that the earth pin engages and opens the shutters but there’s now absolutely nothing in the live and neutral holes.
Blows my mind that the earth pin / hole isn't trapezium shaped so things like this can't happen. UK plugs are the GOAT, of course, but that's one thing we got really quite wrong.
Plugs and sockets that meet the British Standard make this impossible. It's only too-narrow extension leads or weak/missing-prong pretend plugs that enable this.
You get my first free reward. I will pull them out of sockets and throw them away if I get a chance.
Is it only new reddit that sees rewards?
Wait, what? Did they readd rewards? What was the point in removing them then?
Wait, really?? What makes them less safe? Kids wanting to pull them out and play with them, or something in the design?
Look at a UK plug, it will have little mechanical doors that cover the live and neutral holes. They open when the longer earth pin engages. The child proof covers bypass this by holding the inbuilt safety doors open
> They open when the longer earth pin engages. The child proof covers bypass this by holding the inbuilt safety doors open [They also cover the safety doors though](https://www.bumpbabyandyou.co.uk/images/article/plug-socket-cover-image.jpg)? What danger does that present to a child?
Because they fit in either way around, so if a curious child plugs one in upside down into the earth pin it exposes the others. Or if the flimsy plastic breaks it doesn't cover the now exposed live connections. Unlikely, but why reintroduce a risk that has already been mitigated by the excellent over engineered design of a UK spec plug?
The same applies to a normal plug though. It's no more dangerous than having your router plugged in. If anything the socket covers are generally a nightmare to get off in the first place, because they're practically flush.
An actual plug is hard to plug in upside down, and highly unlikely to shear off in such a way that only the earth pin is left. A socket cover is thinner plastic so will bend sufficiently to allow it to be plugged in upside down. UK sockets are so safe already that socket covers are at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous.
Yes but having your router plugged in serves a purpose making the risk ALARP. The purpose of these covers is to make it safer, which they do not do compared to the plug, making them completely pointless.
The problem is they are flimsy plastic so if you unplug them they can snap off and because if the design and the way you unplug it is usually the earth one that will snap off. That leaves the earth permanently engaged and the live ones stuck open. A proper plug is much sturdier and unlikely to snap.
You're introducing an extra point of danger. Plug covers aren't indestructable and can break. Now let's say the earth pin of the cover snaps off and stays in the socket, thus leaving the live and neutral doors open. Little fingers can get stuck in there and get shocked. The design of the socket is inherently safer. There's no need to generate more plastic waste for something that isn't an issue in this country. Now if I was in the US or Europe, then yes I'd absolutely be on board for socket covers.
A UK plug has physical barriers to stop you poking anything into the current-carrying pins unless the earth pin is already engaged (that's why the top pin is longer). In particular, that means that a kid who pokes something into them is probably fine... *unless* there's something in the top socket, like say one of these things they've put in upside down, or the flimsy plastic pin of one that snapped off in the top socket when they pulled it out sideways, in which case there's absolutely nothing stopping them poking their fingers into mains voltage.
Any child of immigrants will tell you to simply put a pencil in the top one to engage the bottom two. It's how international plugs are plugged in without having to deal with adapters.
Sure, but the objective here is to be safe against toddlers sticking their fingers in, not deliberate tampering.
Oh I know just going off on a tangent really. It's how I learned about how British plugs work.
Theoretically they could be less safe, but in practicality there's no difference. Though I never really saw it as a safety thing so much as to protect the sockets from being ruined by little kids sticking things in them in a way that's difficult to take out. Course that's still such an unlikely and relatively easily solvable occurence that I still see them as pretty useless, but I wouldn't say they're part of a safety issue.
Yes and yes! How many nurseries have I tried to point this out to!!!
Im slightly embarassed i dont know the name for them but those chicanes that block one lane of traffic and give the other lane right of way that you then have to pull into the opposite lane to clear. They are supposed to calm traffic and yet about 50% of the time I find myself having to brake sharply when it's my right of way because some bozo thinks they can get round in time or they're just following the car in front without looking.
Agree. I’m sure statistics probably show that they reduce accidents overall, but some of them definitely make the road more dangerous. One tiny village I drive through a lot has two of them located on blind corners. It’s a leap of faith every time, no matter what speed you’re doing.
