A rumination on active safety features

"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein) 08/15/2018 at 11:34 • Filed to: None

1

18

While shopping for what ended up being !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , one of the things that was a must-have for us was a full suite of active safety gizmos. Her Subaru Impreza we were replacing had them, and the pre-collision braking had saved my wife’s bacon a few times already.

My wife isn’t a bad driver by any means, but we live in the DC suburbs and the roads can be pretty treacherous. We moved here this past spring and while I was used to DC driving from growing up here, it was a new experience for my wife. She had a few times where her Impreza detected some other idiot doing something stupid and braked before my wife had a chance to react. She was very thankful that the car was doing this for her.

Our CX-5, like the Impreza, has all the safety gizmos like pre-collision braking, lane departure warning, and blind spot monitors. This past weekend, we took a trip from DC out to St. Michael’s, MD and Rehoboth Beach, DE, and as is often the case on these trips, I did most of the driving, so I got to experience the Mazda version of these gizmos.

One thing I immediately noticed was the blind spot warning in the CX-5 is very persistent. If something is in your blind spot, a little yellow blind spot icon lights up in the side mirror. This is fine. But also, every time you put your blinker on when the little yellow blind spot indicator is lit on that side of the car, the car beeps at you to check your blind spot. In theory, this is also fine, except the activation radius for the little yellow light is kinda wide, so when you’re driving on a busy highway like the DC beltway, basically every time you put your blinker on, the blind spot monitor is on, even if there’s a decent enough gap in traffic for you to merge. Which means almost every time you put your blinker on, the car beeps at you.

I understood the virtue of this notification but wished the beep was quieter, and also wished that maybe the blind spot activation range could be a little narrower. I was able to dig into the settings and found there’s an option to lower the blind spot warning beep volume, but it only lowers it a little. There’s no sensitivity setting. Hey, it’s better than nothing.

Mazda has perhaps the best implementation of lane departure warning that I’ve experienced. In my wife’s Impreza, the lane departure warning was way too damn sensitive, and it had a super annoying beep too. This meant that any time you drove close to the marker for a shoulder, the damn thing would BEEP BEEP BEEP and flash a not-very-informative LANE DEPARTURE warning message on the screen in the gauge cluster. I called this the make my wife pissed at my driving tattle-tale, because any time we’d be on some curvy rural road in her car, the lane departure would freak out. At one point we went several months or maybe even a year with the lane departure deactivated, which thankfully was a setting the car would remember so you didn’t have to do it every time you turned the car on, but it left an annoying yellow warning light on the dash lit all the time to remind you that yes, your lane departure warning was turned off.

In the CX-5, the default setting for the lane departure warning makes no sound at all. The steering wheel has a vibration motor built into it like an old arcade driving game and when you approach a lane marking, it vibrates the steering wheel. It also blinks a more detailed graphical warning on the gauge cluster screen that shows you which side of the car is approaching a lane marking. It also defaults to doing subtle steering corrections to keep you in your lane. Overall, I thought this was very nice, and while it wasn’t quite so sensitive as the Subaru setup, it was making itself known a little more often than I liked. But, I found another handy setting that lets you set the lane departure warning to a lower sensitivity level, so I chose that. You can enable or disable the lane keep assist steering stuff separately from the sensitivity control. I left it on.

The CX-5 also has rear cross traffic alert which the Impreza didn’t. Basically if something is going to cross your path by when you’re in reverse, the car beeps at you and flashes some warning icons on the backup camera screen. It’s pretty handy in crowded parking lots. But again, more damn beeping.

Yesterday morning, after getting mean !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , I got on I-270 and then the Beltway to head to work, in my stick shift, modded 335xi. It’s obviously a lot more involving of a drive than the CX-5. But one thing struck me. I was in the left lane on the Beltway, and I approached the shoulder marking line, and nothing happened. I put on my blinker to merge into a small gap in traffic, and nothing happened.

I thought to myself, ya know, not getting beeped and booped at, or having the steering wheel buzz at me, was extremely nice. Then, later in the day my wife texted me that she had some kind of near miss in her car that freaked her out a little bit, but she was fine and she’d tell me more about it when I got home.

Basically, she was driving along in the right lane, when someone in the middle lane decided they needed to go to the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! so badly that they cut into her lane without signaling, then slammed on the brakes to turn into the JCC driveway.

My wife freaked out, but before she could even react, the CX-5 detected the other car, produced many beeps and boops, and came to a complete stop, all on its own. She was a little shocked by the experience, but immensely grateful that her brand new car was still intact, thanks to the car’s active safety gizmos.

So this got me to thinking. The pre-collision braking is extremely valuable. The blind spot warning, I could do without the constant beeping while merging, but I do like the little yellow lights on the mirrors. The rear cross traffic alert is nice. The lane departure is probably the most superfluous but at least the subtle steering wheel buzz doesn’t freak out your passengers.

But what have we come to, where we need our cars to constantly beep and boop at us to warn us of impending danger? My wife loves all the beeps and boops but me, it kinda makes driving a little more stressful. I like that my the only beeps and boops my 335xi makes come from the parking sensors. But if I had a car like the CX-5 where you can actually disable the warnings without leaving a light on the dash constantly lit like the Impreza, I’m still not sure I’d actually turn them off.

I don’t know. I’m conflicted. What about y’all: yea or nay on the active safety beeps and boops? 

