Car safety systems are too intrusive | GRR
I’ve been driving a Lexus RZ540e and if that slightly strange agglomeration of letters and numbers makes you squint, you have my sympathy. If I didn’t do this for a job, I’d struggle to know what it was too. But it’s a quite sharply styled and nicely appointed electric SUV, closely related to the Toyota, wait for it, bZ4X. I know.
But it’s not indecipherable naming strategies I’m here to discuss today, but the strategies this car employs to save you, frankly, from yourself. We’re all used to a level of active safety measures because our cars have been fitted with them for years: anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control and that sort of thing, and none of us would dream of turning them off in any form of normal driving other than for a very specific reason.
But more and more are coming. Driven a car that ‘helps’ you stay in the middle of your lane by wrenching the wheel in the other direction if it doesn’t realise you’re just taking a gentle line through a corner to improve passenger comfort? It’s alarming. Been in a car that vibrates the wheel and emits angry buzzes if you’ve not indicated in the prescribed manner while changing lanes even on a completely deserted motorway where there’s no one to see you indicate? That’s not much fun either.
The latest is software that scolds you when you break the speed limit. Now I’m not suggesting anyone goes tearing around the place at injudicious speeds but if you live in Mark Drakeford’s Wales where every town and village is now subject to a 20mph limit, you’d be worthy of canonisation if you never did so much as 21mph. And when you do, this Lexus berates you with a series of binging noises. So you appease it by slowing down by a single mile per hour but a minute later, you wicked, wicked, man, your speed has crept back up to 21mph. So it tells you off again. No speed camera or law enforcement officer in the land would trouble you over such a microscopic transgression, but the RZ450e nails you every time. And it is not alone. When I pointed this out to another manufacturer they wrung their hands and said it was a legal requirement, but then why aren’t all new cars that come here for testing so equipped? Because they’re not. Some don’t even have lane keep assist.
If there is good news here, it is that once you’ve parked up somewhere safe, stopped cursing, figured out what goes where in the scarcely intuitive infotainment system and delved deep enough into the relevant sub-menu, you can turn off that speed limit alert. Hallelujah! Just don’t
, whatever you do, switch the car off too. Because the moment you do, the moment you start it up again it will default instantly to on. Every time.
My understanding of the reason for this is that unbeknownst to the car, someone else might have taken over the driving, someone who, unless they are constantly reminded by bonging (whose sound I presume has, like a baby’s cry, been deliberately evolved to be as irritating as possible so you give it the attention it seeks) that they’re breaking the speed limit might otherwise – who knows? – run amok. In their electric Lexus SUV. It doesn’t sound desperately plausible to me but there you go.
And even if it did, I still don’t understand. I have a telephone that unlocks the moment I look at it because it looks right back and knows it’s me. This Lexus looks at me too – and I know that because if you turn your head to one side or the other it will angrily emit another alert, to tell you you’re not paying attention. So if the Lexus can see me and the technology that allows it to recognise my actual face is so simple it exists on a bazillion smartphones, why can it not think, ‘oh look, it’s Frankel, he’s one of those strange coves who actually want to keep the settings he programmed in last time’?
Alternatively, why not just be straightforward about it and remove all choices from the driver? ‘This car comes with these systems and they’re all on all of the time, chum, and there’s nothing you can do about it’. The reason is that sales would suffer because not everyone is yet convinced their car is smarter than them. So you are allowed to turn them off but by doing so, you’re simultaneously covering the manufacturer’s backside if something goes wrong; because you’ll never be able to say the car failed to save you from yourself. If you actively took a decision to switch off a safety system then the consequences of that decision must be borne by you.
But there’s another problem here that I expect the boffins who configured these systems didn’t think too hard about it. Which is that in those submenus there are so many systems that can be switched on, off, turned up or down or otherwise controlled – I counted around 25 grouped under three different headings – instead of researching the function of each, because who has the time for that, I just found myself swiping left at every little virtual toggle switch. Which almost certainly meant that I turned off something whose function I might actually value.
Some will say that’s my fault, that I should fully familiarise myself with the car’s every operation and in theory, they’re probably right. In reality, we’re all busy, flawed, fallible humans who can’t always be relied upon to act in exactly the right way, even if it’s in their interests to do so.
And the solution is so simple: manufacturers, laden your cars with every safety system you can think of by all means. But just add a few lines of software that allows your cars to recognise just a couple of people – probably the owner and his or her other half – let them choose the settings they want and then just leave them there. Not much to ask, is it?
Andrew Frankel has been racing cars for over 20 years and testing them for nearer to 30. He is senior contributing writer to both Autocar and MotorSport magazines, sits on the Car of the Year jury and was chief car tester for the Sunday Times for 15 years. He cites driving and writing as the only disciplines for which he has any talent and therefore considers himself vocationally employed. When he is not working he lives quietly in the Wye Valley with his family, a small and unimportant accumulation of cheap old cars and some sheep.