When my 12-year old Toyota was in the shop, I drove a new loaner car for two days. I’ve driven newer model cars when renting a car while traveling but using a new car in a familiar environment—where I was not constantly worried about navigation—gave me a chance to dwell on the new features.
First, I love having blind spot detectors in the mirrors. It’s a really great UI. You’re looking to see if you can switch lanes, and the warning light is where you are looking.
But with cars reporting driver data to insurers, I’m worried about the false alerts. And there are a lot of alerts now:
- The car chirps if you’re not precisely in your lane. But I wasn’t precisely in my lane because there were road repairs impinging on my lane (a concrete barrier!).
- It chirps if I don’t use my turn signal when two lanes are merging, even if I’m in the remaining lane.
- The mph display, which helpfully shows the speed limit, was sometimes wrong about the speed limit. It thought the 45-mph divided road near my house was 35 mph, so I would have been falsely flagged as speeding.
- The system beeps when the car in front of you is pulling away. Useful in stop-and-go traffic, but we were congested, getting through a light, and the car in front went through the yellow, and I didn’t follow it. This also happened to me at an intersection with 4-way stop signs.
- A driver cut over two lanes right in front of me. I’d seen them coming and was slowing down sufficiently, but the system gave me the loudest alert yet when the car cut in front of me. It gave me a similar loud alert when someone slowed down in front of me as they made a right turn. In neither case was a collision imminent.
I don’t mind false alarms as a driver; the system is being cautious. I will be upset if eventually I own a car, and it reports this information back to my insurance company.
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