When I was in Australia last year I was overwhelmed by how much modern cars beep at you. The worst offender by far was a 2025 Kia Carnival that had different beeps for every possible thing the system might label a driving error.

It was more distracting than helpful to be honest.

This article is 2/3 fluff. The majority is about convenience features, not safety.

That said, I recently moved from a ~15 year old car to a modern one, and have driven several newer models with the features described.

Adaptive cruise: it‘s often poorly designed. It brakes far too rapidly and abruptly should traffic or a car ahead slow, and there‘s absolutely no reason to apply as much throttle as it does should it decide acceleration is appropriate. Also for uphill driving the cruise control often drops into far too low a gear in order to maintain speed. It‘s more of a nuisance than an aid, and it‘s even worse if traffic increases or you‘re in a lane with jackasses that can‘t maintain a steady speed. Adaptive cruise attracts idiots, too. The new versions will stay engaged and slow to a complete stop. If the driver has set the following distance to maximum the car will stop with a 4-5 car distance from the car ahead. They‘re treating it like some kind of autopilot that will run the car for them.

Lanekeeping: there‘s a huge span of quality here. Some are shit, some are far too aggressive, some are “jerky” following a segmented plotted line rather than a smoother curve. They can overcorrect and really make for an unstable drive attempting to counter intentional driver input. Some “give up” and disengage with little warning, the audible alerts are often weak. Some briefly follow merge, exit, or widening lines for an additional lane pointing you off the road before they get confused and disengage with the car pointed in an unsafe direction.

Auto braking: in my experience it has engaged every time when I was already braking, or engaged when there was no need to brake. The few times I thought it should have engaged, it didn’t. It’s a nuisance at best, ineffective at worst.

Reverse cameras don’t provide a full picture and are awful in developing driver proprioception about the dimensions of their car. They’re fine for what’s immediately behind you, but use of mirrors and looking around is far better for backing out and looking for approaching people or cars. That said, I love the “360°” view ones. Those are great for centering oneself in a parking space.

So I completely understand why drivers don’t use them. They’re often low-quality, inappropriate overcorrections for the situation, and make for a worse ride and potentially even detrimental to safety. That’s saying a lot considering the quality of a lot drivers on the road today.

I run 80% of the time with adaptive cruise and lanekeeping off. I can’t disable the autobrake, if I could I would.

I can't back up my own driveway with "maneuvering assist" enabled or it slams on the brakes every time it gets close to a completely harmless fern on the passenger side. Every time it happens it's so infuriating that I could actually scream. So it's now off.

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.

I turn off all that shit for one reason: too many electronic nannies mean less attention is required to drive. I rarely even use old cruise control.

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.

I've disabled safety tech in cars I drive because the signal to noise ratio was bad.

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 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.

So glad my 2019 car is a standard but still has CarPlay.

Like, CarPlay is about the most "smart" feature I need/want. I just want a good map and the ability to play podcasts and listen to music easily. That's it.

Since it's a standard the car couldn't get any of the "smart" features I didn't want anyway.

I'll drive the car, thanks.

One interesting finding relates to driving modes. While almost all new cars have them, just 27.3 percent of respondents say they regularly use their vehicle’s driving mode. Those aged 25 to 34 were more likely to use them, at 38.3 percent.

so what, all these people are always driving in reverse...??

The safety tech is not mature enough, simple as. People turn it off because of the false positives and general nagging behavior

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".

Maybe if half of it didn't spy on you ...

"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.

The lane keeper fucks up and tries to drive on the shoulder, driver turns it off, research group acts surprised that it's turned off

• adaptive cruise control
• AR HUD
• driving mode

None of these were meant to save lives

Also, both lane assist and auto emergency brakes are mostly poorly implemented. Even the ones that aren't really bad don't fare well with the chaos of the roads.

Also, voice assistant is bullshit. You know what would be better? That's right, physical buttons.

God, every time.

Lane keep assist. Don't tell me how to drive my own car.

You can't even show me the right speed limit due a sign on a different road that say 5MPH, when I'm on a 30MPH road, and suddenly you start beeping at me cause I'm going too fast?

Randomly flashing up the BRAKE! Warning for no reason at all?

None of this tech works correctly, and until it does, it all gets turned off every single time 8 start the engine.

This makes me sound like I'm irresponsible. I'm not, I just happen to have a car with dangerously poorly designed "safety tech".

My car has sign recognition, cruise control, and lane keep assist. I use a single one, and one I can't turn off permanently.

Lane keep assist insists on making me drive way too far left, so I turned it off after it tried to kill me by forcing me into a super wide load truck coming towards me.

Cruise control keeps wanting to switch setting to the recognised speed limit. But it picks up all sorts of stuff. So driving by a highway on ramp will make it suggest that I put the speed limiter to 130km/h, on a 70km/h road. But turning off sign recognition requires me to go through several menus and is reset when I park.

On top of that the speedometer is 4-5km/h too slow, so I'll be going 84km/h according to the speedometer, my GPS says I'm going 80km/h, and I'll go by a sign and the speed limiter will pop up suggesting that I set it to 80. And btw that the speedometer is displaying a faster speed than I'm going, has nothing to do with wheel circumference. The car's odometer is spot on. If google maps says a trip is 300km then the odometer advances 300km, not 298 or 302.

Headline should read "One in five drivers switch off 'safety' tech meant to appease lawyers in a lawsuit-happy culture"

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.

because they are awful!

I got a car 2 months ago and i’m incredible frustrated by the automatic cruise control. it has two modes “ICC” and “ACC”. I have no idea about the difference but the thing keeps switching between them and alerting me with a red alert every time!

I stopped using it after two weeks

In this topic, people not being able to spell 'brake'

Lane assist is only good on highways. Everywhere else it's a detriment.

I have driven some number of hundred thousand miles and departed the highway once to avoid an oncoming semi and 0 times for any other reason. I have operated a vehicle with lane assist turned on for some 10s of miles and they have attempted to take control to depart my lane/the highway a handful of times, which results in me parking the vehicle and figuring out how to turn it off.

This title is so misleading as to be incorrect

Lane keep drives me of the fucking road when it’s sunny and the cameras can’t see straight.

Automatic braking loses it because of shadows but misses the goddamn elk.

I really love adaptive cruise, but i can see how many people (especially with lane centring) tune out - and make it a liability.

What most people don’t do is drive many vehicles. The difference between safety features on cars - and it’s not always price that is the differentiator - is staggering. Stability control isn’t the same between a Toyota and a BMW. Not halfway. A $90,000 GM and a $15,000 smart car are generations apart - the smart wins, at least on traction control. Unfortunately it’s not easy to test all these features empirically.

It’s no wonder people turn it off.