Recently we had a ‘situation’ on the road test desk. Nothing serious, just a logistical mess, but the eventual solution involved me blagging a lift up to MIRA from one of my What Car? colleagues.
George kindly bent his run from Brixton to the M1, passing through not just Finchley but also Archway, which is where I was waiting at the kerbside, crummy old road test backpack stuffed with the essentials: tape measure, gaffer tape, telemetry gear and very old, if-it-ain’t-broke laptop running VBox data-logging software.
The London-to-MIRA dash is one I do once or twice weekly. Three times if the proverbial hits the fan. Like a lot of this job, it’s a journey passed in solitude, so it was nice not only to be driven by somebody else but for it to be decent company, as George is.
He bought a Range Rover L322 in his early twenties so, in terms of raw tolerance for car-based financial turmoil, is up there with the best of us, only recently swapping the Rangie for a Mk5 Golf GTI (five doors, big teledial wheels, red: not my dream spec but still a lovely thing).
Playing passenger was enlightening. Free to observe, I could readily appreciate how much George was suffering at the hands of our car’s ADAS, which were running amok in London traffic.
No sooner had the lane keeping assistance made itself known than the road sign recognition would go off, then the driver attention monitor would extract its pound. I sat there thinking: this is what a dogfight sounds like when the entire squadron of enemy fighters achieve lock-on.
At this point I need to make it clear that George appeared to be doing nothing wrong. He seemed to be operating slickly in London traffic, which is, of course, as much art as science.
There’s give and take in the melee, but these systems don’t allow for that. They operate in a binary world where everything has a defined scope. At one point the driver monitoring went loco purely because poor George had had the temerity to glance out of the side window at an HGV speeding up to the dotted lines at a T-junction. Sensible to keep an eye on that sort of thing, no?
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I bet it's way better than observing the driver falling asleep and veering onto incoming traffic. ADAS saves lives. Stop the clickbait journalism instead.
Depends on the alert, and on the situation.
Driver falling asleep, one hopes the ADAS works to intervene before it happens.
System going "beeep beeep alert" causing you to jump out of skin just because there's a car parked in an (unofficial) layby ahead - that's an accident risk because of processing the misleading alert distracts the driver from watching the road around them. Some systems are far too trigger happy, and consequently distracting drivers from watching the road.
Current Volvo add show a daughter making her Father look old by reassuring him that the tech is making her progress safer and I guess the current and future generations will just take it for granted that the tech is always right, I don't mind all the bings bongs lane departure stuff even speed limit bings aren't infact I've learnt to ignore them to an extent,if anything I think my driving has improved because I observe the info and act accordingly,maybe we need to chill out a bit?
Her father IS old.
There's no point in buying a serene, relaxing, quiet EV if the bloody ADAS is going to be prodding you in the forehead every ten seconds.
I wonder what is going through the heads of the European Commission and car manufacturers (some are better than others admittedly) that design these things. Have they ever driven with them?
I doubt it.
They are perfectly quiet is you drive correctly, which is what your problem seems to be.
Some ADAS systems aren't, as reported by professional reviewers.
They're more likely to INCREASE stress and fatigue, defeating the whole object.
Problem is the car makers. As shown by the few who seem to be able to do a decent job of the design of ADAS systems. I've nothing against ADAS as a concept, it should improve road safety, but the first round of implementations have been patchy, with the worst probably a backwards step.Like you, the behaviour of the ADAS is a key decision point for me in buying a car.