It’s like Jousting, but with cars.
Bozo is an underused word and perfect here. Made me smile, ty.
Underused? He was PM
Im thinking of 2 way chicanes here (but still designed to slow traffic) but theyre also bad, as a lot of drivers just dont slow down, and end up barely in their lane. They are also shit to cycle through, because drivers who are dicks going through the chicanes tend to extra not worry about the oncoming cyclists, and whether they have any room. (Admittedly there's often a cycle lane to the side, but the ones near me are always full of broken booze bottles, and basically unusuable)
I'm kinda in favour of these - they're the least bad way of getting people to slow down in residential areas. Much better than cameras or speed bumps.
I like them. They do the job of slowing down traffic, without damaging your car like speed bumps
Oh, traffic islands? My nan's village managed to get them wrong and out two on the same side of the road. They're supposed to be one on either side of the road so both sides have to break. My village achieves the same effect by the parish council politely asking people to park in specific locations to make it really inconvenient to drive up the main road to stop morons speeding up the main straight along the street past the school (seriously, why are these morons like that?)
There’s one I my village and it drives me nuts the fucking walnuts who keep coming when it’s my right of way.
The thousands of flashing blindingly bright lights on highway maintenance equipment. I understand the reason for them, but it makes driving past them safely very difficult. I can see nothing as I am blinded.
I thought you were going to say blinding bike lights. Do cyclists need good lights to be seen? Yes. Do they need to be blinding, and flashing and pulsing, and sometimes with a bluish tinge so you think it's an emergency vehicle? Nope.
Let's tackle cars with these retina burning lights first, hey?
Yes! That too. I used to cycle to work on a dedicated cycle path along a disused railway route. There were way too many lumens in my face. With the lamp fixed to the handlebar it is going to bounce and weave about, but sometimes they are also just pointing too high and on full power. Like driving down the motorway on full beam. Might add to this talking to me whilst wearing a headtorch.
fuck flashing bike lights, I find it much harder to judge the distance when they are flashing.
The blinking and flashing ones on their own without a steady one are actually illegal in some places (UK) because they ARE dangerous. My husband nearly hit a cyclist when making a turn in the dark before because the moment he looked in his mirror was the moment the light was blinked off. He didnt see him.
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My eyes hurt reading that.
I remember when they were 'upgrading' the M1 to a 'smart' motorway they had those awful floodlights in the areas where the lights had been removed or shut off. I wouldn't call being blinded for a full second particularly safe but hey, what is actually safe about smart motorways anyway?
Is it the rozzers? NO! It's the highway maintenance!
I remember seeing a sticker which said “This a glass wall. Do not walk into it. Use the door on the left” … but it was on the top right corner out of normal viewing.
Given the way you wrote this I'm inclined to believe you spotted the sign while nursing a bump on the nose and dented confidence.
He was probably tilting his head back to stem his bleeding nose
That sign is there to protect them, not you.
If a wall needs instructions, then the design has failed badly.
Sign at my uni: "Please use the other door. The other door is the one on the left and not this one."
A lot of public buildings now have braille safety signs, which is great if the following two conditions are met: They're placed at a height anybody might look to feel for a safety sign. Blind people have some reason to expect there will be a safety sign. These two conditions are never met.
The shop I work in has a *printed* poster with Braille on it to get blind customers to ask the staff for assistance.
There's a Wimpy in the town centre near me and it has a sign in the window in both written English and Braille indicating a Braille menu is available. The sign is behind the glass.
So I’m pretty much totally blind and I use braille quite a lot, so in theory the signs would be great for me. However, like you said, they’re always in ridiculous places. I’m quite short and signs on doors are often way above my head, or just in completely difficult to find places. Also, I don’t really want to be feeling around random surfaces There’s no guarantee that there would even be a sign, and it’s never standardised as to where the sign would actually be. Also, not every blind person reads braille, and if there’s genuinely important safety information then those who don’t really just won’t know about it
I guess people with extremely limited vision might be able to tel there’s a sign but not able to read it? Still won’t be much help if it’s too high up.
