Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn't actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.

The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some "AI magic", I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.

I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.

When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or "nice feature actually", "what about the camera on your laptop?", "you are way too paranoid", "I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded".

I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.

What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn't really find any information about it on the internet.

The dashboard of an renault 5 e-tech. The camera mentioned in the post is in the A-pillar.
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[–] -5 points 5 months ago (14 children)

Do you have people who count on you? Who love you? Whose lives would be changed were you gone? If so, consider them when you consider your personal safety.

I wasn’t talking about electric cars, just any car made after 2013-2016 ish

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    You keep saying that. We'd like to know what are the factors that lead to thinking that anything pre-2013 is not safe.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    The failure of IIHS’ small overlap test

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    What is that and what does it mean?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    They run a car into something that only crunches a corner. Simulates a tree, telephone pole, or guard rail collision.
    Uneven force application is much harder to safely accommodate, and it's also a more representative crash test, since more crashes happen in that manner than full width head-on collisions.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (4 children)

    What specifically would a newer car have my 9th gen civic wouldn't?

    Two things I know of that mean anything are collision detection/prevention and blindspot sensors.

    The ladder of those things can be added aftermarket.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    It won’t fail the small overlap crash test, but some years of the 9th gen civic are okay

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    2013 survives it, I really doubt they made much a change because that was that gens second year.

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