I have a car from 2020 with most of the “modern” safety features. I have most of them off, but I do like the radar cruise control, makes long trips less stressful since it will adapt to traffic in front of me.
The problem with some of these “safety” features is they malfunction at such a high rate they seem more likely to kill me than save my life. They also don’t anticipate future consequence in any way.
The collision detection malfunctions regularly giving a loud beep or applying breaks when nothing is ahead.
The lane departure does not understand situations where you had someone wander into your lane and you may drive onto the shoulder quickly before signalling. I don’t need my car fighting me while im making the correct call. I also think having the car take over, even gently, is so startling that it could cause the accident it was meant to prevent. If I’m startled I might over correct and lose control. While that has never happened, with everything considered, it seems safer to leave some of these features off.
I don’t need to be an early adopter on flawed technology that could get me killed.
After my car suddenly slammed on the brakes for the third time on wide open highway while screaming warning beeps at me I went to the settings and disabled everything. I had enough “safety” thanks.
Semi truckers have been fighting this for years. And they’re not allowed to turn it off unless they own the truck. Most truckers work for someone else.
The typical scenario, approaching an overpass in broad daylight, the sensor sees the shadow on the road and freaks out, stomping the brakes.
Name and shame please!
I had way more issues with phantom braking in the 3 months it was enabled than I’ve had with actually crashing in 20 years of driving.
I want graded licences so people who have no crashes don’t get forcibly subjected to bad technology just because those that can’t drive need it.
In this topic, people not being able to spell ‘brake’
give me a brake!
I know a couple people who one could describe as “twat” who turn off traction control and abs, thinking they are going to be rally drivers on the way to McDonalds. They tend to end up in the ditch.
Subaru has been good. The lane warning was the only thing we turned off because it was just obnoxious. If something is beeping constantly and erratically, what’s the point? The lane centering had a tendency to pull towards semis when passing but that seems to have been fixed in an update. The only other thing that is more a quality of life is a way easily and preemptively to turn off the backup warning and breaking assist when pulling a trailer.
Some of the safety tech has tried to kill me twice, due to glitching itself, so I have had to turn it off. 🤷♂️
My only experience with a car that had lane-keeping assist was that the car actively tried to kill me by steering me into oncoming traffic.
That car also thought I was sleeping when I wore sunglasses and again tried to kill me by scaring me with the loudest beep to ‘wake me up’ again.
If that is how well this tech works it is not adding any safety. Quite the opposite actually.
I also really started to wonder how bad the government ageny that tests these cars operates to certify this safety risk on wheels.
I’ve disabled safety tech in cars I drive because the signal to noise ratio was bad.
You’re going over the speed limit, says the shitty sign recognition that missed the one outside that says otherwise.
You’re tired, says the racist eye closure camera that can’t deal with Asian eyes.
Your seatbelt is undone, says the sensor that can’t discern between your backpack and a person. (To be fair, this one is just for the power of threes. Buckle in heavy objects. Secure your load.)
My 2015 would have the ‘collision alert’ because a car was in an adjacent turn lane, but the road curved and it didn’t know that.
It also would go off most days on a stretch of road because it was certain I was going to slam into the guardrail of the curve. Again, the system had no cameras, no map awareness, so it just had radar saying ‘something metal ahead’.
It was slightly annoying but left it on, just in case.
Now my 2023 on the other hand hasn’t had a false positive that I can recall, in fact if not for one incident, I wouldn’t even know it was doing anything. Someone pulled right out in front of my kid learning to drive. I had just enough time to think “oh, we are going to hit or my kid is going to yank this thing off the road”. Instead, my kid executed a shockingly perfect evasive swerve that landed perfectly into the free lane. Then I find out that it also would take over steering and as a result, I’m pretty certain it saved me a pretty significant wreck.
Then I find out that it also would take over steering
Um. This is kind of terrifying.
Based on what I saw and what I read, it only took over of it detected you trying to swerve and an obstacle that would hit and change it into an aggressive lane change. The steering into was at least roughly the maneuver desired, but it just corrected it.
Though it may sound scary, it absolutely worked in my scenario. I’ve never ever seen it activate accidentally.
I can’t even be sure whether it activated or not that time, I wasn’t driving. It just seemed like a scenario and maneuver unlikely for a barely driving 15 year old to pull off so perfectly. I’m not so sure even I would have avoided an accident, but even if I did, I doubt I would have hit the maneuver so spot on.