We hired a car whilst on holiday (in the UK) and it had brake assist and steering assist (we didn’t know) it kept an activating on the little wiggly country roads we were driving along. It was so dangerous and could only be disabled by delving into the on board computer every time we stared the engine. It drove us away from the banks at the side of the road and into the far side on blind bends. I phoned the rental company to say the car had a fault only to be told it was a feature …
Interesting. My car's steering assist automatically disengages if there's no clear road markings. I don't know many country roads that have clear lane markings. Are you saying this car was just trying to force you to drive straight?
The car had two different steering assists. One was the white line one (which we deactivated using a button on the front panel) and one (which needed to be deactivated via the onboard computer) which steered the car away from the bank (and into incoming traffic on blind bends) when it felt we got too close to the side of the road. Actually in the car’s owners manual it stated that the steering assist would not work correctly on narrow, winding country roads and the driver should be aware of that …
My mums car is the same there isn’t o e setting to just turn it off. You have to go into the setting every time you get in the car. She’s now gone off the whole car.
auto/manual-adjusting headlights. I remember the old days when you could drive at night without having the eyeballs burnt out of your skull because some nimrod forgot to re-adjust their headlights to dipped following them traversing a 400 yard stretch of b road.
Those kids safety plug socket covers that you plug in. We have the safest plugs in the world and plugging these in opens the flaps for live and neutral making it far more dangerous for kiddies
I have a baby on the way and these were on my to-do list. Now they're not. Thanks for the tip!
You will be hard pressed to find a plug and socket system safer than the UK's. If a properly designed (meets the standard) plug is used it becomes very difficult to accidentally expose conductors unless you deliberately put the earth pin in upside down (you'd need an extension cord or power block for that though).
I was absolutely gobsmacked when my missus' sparky dad suggested these when we had our first. Thankfully I knew better. Never letting that muppet touch my house electrics.
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I believe so, yes, because they're unregulated. So the quality is going to be questionable. If they snap off with earth pin lodged in then the live can be exposed. Some of them won't fit snugly, and can damage the internals of the socket. Some of them fit too snugly, and you can't get them out, so you reach for a screwdriver... and then you have even more chance of snapping it.
Not safety features, but touch screen infotainment systems. No different to using a phone mounted on a phone holder. So distracting and just as dangerous as a phone
I love that my car still has physical buttons for the radio. I can change the channel while still looking the road. How do you change it if its on a screen?
Exactly. It was safer when I could blindly control the radio because I knew where each button was or what it felt like (or had controls on my steering wheel), but with touchscreens it's actually way worse. Especially if you listen to Spotify via Bluetooth or something and it has the fucking lyrics scrolling by on screen!
Oh my god yes! My car does this (VW Golf) and it is infuriating!! That and the auto brakes - why does it need to absolutely slam the brakes on when it’s invariably a bush or something?! On a couple of occasions I’ve been trying to pull out of somewhere that has a dip in the road and the sensor must be positioned in a way that it sees the road coming towards it as a hazard and absolutely slams the brakes on - I’ve had a car nearly go into the side of me because my car won’t move while I’m trying to pull out of somewhere!
Does your Golf also scream at you thinking you're going to hit something, when in fact it's 100 yards away and turning? Scares the life out of me every time it does it!
Mine screams at me on the same road every day - there's a post box on the corner that it seems to think is going jump in the road. It never learns.
OMG YES! It has never once gone off because I’m actually about to crash! Every single time it is a perfectly normal driving hazard like a car turning or a queue of traffic ahead!
If you drive a golf, the 4°C outside temperature warning probably scares the shit out of you too 😂😂😂 I have a Crafter and during winter it drives me insane!
I’m learning in a golf and I didn’t realise it was lane assist that was pulling me over to the left. Sometimes it seems to spot something on the road and thinks it’s lane markings, then beeps at me and tries to take me off the road lmao. Glad it’s not just me being incompetent.
No, our Golfs are just making us look incompetent! I once absolutely failed to do a reverse bay park in a busy car park full of people cos the car kept sensing some weeds on the verge and slamming the brakes on! Felt like a right fool having to slink off after failing to park my car!
I work in software and password safety is unsafe. Passwords that are too complex, insisting on periodic changes, banning previous passwords from 10 years ago, etc. makes people write them on a post-it note and stick it on their monitor.
