GRR Garage: Nissan X-Trail – safety gone mad?

At the end of the day they are all there to help us, but the constant assault of devices can leave you feeling attacked.

This week is one of our last with our long-term Nissan X-Trail and, as if it new it was about to leave us, it chose this week for its automated braking system to play up. Many of these systems are a bit jumpy, our old Honda HR-V used to beep at us the moment there was a car going one mile an hour slower than us in front, but the Nissan’s has been largely trouble free.

But this week, leaving work and heading into the tunnel, all hell broke loose. Attempting to save me from either some phantom spirit, or rather misidentifying the change of gradient as a wall, the X-Trail slammed it’s emergency brakes on, sending me careering toward the steering wheel and my heartrate up into the thousands.

Thankfully the X-Trail also has modern seatbelts, and the brakes kept us perfectly inline while they drew us to an almost halt, before realising it was a false alarm.

Wildly irritating I thought, cursing the technology overkill of modern cars as I went about my day. Then a couple of days later I distractedly looked out of the window for a second, only for a quick beep to alert me to the car pulling out of a junction in front of me from nowhere, allowing me to slam the brakes on and avoid one hell of a mess.

Perhaps technology isn’t so bad after all…

Mpg this week: 36.8.