Seat 'lane assist' ad -are driving standards now THAT bad..?

[Ari]

ensignia said:

To claim that people will completely rely on it and look at their phones more as a result is quite frankly ridiculous.

I had a long coach trip in America a couple of years ago. I was sat on the offside of the coach so could watch cars passing us at 60mph. This is how at least one in fifty cars is driven.



Now give these people something that will keep their car in lane when they're doing this...

Oh course people will use it to look at their phones more! People are obsessed with text messaging, Facebook, emails, the Internet, etc etc. The car steers itself innit! No problem bruv.

To suggest that people will steadfastly leave their phones alone as they bowl along the motorway, car steering away, is naive in the extreme!

[Ari]

Douche said:

The most effective safety feature you could fit to a car is a great big rusty metal spike, mounted in the centre of the steering wheel.

Whilst I understand your thinking, it would make roads safer for about a week. Then people would revert to type because it will never happen to them.

It's why, despite many campaigns etc, they actually had to make it law before the majority of people would put a seatbelt on. It wasn't because people didn't think that seatbelts made any difference, it was because they didn't crash yesterday, so they won't today.

[Sump]

Ari said:

ensignia said:

To claim that people will completely rely on it and look at their phones more as a result is quite frankly ridiculous.

I had a long coach trip in America a couple of years ago. I was sat on the offside of the coach so could watch cars passing us at 60mph. This is how at least one in fifty cars is driven.



Now give these people something that will keep their car in lane when they're doing this...

Oh course people will use it to look at their phones more! People are obsessed with text messaging, Facebook, emails, the Internet, etc etc. The car steers itself innit! No problem bruv.

To suggest that people will steadfastly leave their phones alone as they bowl along the motorway, car steering away, is naive in the extreme!

If they're going to do it regardless wouldn't you rather they have the lane keep assist?

[Swanny87]

Sump said:

I find that people complaining are the ones that haven't travelled the world.

After driving to Tehran from Sheffield in 2012 I can guarantee that the driving standards in this country and excellent.

This.

If you want to see some truly shocking driving standards and maintenance levels take a trip to Uganda (or any of the less developed countries in Africa). I never feared for my life while whilst in a car before I went there.

[so called]

Mentioned this before on here but one more time.
Driving a rental in heavy snow last January in the US, the lane assist kept sounding the alarm as it couldn't deal with the lane 'white line' being the full width of the freeway.
The noise drove me crazy and being an Avis rental, who take the hand book out of the car, I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.

Worse was the proximity sensor that kept thinking I was suddenly closing on a car in front and would hit the brakes on the ice and snow covered road.
It nearly put me in a ditch 3 times just because it couldn't tell the different between a truck and a blinkin snow flake.

I don't like all this driver aid crap.

[FiF]

I'm trying to understand the arguments which claim that because the standard of driving in :insert name of some distant 3rd world place: is so awful that this means abysmal driving in this :insert name of 1st world place: isn't so bad after all and anybody who complains doesn't know anything, or hasn't travelled beyond the boundary of Little Snoring.

I've driven in rather a decent number of countries around various continents andyes there are some challenging environments and standards. But it's also evident that standards in UK are dropping.

Furthermore cross the channel or north sea upon return from a longish continental trip and one regularly, especially in the South East and Laaarndan, more examples of loutish and generally poor driving than one might have seen in thousands of miles over there.

Or have I misunderstood the point that people are trying to make.

[Mr2Mike]

Sump said:

If they're going to do it regardless wouldn't you rather they have the lane keep assist?

I'd much rather they were caught and suffered heavy penalties.

[SuperchargedVR6]

Bizarrely enough, on Saturday night I saw a Yodel delivery van veer off the DC onto the embankment very abruptly. He was clearly asleep or texting, but when he swerved back onto the carriageway again, he narrowly avoided hitting my car, so I would say lane assist is a good thing.

As always, technology and / or enforcement has to intervene human stupidity.

[wc98]

Blue Oval84 said:

I'm not suggesting that people should say "hey, I'll drive whilst exhausted because the car will keep me right".

I'm saying that having the system may well be the difference between life and death if someone makes a mistake and does nod off, which does happen, because cars are driven by humans. If the system kicks in I would hope they would take it as a sign that it's clearly time to pull in and have a break.

As I say, I've found myself on the rumble strip before and this would have prevented that, but big congratulations to anyone on this thread who claims to have never made a mistake

it may come as a surprise to hear that people die from their mistakes. it is called natural selection and is how the evolution process works ,by gradually removing the stupid gene from the gene pool.just think of the caliber of the average driver in 30 years time or so,all brought up with arse wiping technology on their cars.

only the other day i witnessed school run mums with abs activating on ice,with no clue how close they were to crashing. they got way with it at slow town speeds,they will not if it happens at 60 plus.