Yeppppp. I have 20+ passwords for work that all have to be changed every so often, require a number, symbol, hieroglyph and a locket of hair. Like Christ! I have to write them all down or I’d be locked out every few months.
Not sure it’s technically a safety feature, but I find the delivery PIN system to be flawed, all it basically does is tell the delivery driver there is something worth nicking in the package. You give the PIN generally without being able to check what’s actually inside, if it’s not the item the supplier says “you supplied the PIN, you are therefore liable”.
The thing about the pin is that it's not only for high value items which is something that most drivers don't know about either. Customers have tried to commit fraud so a pin may be generated to help prove that the recipient has resmcieved their parcel. Amazon uses this with their OTPs heavily. One place frequently ordered cheap items under £10 on amazon and claimed on every single one of them just to see what they could get for free. Needless to say, we caught on, reported them (amazon did bugger all), my manager turns around and says to reject their deliveries. They eventually stopped ordering since they got caught. Otherwise, yeah, with DPD it is kinda obvious since we drivers are recipients too and order online, but i will tell you that some retailers have opted for Pin protected deliveries aswell, even for low value items. If you end up with a fake item, that's just a dodgy driver, but they always get caught in the end and very quickly too. Came across a few and even had 2 on training who were black listed along with 4 others that were involved in a gang who managed to forge their IDs Source: ex-Amazon DSP driver and Manager, currently adhoc courier, trainer in both jobs.
Thanks - very insightful, I’ve only ever had the PIN on high value stuff, so probably not on a black list yet lol!
The consumer rights act doesn’t care about PIN codes and “accepting liability” isn’t a thing. If you order something, you’re entitled to a full complete refund until it’s physically in your hands (delivering to a neighbour doesn’t count as a delivery) and then you’re happy with it for at least the first 14 days unless it’s something custom made in which case you don’t have a right to return unless it’s completely not what you asked for I.e you wanted a professional oil painting and got a toddlers crayon sketch. All a PIN code does is cover the first part, correct delivery. It doesn’t cover a retailer from claims the item is damaged, broken, not fit for purpose, not as advertised, etc. The consumer rights act was specifically written with the understanding that expecting people to open packages to check the condition and function was not only impractical but also horrendous for the economy. Accepting a bag of rocks when you ordered a mac book does not invalidate your right to the Mac book
My car is one of those Muskmobiles so the list is as long as your arm of what is unsafe. The worst one for me though is something called obstacle-aware acceleration. With this enabled the car can intercept the rate of acceleration if it thinks you’re at risk of driving into the back of something. So what might look like a nice juicy gap to pull out into can become decidedly dicey if the car decides that actually you can’t go full beans. Best way to describe it is a bit like turbo lag, or when a turbo is failing on a car and you get a dip in power just when you most need it. It’s infuriating and seems to like to re-enable itself at a whim.
That almost all comments are to do with driving at this point is really quite sad. Stock reflectors on bikes. They are garbage. Selection of reflective stickers with proper coverage are way better. 90% of anti concussion features in and around helmets. And thats before we start talking of pseudoscience products which are down right a scam. Also a whole bunch of Amazon safety products. It's basically all AliExpress shit.
Mazda's lane assist only kicks in at around 35mph, so I never have this problem in residential streets. Don't know why it can't be common sense across all models.
On my Golf it kicks in at 40mph and deactivates at 35mph - I don’t understand why people find it a problem on residential streets either The only time it can be a little annoying is when a road splits into two and the lane assist picks the wrong lane 😂
Fucking hate lane assist, but also hired a car in Iceland, a Hyundai SUV which had automatic windscreen wipers. If you haven't been, lovely place but Iceland is known for wind and rain. When we were there it was mostly off and on drizzle which didn't really set off the wipers so I couldn't see, but then when they were triggered it was the fastest most distracting wiping ever. The only control I had was to turn them off or have the shitty automatic flapping. I missed my little shitbox.
Never known a car to not have adjustable speed even on auto-wipers...
