An analysis by insurance company AAMI of 480,000 claims over the past year shows 20 per cent of drivers admit they sometimes turn off features in the car that are designed to improve safety.

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Of the 20 per cent who did disable the features, 69 per cent said it was because they found the safety features annoying, distracting, and too sensitive.

Twenty-three per cent said they did not think they needed safety assistance features, and 13 per cent said they did not trust them.

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[–] 7 points 1 year ago

No shit, I'm surprised it's only one in five. I'm very happy my own vehicles are old enough to avoid this sort of annoying intrusive features. My experience with the safety 'features' in work/rental/family vehicles has been less than positive. Stuff like lane keep trying to pull me into other cars due to following old lane markings rather than current one, speed limit recognition sounding an alarm at me when passing most offramps on the Hume (the off ramp limit may be 80/60, the highway is definitely not that), AEB firing off when reversing as it can't figure out the trailer (yes, it was plugged in properly), minutes of alarms due to 'erratic driving' (unladen truck on a open road on a very windy day), and so forth.

Safety tech needs to be like ABS - do something which is genuinely useful for the average driver, and stay out of the way until there is a clear need to intervene. Even then there should be a way to turn it off without going through a whole rigmarole, because even that example does have specific use cases where it should not operate.

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