Two hours ago, I was driving in my little town. Speed limit is about 35. At the edge of town is one of those giant freeway-style lighted signboards that flashes some info about upcoming construction starting soon. When you see them on the freeway, they don’t look as big. When you’re up close to one, you realize they’re pretty freaking big.
Anyway, the signboard is now on it’s back, all fucked up, twisted and broken. Looks like a dinosaur picked it up, bit it and threw it. A little farther up the road is a late model kia sedan with the front torn off and some fucking twat of a driver taking pictures of his car.
So I don’t know what model he was in, but it was one of the larger sedans, so not an Elantra or something cheap. I know darn well that it at least had to have automatic emergency braking, maybe even some other driver aids. Somehow, this muppet was able to NOT see the giant lit up, bright orange signboard and his car did nothing to stop anything by the looks of it.
So it doesn’t surprise me that people turn this shit off, not one tiny bit. It’s always the people who need to have them on the most, as usual.
Whenever I get into a modern hire car the first thing I do after starting it is turn all the ‘safety’ features off. They either don’t work well, are annoying, or both. Sometimes they’re downright dangerous. It was a large part of the reason I chose to buy a slightly older vehicle when I needed to change my car. The later models all had the annoying stuff.
and 41 percent use heated windshields.
What are they talking about here, the defroster?
My car has micro wires in the front window, smaller than the ones in the back. Maybe it refers to this?
My “parking assist” feature got immediately turned off when it slammed on the brakes because I backed into a parking spot and it saw the concrete parking block 6ft behind me…
I got out of the car thinking an animal had ran under a tire where I couldn’t see it, then figured out it was just the car being “helpful”.
AND that’s the problem with “safety” tech. It doesn’t act as an assistant it acts as a nanny. A nanny that makes mistakes. Sometimes harmless, sometimes irritating, and sometimes dangerous. Each driver should be allowed to decide what level of assistance they need/want without being forced or shamed about it. If we can’t trust drivers to drive then maybe we shouldn’t have cars and should redirect resources to public transportation infrastructure instead. (Personally I’m very on board with the latter.)
Maybe if half of it didn’t spy on you …
Lane keep assist has been around since about the 00s I believe and adaptive cruise and emergency braking since the 90s. That’s not the tech that’s spying on you lol
When it was created, this was true. However, now cars have systems that log just about everything you do and send it to the manufacturer, who then sells it on to insurance, ICE, anyone with money.
So it started off ok, but now I would imagine that if your car has a sensor, it is reporting data back to that central telemetry unit which is sending it up up and away.
Then they’ll just report to the insurance that you turned it off and also report all the sensor data anyway.
And you can just rip out the antennas for the telemetry and that won’t magically make your safety systems stop working.
You can switch off the safety systems if you want to, but don’t pretend you’re doing it for privacy reasons.
So you are sure that no one can access the cameras used for that?
It’s more “is it practical to access the cameras” than “can someone access the cameras”.
Look at it this way… How are “they” going to access your cameras? Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle, and upload realtime video data from multiple cameras in real time? Maybe for one car, but to do it for every car, they would end up choking out all the cell towers in an area. What about storing your data in the car and accessing it later? Well, storage is relatively cheap, but when you add in the compute required to encode that video, and depending on how much you want to store, it could easily be a few hundred dollars to include all that, and let’s face it, manufacturers want to cut costs, so who is going to pay for it? To top it off, if this repository of compute and storage existed, computer nerds would have found it and publicized it, so it seems unlikely to me that it exists for most cars. Finally, what data would “they” hope to get from real time-video of your car that is not already documented in other ways? The GPS unit can log your position and velocity with ease, your phone is an active listening device that follows you everywhere, so there are simpler and cheaper ways to get the same useful data as a realtime camera feed of the side of the road that don’t involve some huge conspiracy.
Well, the cars all have modems and quite a lot of processing. They don’t need to send a lot of data anywhere to check if it has seen familiar faces.
Modern cars are literally cameras with wheels.
I will admit that changing the settings on the safety tech changes nothing in this regard.
Pictures are expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate, especially at a distance in a variable environment
Cameras inside the vehicle? Those might be worth mining for data. You can easily detect if there’s a person in frame, and snapshot all the passengers. Insurance and law enforcement would be interested in that
Cameras outside? You could search for human faces or license plates and upload them off peak hours… But how much is that information valuable? What percent of the time is a car even driving? Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?