[Sump]

Mr2Mike said:

Sump said:

If they're going to do it regardless wouldn't you rather they have the lane keep assist?

I'd much rather they were caught and suffered heavy penalties.

This isn't realistic though.

[Ari]

ensignia said:

Manufacturers devote millions of pounds and man hours to perfect the technology and cover virtually every scenario. It's all very clever when you think about it...

so called said:

Mentioned this before on here but one more time.
Driving a rental in heavy snow last January in the US, the lane assist kept sounding the alarm as it couldn't deal with the lane 'white line' being the full width of the freeway.
The noise drove me crazy and being an Avis rental, who take the hand book out of the car, I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.

Worse was the proximity sensor that kept thinking I was suddenly closing on a car in front and would hit the brakes on the ice and snow covered road.
It nearly put me in a ditch 3 times just because it couldn't tell the different between a truck and a blinkin snow flake.

[Ari]

Sump said:

Ari said:

ensignia said:

To claim that people will completely rely on it and look at their phones more as a result is quite frankly ridiculous.

I had a long coach trip in America a couple of years ago. I was sat on the offside of the coach so could watch cars passing us at 60mph. This is how at least one in fifty cars is driven.



Now give these people something that will keep their car in lane when they're doing this...

Oh course people will use it to look at their phones more! People are obsessed with text messaging, Facebook, emails, the Internet, etc etc. The car steers itself innit! No problem bruv.

To suggest that people will steadfastly leave their phones alone as they bowl along the motorway, car steering away, is naive in the extreme!

If they're going to do it regardless wouldn't you rather they have the lane keep assist?

Wouldn't you rather the other forty nine didn't think 'ooh, a car that drives itself' - and joined in?

What actually needs to happen is that using a phone whilst driving needs to be treated as seriously as drink driving. Drunks might make terrible drivers, but at least they're generally looking out the frigging window!

A few high profile 12 month bans and maybe people that can't resist that 'email received' bleep might actually leave the bloody thing alone and carry on with the important bit - controlling a tonne of metal at 31 metres every second!

[TonyRPH]

Pit Pony said:

Blue Oval84 said:

I predict that this thread is going to be overwhelmed with PH'ers who have never, ever-
a) Made a mistake or-
b) Got drowsy at the wheel

My mate awoke to find himself half under the rear wheels of a lorry, travelling sideways at 50 mph, on the M5 one evening. He'd been travelling daily from Solihull to Stonehouse, for 9 months, doing a full days work with overtime, and driving back the same day.

Before that, I'd have said that of all the people I knew he was the one I'd least expect to crash, and most likely to not fall asleep, taking his own personal safety and responsibilities to other road users very seriously.

He describes the experience as bowel opening.

I'm struggling to see how anybody would view automated aids as a good thing when people do stuff like this ^^^.

Driving a 140 (or so) mile round trip on a daily basis, whilst working 8 - 10 hours+ is going to take it's toll on anybody.

You can only consume so many energy drinks before your body decides enough is enough and sleep takes over.

For many people, these automated aids are going to be just that - and 'aid' that they will become dependent on, to enable them to do even more for longer (along with the energy drinks etc. etc.).

Driver education is where it's at, but some people will just never learn*, unfortunately.

• and go on to think they are invincible

[Tony33]

ensignia said:

To claim that people will completely rely on it and look at their phones more as a result is quite frankly ridiculous.

So ridiculous the Transport Research Laboratory wrote this in a research paper on the subject:

9.4 Potential risks relating to LDW and LCA systems
Although these systems are intended to assist the driver and to help reduce the risk of an accident, there are also potential risks associated with such systems. There are two key areas in relation to risk:

• Unintended consequences – These could relate to the subject vehicle and the
driver’s behaviour – i.e. feeling that they can rely on a lane departure warning
system while deliberately performing distracting tasks. There is no evidence in
the literature that suggests that lane departure warning or lane change
assistance results in an undesirable driver response and some fairly large studies
have been carried out; nevertheless, these studies are relatively few in number
and have not focussed on unintended consequences specifically. There may also
be unintended consequences of lane departure warning and lane change
assistance for the other traffic. However, more work is required because there
was no research identified that had considered this aspect. Particular areas to
investigate are the effect of multiple advanced driver assistance systems and the
effects on drivers and driving. The cost-benefit analysis considers a combined
system, but much of the research that evaluated the systems considered each
system individually. The effect of other systems might mean that a proportion of
the accidents assumed in this study to be addressed by LDW and LCA systems
might have already been partially addressed by other systems, such as driver
drowsiness monitoring, speed warning, or ESC.