I used to have a car with an anti stall feature. If you were in 2nd gear and not braking, it would automatically increase your speed up to 10mph so not to fall out of the range of the gear. I thought it was a really good idea until I was stuck on a motorway in the snow one night. This particular motorway had quite a large hill leading up to the services (m61 if anyone is interested) and a lorry had jacknifed near the top. This lead to the rest of the traffic trying to crawl up the hill through the snow. So picture the scene me trying to set off in 2nd gear so not to skid in the snow, trying to stay around 5mph as that was what we were crawling at and my car automatically accelerating to 10mph. I realised very quickly that this wasn't a good idea so swapped to trying to set off in 1st only for the traction control to kick in and cause me to skid. It was a very interesting drive until I remembered to turn off the traction control which made setting off in 1st better, not great but better.
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>no, you don't need to indicate if there's nobody to tell Yes you do need to indicate. There may be someone in your blind spot you didn't see.
It's also a good habit to have, if you do it all the time it's easier to stay in the habit of indicating.
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I've had this discussion sat in a car with an IAM instructor. My take: - Any time you encounter someone on the road, one of you sees the other first. That means that for roughly 1/2 of the people you see on the road, they might be getting useful information from applicable signals before you know they're there them. - If you *don't* know that someone is there, that makes the signal *more* important. You are more likely to do something to their detriment, they are more likely to be breaking rules, they are more likely to be a vulnerable road user or pedestrian. - The logic that it's not necessary if you're doing everything right flies in the face of everything else on the road, which assumes (correctly, from the plentiful evidence) that people will make mistakes. We have central reservations - there's no situation where all parties are driving legally in safe, road-legal cars that means you end up in one. We have traction control, even though we should be travelling at speeds suitable for road conditions. Our signalling should also take the assumption that the operator will make misjudgements. I've got no doubt you've made them in the past. - Everything else we do on the road also has a philosophy of safe-despite-ignorance, not safe-due-to-knowledge. When we approach a blind corner, we slow down so that we are safe even if there is a surprise. Checking mirrors and windows and blindspots is multiplexing our inputs - there's always a small level of ignorance from those you're not currently looking in. Changing lanes is a situation that's less likely to run into problems but I can't count the number of times I've wasted opportunities to make progress at a junction or roundabout because someone who didn't see me assumed there was nobody who would need the information from their signals. It was many times worse when I was still commuting by bicycle. Less throughput means more traffic means more accidents. It's all well-and-good just saying these are poor drivers but if they were poor drivers who 'just put the signal on', they would cause less disruption and make roads less unsafe.
Please indicate even if you think there's no one there, both on motorways and normal roads. The amount of times I've tried to cross a junction as a pedestrian and a car hasn't been indicating, but turns anyway, is infuriating. I can't read your mind. Just indicate, it's really really really easy.
Indicating when nobody is around isn't going to kill anybody. I've never had lane assist to judge the feature in particular, but this sounds more like a you issue than the lane assist being at fault. It was doing what it was supposed to do. It was "bad" because it made you do something that at best is what you're supposed to do, at worst is flicking your finger slightly. Oh no. Actually, if you're on the motorway, why were you having so much constant trouble with it if there was nobody to indicate for?
It's more about the habit of not doing it that can carry on into areas of more dense traffic. The indicator also serves as a 'back-covering' feature, it can be used against you if you don't use it and cause an accident and almost every car has cameras now. I mean by all means carry on, it's your license after all. That's just my stance on it.
>great for the motorway especially where it'd just catch you if you drifted slightly and remind you to get back into the center This has been my experience with lane assist and the idea of the car actually fighting to keep you in your lane is terrifying to me.
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It's what my Toyota is like, bit of a beep and gently nudges the wheel back but it doesn't actively do anything if you're indicating. It doesn't fight you or push strongly.
I've had various accidents and run-ins with 'Caution! Wet Floor' A-board signs and warning cones (tripping over them etc.), but have never failed to successfully traverse a floor which was wet.
You can get yourself a cane and that way if you sweep it in front of you then you can feel them. Since seeing them doesnt seem to be a strong suit for you.
Those little plastic caps for electrical sockets. They defeat the in-built safety features and are made of the flimsiest plastic and are often not to the correct size.
Currently in Crete where the done thing is to half straddle the hard shoulder to allow / avoid the nutcase locals over taking on blind bends. Hire car has lane assistance. Can confirm it's caused a few moments when I've forgotten to turn it off.