Flock cameras just yield much more useful data… They’re designed to sit somewhere and capture those pictures. Even if public outcry gets them removed, they’re just going to wait until the public gets bored and then put up less noticeable cameras… We really need to fight this forever
All that being said, I have a car with no cameras and I’d only budge on that if the car reliably could drive itself. I don’t like having cameras pointed at me
Pictures are expensive (data wise)
not really. you don’t want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it’s not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.
expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate
debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes.
tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.But how much is that information valuable?
plenty valuable for “partners” like clearview AI and flock, or if you want to become a competitor in that field.
What percent of the time is a car even driving?
that’s a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.
Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?
how the fuck no. It’s less data than what people upload daily to youtube, funded from government money basically.
and then put up less noticeable cameras…
like cameras appearing nowhere any time, like camera cars.
not really. you don’t want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it’s not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.
Let’s do some order of magnitude math… Let’s say each car on average “sees” 100 things a day (which is very conservative since there’s multiple cameras and with basic object recognition you’re going to have a lot of false duplicates). Let’s say each picture is cropped to a megabyte with compression, which would be pretty low res to grab identifying information from
You can’t do much in the way of video compression, because this isn’t a video - we’re cropping pictures, too much will change frame to frame
So 100MB a day per car, that’s nothing… For one car. How many cars are doing this? 10 million? 50 million?
(Oh, and btw 5G is basically just 4G or 3G outside of Metro areas in the US)
debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes. tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.
It detects faces well, that’s easy enough, and it can generally label the people because you only have so many in the pool of subjects. If you want to identify people in a population? You’re not doing that on a phone. Even the best systems have a big problem with false matches
that’s a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.
Parking lots are not usually good vantage points… That’s where most cars live
And as for disparate data points… Unless ever auto company is using the same system, it’s going to take non negligible amounts of work to integrate different systems. Palantir is probably going after the lower hanging and more juicy fruit, like Ring doorbells and commercial security systems. Or, you know, phones
That’s what it comes down to. All this for what? I’m not saying they wouldn’t do it, or it couldn’t be done, I’m saying there’s better options that they are already using for surveillance
If they were to do it, you’d pick Tesla - they have the cameras and sell monitoring as a feature. They’re reasonably widespread, so you’ll get almost the same coverage as if all automakers were on board - remember, this is about tracking people and vehicles, if we’re recording them we’re in a whole different ballpark
Or, you know, set up 100k cameras at key intersections and get a more comprehensive system with a lot less moving pieces
to add to the image processing, first gen ryzen desktop CPUs can handle basic object classification on live camera feed. not effortlessly, but they handle it, and performance has only ever improved with time.
Cameras sound like a really expensive and inefficient way to gauge distance and speed differential between yourself and another object. I doubt many cars (besides, famously, Tesla) use cameras for LKAS or ACC.
I’m not even sure if they use cameras for driver attention systems.
Cameras are always used for LKAS, even things like Waymo mix cameras with LIDAR. That’s the only way to see the lines on the road, etc.
Now for ACC that’s always radar except for newish Tesla. Same with blind spot monitoring and parking sensors unless those are ultrasonic or something, but not cameras except for Tesla.
See comma.ai how one can basically do LKAS and adaptive cruise with one camera, but IME it typically uses the radar based ACC built into the car already.
They are used, not exclusively except by Tesla, but yeah. Lane keep is legit hard to do without a camera, acc is OK but using a multi sensor system is a lot more reliable.
“Safety tech”. OK. I was visiting a mate in the states, and the rental gave me a Nissan. Apparently, there’s a lot of construction going on in that state, and the Nissan tried to literally run me, at 100kmh, into a median, because it recognized the (clearly) scratched off lane markers and not the (clearly) newly painted lane markers. I had to use nearly all my upper body strength (whatever little of it I had left after a 13hr trip), to force the wheel to the left and away from death. And that fucker bitched at me the entire time! would have 100% died. All because of their fucking “safety” tech. I turned that shit off as soon as I parked. All of it. I’m still so angry at them for that shit.
I hate lane assist, its so irritating. Worst thing is: in my skoda you cant turn it off for good, every time you shut of the engine it resets to default, which means lane assist on.
After my skirt with death because of this thing, it’s a ‘no sale’ feature.
This title is so misleading as to be incorrect