[Devil2575]

Ari said:

ensignia said:

To claim that people will completely rely on it and look at their phones more as a result is quite frankly ridiculous.

I had a long coach trip in America a couple of years ago. I was sat on the offside of the coach so could watch cars passing us at 60mph. This is how at least one in fifty cars is driven.



Now give these people something that will keep their car in lane when they're doing this...

Oh course people will use it to look at their phones more! People are obsessed with text messaging, Facebook, emails, the Internet, etc etc. The car steers itself innit! No problem bruv.

To suggest that people will steadfastly leave their phones alone as they bowl along the motorway, car steering away, is naive in the extreme!

This is a prime example of annecdotal evidence though isn't it.

At least 1 in 50? I asume you have data to support this or is it just a number you made up to support your argument?

Of course people will use it to look at their phones? really? This sounds like more made up stuff to me. To suggest that you can predict with any certainty that this will happen is naive in the extreme.

[Tony33]

Devil2575 said:

Of course people will use it to look at their phones? really? This sounds like more made up stuff to me. To suggest that you can predict with any certainty that this will happen is naive in the extreme.

It is a valid question as to whether it might impact driver behaviour. People have careers researching this stuff...

[Catatafish]

Devil2575 said:

This is a prime example of annecdotal evidence though isn't it.

At least 1 in 50? I asume you have data to support this or is it just a number you made up to support your argument?

Of course people will use it to look at their phones? really? This sounds like more made up stuff to me. To suggest that you can predict with any certainty that this will happen is naive in the extreme.

Yes, because everyone comes on here with verified data on blah blah blah.

In the time it took you to post you could have run outside and had a look at 50 cars drive by... and your passive-aggressive hyper-insecure-rage-anger might have subdued slightly in the process.

[Swanny87]

FiF said:

I'm trying to understand the arguments which claim that because the standard of driving in :insert name of some distant 3rd world place: is so awful that this means abysmal driving in this :insert name of 1st world place: isn't so bad after all and anybody who complains doesn't know anything, or hasn't travelled beyond the boundary of Little Snoring.

I've driven in rather a decent number of countries around various continents andyes there are some challenging environments and standards. But it's also evident that standards in UK are dropping.

Furthermore cross the channel or north sea upon return from a longish continental trip and one regularly, especially in the South East and Laaarndan, more examples of loutish and generally poor driving than one might have seen in thousands of miles over there.

Or have I misunderstood the point that people are trying to make.

Misunderstood. I see where you're coming from and agree that standards are slipping due to cars becoming less involved but that's not a problem specific to the UK, more a problem specific to the western world were having distractions is more likely. None of the people that came up with similar comments to mine said that people knew nothing 'look at me I went travelling yah' kind of thing. It was meant as a 'look at the bigger picture before ranting on about cars going slightly over white lines' type comment (not that you were ranting specifically, just in general).

By no means am I trying to absolve the act of texting while driving, or anything like that but the driving in our country isn't really 'THAT bad' in comparison to the '3rd world' is it? Whilst it might not be as good as 'on the continent' at least we have some form of vehicle safety standard, drivers are tested to a certain extent and the roads are of decent quality. Driving is dangerous whether standards are high or low, always has been, always will be. There will always be a distraction to people not interested in driving (which is the key to these type of problems), whether mobile phones are programmed to deactivate when driving, a drug is invented to keep people awake for 24 hours or not. Drive defensively and try and mitigate the dangers.

Also the 'on the continent' banner that people wave is always missing one key fact. Continental Europe is far more sparsely populated than the UK. The only reason the standards seem to slip when coming back over here is because traffic is more concentrated therefore you're more likely to see bad driving.

Edited by Swanny87 on Monday 15th December 13:45

Edited by Swanny87 on Monday 15th December 13:47

[stargazer30]

HTP99 said:

I have driven a Leon with this very feature, it is extremely clever how it works and it does indeed steer you out of thie mistake; it works if you drift out of your lane and aren't indicting,

No good for BMW/Audi drivers then, they'd be totally stuck in one lane

[luckystrike]

Swanny87 said:

There will always be a distraction to people not interested in driving

This is an important point that a lot of people seem to be missing I think. Regardless of the arguments about falling standards, the average 'A-Ber' who only treats a car as a white good and operates it accordingly will not suddenly become enlightened because a small group of driving enthusiasts on a website believe people should pay more attention to driving as a whole. They'll stay distracted and bored, and won't really understand what they're doing. Only now, when they cock it up and drift across a lane they'll get told off by their car instead of crashing. If someone's determined to not care about driving they'll always be a risk on the roads, so any technology that mitigates this is fundamentally good.