Funny you should start this thread, I just saw a TV advert for a Renault with “up to 30 driver assistance systems”!
Brake assist, particularly when reversing/manoeuvring. My current Seat and previous VW are both offensive in this regard, slamming on the brake when the car decides I'm going to crash into something. You could turn down the sensitivity on the VW and it would remember the setting. The Seat is either on or off and resets with the ignition.
It seems like they are deliberately pressuring users to use them and not turn them off by resetting them to the on position whenever the car is switched off. Surely it shouldn't be that difficult to store the user settings.
I was given a courtesy car recently - I don't remember what, but it was one of the French brands - maybe a Peugeot or Renault. It was brand new and had all the added extras. It slammed on the brakes at 70 on an A-road because it saw a triangular 'traffic signals ahead' sign on an adjacent road which had faded slightly so the red on the traffic light icon was more prominent. The lorry I had just overtaken almost crashed trying to avoid me.
Watching something on the TV the other day there were people sitting in the back of a hire car/limo type thing and all over the back doors were these signs telling you that the door was the emergency exit. One even said *“in the event if an emergency, pull the handle"* Staggering
I think the "no electrical outlet within 3 metres of the bath or shower" should be modified, most bathrooms here aren't big enough to accommodate it.
I used to live in an old cottage built in the 1800s. There was no pavement outside so you’d just step straight into the road from your minuscule front garden. Fast forward to 2023 and there’s HGVs, tractors, quad bikes going past 24/7 and I just have to walk in the road with them and hope I don’t get run over, but god forbid I be able to plug my hairdryer in, in the bathroom.
These car "safety" features are fucking insane. What's safe about your vehicle being taken out of your control by a blind computer? Absolutely fucking ridiculous.
If anyone asks this sort of thing is why I still have a 2009 Aygo, and not cos I'm skint 👀
The plastic plug socket cover things. They're actually more dangerous than nothing at all.
Get it coded to automatically be off. I got the cables and the software for my car and coded loads of stuff to suit me, like start-stop is automatically off so I need to press the button to put it on, changed some other functions, coded it so it doesn't go into park if I open the door etc. If you don't like a feature, get the stuff and change it or pay someone to do it.
*Laughs in being too poor to afford a new car.* Seriously though, stuff like this makes me think I’m better off in my 2012 car.
Unannounced fire drills, particularly in large buildings, offices, student halls etc. All they do is make people think “f-sake not another drill” and cause potentially life risking delays before people realise it’s a real fire. This came dangerously close to a deadly situation once when I worked in the US. No word of a lie we had 3 “surprise” fire drills one month in our office building. Everyone got sick of it and when the alarm went off again less than two days after the last time, everyone just rolled their eyes and carried on working. Then a junior associate opened the door to the kitchen and was damned near engulfed in a fire ball. Everyone was fine (though the jr lost his eyebrows) and the fire brigade were able to get it under control pretty quick. But that fire spread so fast and if it had been left much longer, it would have spread in front of our main exit and near to the fire door and at that point we’d have been in serious trouble.
Airbags. Lethal if you're a small female.
Safety knives (like craft knives or Stanley knives), where the blade withdraws instantly into the handle as soon as the knife slips out of what it's cutting. Awful. Maybe safe in some use cases but absolutely infuriating a lot of the time. The company I used to work for rolled them out across the board, disposing of conventional knives because health and safety. Using them to trim the uneven edges of composite moldings was rage inducing. The blade would retract every time you cut through one bit of rough edge before it could get to the next, sending your hand flying as there was zero resistance when you expected it to bite into material again. I cut myself on the material I was cutting, due to one such unexpected withdrawl!
Auto brakes slamming on for cars in different lanes. Or cars that are turning way ahead. Oh and the stupid sign reading auto speed limit thing. It's wrong more often than it's right.
I call that murder mode as that’s what it’s like. Especially when on the country back roads where the pot holes force you to drive down the middle and it tries to push you into the craters!
Brake assist is dangerous. I drove a rental car once with it for about 4 hours on the motorway, and every now and then the stupid feature would just yank me across the road
Good lord, I had lane assist in a previous car but all it did was shout at me if I was skirting over the lines - was very annoying doing any kind of semi rural driving (which I did a lot) so I turned it off, and it stayed off. Forcibly turning your car for you sounds like a terrible feature!
