It should be illegal to turn off your car’s safety systems

COMMENT:

There is a sentence I hear at almost every new car launch these days that makes my eyes twitch.

“The safety systems can just be turned off.”

And I reckon we should just nip that right in the bud… from a regulatory perspective.

If a safety system is so intrusive, so irritating or so poorly calibrated that the solution we're giving customers is simply to switch it off, then surely we should be asking a much bigger question: why are we allowing that system into the car in the first place?

I'm talking about ADAS here, or advanced driver assistance systems and the clue is really in the name.

They're supposed to assist you. If they’re not assisting, they should be fired or be forced into some company mandated assistant training.

But before you start tippy-tapping on your keyboard, materialising your disdain for new safety tech in the Facebook comment section, I’m sorry to tell you this isn't an argument against it.

I couldn’t be a bigger advocate for vehicle safety. I think so highly of it I even worked at ANCAP! I never thought it would be controversial to have the opinion that I don't want anyone dying on Australian roads. Or roads anywhere for that matter.

Any system that can help prevent collisions, warn people that they’re about to be in one or intervene when there’s genuine danger is exactly the sort of technology we should want in modern cars.

So here’s my controversial take: I think it should be illegal to turn your car’s safety systems off.

Before you think I’ve completely lost the plot, yes, I know there are caveats. Driving in remote locations, on loose surfaces, situations where intervention can actually be counterproductive.

I get it. I’m not writing the legislation. I’m not a politician. But if that's the case, then perhaps the problem is that we've put the technology on the market too soon.

If a safety system isn't reliable enough to be left switched on in the vast majority of driving situations, perhaps it isn't ready to be a fully fledged piece of safety technology yet?

Because I don't think the answer should be: “Well, just turn it off when it annoys you.”

I've driven cars where lane-keeping assistance is so aggressive that it feels like the steering wheel is having a brawl with me. And then there are the warnings.

Speed-limit bings and chimes. School-zone warnings. Driver-monitoring alerts. Lane-departure warnings. The car telling you you’re distracted because you looked away for half a second, at the very screen it’s forcing you to rely on.

It’s exasperating.

I've had cars where the first thing I want to do after starting it up is find the menu and make the noise stop. My introduction to this particular frustration was actually something much less dramatic: the endless chimes in some Hyundai and Kia models quite some time ago.

The car would tell me I’d entered a school zone, then beep at me again and again, seemingly without much regard for what was actually happening around me. Like, say, it being 1am on a weekend.

The frustrating thing is, years later, I'm still getting into new models with variations of the same problem.

Why? Because there is very little incentive for manufacturers to fix something if the accepted solution is simply to turn it off. This is where I think Australia has a regulatory problem.

Our island contintent is very slowly mandating safety technology, and conceptually that's a good thing. Our Australian Design Rules (ADRs) are the regulatory framework for vehicle safety, while ANCAP's testing increasingly rewards manufacturers for fitting advanced safety technology.

But ADRs move slowly. So what if we introduced an ADR that said safety systems fitted to a vehicle couldn’t simply be permanently disabled by the driver?

Yes, that would probably also mean the ADRs would need to mandate a few more ADAS features as standard. But with manufacturers already chasing ANCAP ratings anyway, yada yada, you get the point.

Like I said, I’m not a politician.

I'm also not saying there shouldn't be carefully considered exceptions. I'm saying the default should be that if a manufacturer is confident enough to put a safety system in a car, that system should be good enough for the driver to leave it switched on. All the time.

Because if we're putting safety systems into cars with the expectation that people will use them, we need to make sure people actually want to use them.

A recent Australian study found that 60 per cent of surveyed drivers with ADAS-equipped cars admitted to switching safety features off, while modelling estimated that full ADAS coverage and use could prevent around 7850 serious casualties a year.

We have technology that could potentially save thousands of people from serious injury, or even death, yet a huge proportion of surveyed drivers are choosing not to use it.

I don't think the answer is simply that Australians don't like safety systems. I think some brands have built systems that people don't like living with, because they’re simply so annoying and utterly frustrating.

If anything, making these systems harder (or impossible) to disable would force manufacturers to do better. They couldn't rely on the customer to fix their bad software by recommending they turn it off.

They'd have to go back to the drawing board. Make the system less intrusive. Better calibrated. Better suited to Australian roads. Better at knowing when intervention is actually required.

And maybe, if they did, we’d see a pretty significant shift in the sales charts. Because if 60 per cent of surveyed drivers are already turning these systems off, I reckon a fair few prospective buyers would simply not buy the car in the first place.

Some brands are already doing this via OTA or over the air updates. But the bar is set pretty low. Owners will make it known – sometimes directly to the car company via social media – that they don’t appreciate a constantly nagging or overly loud or intrusive system and then an update is made. But sometimes it doesn’t always address the crux of the issue.

The part I find most frustrating about the current situation is that we're increasingly telling consumers that these systems are important enough to influence a car's safety credentials, while simultaneously telling them that if they find those systems unbearable, they can just switch them off.

That makes absolutely no sense!

If the best advice you can give me about your safety system is “just turn it off”, perhaps it shouldn’t have made it out of the lab.

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