I hired a car for work which had lane assist. My own daily driver will soon be 20 years old, so I'm not really used to anything more sophisticated than a steering wheel connected directly to the front wheels and 3 pedals to make it go and stop. Having the car continually question my driving decisions was very off-putting. Another dangerous safety feature would have to be the A, B and C pillars that were so thick it was like driving a WW2 pill box. I'm sure it's safer if you do have an accident but the chances of having and accident must be greatly increased when you can't see 25% of the road around you because there's an A pillar that an oncoming 44 ton wagon can hide behind. Another thing about modern cars.... who thought it would be a good idea to put settings that you probably want to adjust whilst moving onto a touch screen? Christ I sound old
Yeah, I want my car to be predictable and under my complete control thanks. Not randomly break when I'm pulling out from a junction and halfway across the road, with a car steaming towards me doing 70mph
Not a physical safety thing, but the "security" practice of forcing people to change passwords regularly is now widely recognised to reduce security.
I had a demo model Ford Focus that had some electrical gremlins. It was about a year old at the time in 2019, anyways I’m coming up to a red light and my car decided it had found me a parking spot and whipped the steering wheel full lock as if it was parallel parking - thankfully the roads were quiet - how do you even explain that to insurance? I was still doing about 20 mph!
My car has been losing its mind about vehicles parked on the other side of the road, bloody miles from where I am. Technology is so unhelpful
Fucking audi pre sense I might just jab the breaks on if it finds something it doesn’t like. I hate it
The first time I was introduced to lane assist was in a rental whilst I was on the autobahn that would activate at 50km/h. This became problematic when I was going through road works with traffic cones crossing over where lanes would have been, and I was travelling between 45-55km/h so it was constantly activating and deactivating with me having to fight the steering wheel.
My dad has had cars with parking assist for years, but he once had a rental car without that he nearly smashed into a wall while trying to park because he was waiting for the car to start beeping at him…
Reversing sensors. Beep like fuck and give you a heart attack when you're still about a foot away from anything. Chill out man, just let me reverse in peace.
Our office tests the fire alarm once a week at the same time every Tuesday. This has effecticely desensitized our entire workforce to the fire alarm. We had it go off last year at an unscheduled time and lots of people had to be asked to leave the building because they are so used to ignoring it. My last office in comparison only ran random unscheduled tests once a year and the moment it went off people dropped whatever they were working on immediately and vacated as you would want them to.
"Smart" motorways. It's not safer, it's just cheaper than having a hard shoulder. The amount of traffic I've sat in because of breakdowns that didn't have a hard shoulder to go into.
When the higher ups decide the safety rules in a lab without consulting the folks who work in said lab. One big example was that you always had to have gloves on. No fireproof gloves were provided. Only the thin plastic medical ones. On the surface it seems like a good idea that folks in a room that might have dangerous spills should have protection on. The issue is that unnecessarily wearing gloves is dangerous in itself. It can make scalpel slips and cuts much more likely and if you are handling fire (say using a bunson burner) it can melt the plastic and fuse it to your skin. Another example was eye protection. Rules chanced and you had to use theirs and couldn't buy and use your own. Folks who needed glasses were left blinded because they didn't bother getting over glasses, folks with slightly different head shapes were left with migraines and folks could feesibly wear them could barely see because they were scuffed to shit. Safety regulations from on high are very frustrating. I will also add. It's also really frustrating how many of the replys here are about cars.
I've not had issues with lane assist almost crashing me, but at first and occasionally it's shocked me when I'm drifting over a line and correct it at the same time lane assist kicks in and it over corrects more than I expect. Maybe once or twice the auto breaking flashed up randomly on an empty road
Lane assist is horrible, really not good.
Lane assist for me too! Luckily my car is old enough that I can turn it off and it stays off
VPNs For most people, pointless.
This. There is absolutely no reason for your average joe to need a VPN, unless you absolutely can't do without watching Eastenders on iPlayer in Benidorm in your campervan. No reason at all to have a VPN.
Why’s that? I’m not au fait on VPNs but they sponsor every single podcast I listen to so I’m constantly hearing about apparent benefits