TheRealBicycleBuck > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 11:50

1

I had a loaner Outback with the same safety gear. I ended up disabling it because it fought me when I made lane deviations without a blinker. Thing is, the main road to our house has a number of large potholes which require some maneuvering to avoid. I’m not going to turn on my blinker when I avoid a pothole on a two-lane road.

Textured Soy Protein > TheRealBicycleBuck 08/15/2018 at 11:54

2

This scenario is exactly why I appreciate the Mazda lane departure warning. It’s a nice haptic feedback motor that gives your hands a noticeable vibration , but it’s not aggressive or rattly. It’s totally silent. It’s almost as if all the lane markings have gained shallow rumble strips that don’t upset the car.

KingT- 60% of the time, it works every time > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 12:00

0

Good observations. My wife’s Kia has BLIS, Lane keep assist, Forward Collision warning/automatic braking and radar cruise , my car has none, only parking sensors .

I absolutely HATE Lane keep assist (Warning and/or actual steering correction ). They’re just not reliable. Plus it gets confused on poorly marked lanes and construction zones. I don’t think I will ever use that feature unless I am in a semi-autonomous/autonomous car on the highway and it’s truly hands-off.

I don’ t mind Blind spot monitoring , and want an option to set the sensor range closer like you mentioned, and as long as the beeps are not irritatingly loud. Sometimes you have to cut close in crowded urban areas . I still put those small round blind spot mirrors on the Kia like I have on my car just because I trust them more than the indicator, which I use more like a confirmation (Or you can adjust your mirrors to all but eliminate them)

I am OK with relatively unobtrusive forward collision warning and mulitple studies show that they are super effective in preventing collisions, even with good drivers .

https://www.nhtsa.gov/es/press-releases/nhtsa-iihs-announcement-aeb

I have never had to use that feature but I do believe no matter how good a driver you are and how much you say “Duh, it’s easy, just pay attention”, there are times that you just slip, and all it takes is a second or two. Sure, you can react and brake if you are attentive but the good thing is it reacts faster than you can and it makes the difference between hitting the car /or pedestrian slowed down to 10MPH or not hitting them at all . I set this too at the closest setting and it has been relativity unobtrusive. They need to be smarter though, sometimes when a car in front of me is turning off from the road into a parking lot and I just let off the accelerator knowing I will make the gap it gets all antsy and starts beeping and braking.

Textured Soy Protein > KingT- 60% of the time, it works every time 08/15/2018 at 12:05

1

I really think everybody needs to copy the Mazda steering wheel vibration version of lane departure warning. It’s subtle enough to not be annoying. As are the steering corrections. They did a solid job with it.

The blind spot warning can be a little annoying but thankfully once I explained to my wife that it beeps every time you put on your blinker and the blind spot light is on , but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to crash into someone, she decided she wasn’t going to let it get her irked at my driving.

Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 12:13

1

I guess I’m just too old, because I literally will not buy a car with most of these features. Now mind, I would kill for blind spot just because nobody can see out the back of a modern car. Everything behind my head is just one big blind spot. Also the A pillars now make bigass blind spots. Hell, I had to pass hard on the Q60 because I literally could not see behind me because of the B pillar placement.

But let ME decide what the shit I’m going to do about this information. And anything that flips out at abrupt lane changes, I’m going to make some seriously unauthorized code changes in the PCM. Fuck’s sake, our highways don’t have potholes - they have literal craters. It’s either ‘depart my lane’ or ‘depart this earth.’ (Seriously. We routinely have massive chunks of concrete missing from the road surface. The kind that will total out your car with frame damage if you hit it.)

P ersonally, if I can’t save my own bacon at 70MPH, then I need to surrender my license anyway . Means my reaction time is entirely too low.

Textured Soy Protein > Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks 08/15/2018 at 12:32

0

Some cars make it a pain to disable these systems. Either they revert to on every time you start the car, and/or they leave an annoying light lit.

Mazda’s settings are pretty customizable where if there are certain things you want to disable you can do that and get on with your life without hearing from them again. Not sure what other companies have this degree of control. 

The pre-collision braking is one I would definitely not disable. The only time I’ve turned it off in a car was when we moved and had to load the Impreza on a car trailer behind our U-Haul. It thought the U-Haul was an obstacle and wanted to apply the brakes.

SPAMBot - Horse Doctor > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 12:35

0

I drove a ND Miata with Blind Spot monitoring and lane assist or whatever. Immediately turned off the lane and muted the blind spot beep. The gap is so huge it was basically useless in a car with tiny blind spots. I think all of these need a much narrower field.

I do like the Mercedes system. From what I can tell, they are yellow when someone is behind you in that area and red when they are actually next to your car. So you could still change lanes and not hit someone if it is yellow.

Long_Voyager, Now With More Caravanny Goodness > Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks 08/15/2018 at 12:38

0

I guess I’m just too old, because I literally will not buy a car with most of these features.

I’m with you. Unless 30s is somehow old, I don’t think I’m old either.....

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 13:04

1

“ She had a few times where her Impreza detected some other idiot doing something stupid and braked before my wife had a chance to react. She was very thankful that the car was doing this for her.”

So, the near-wreck in the Mazda where the car’s system’s saved her was definitely one that she could not easily predict or avoid, but if she’s had several instances where the car braked before she could, I would suggest that you encourage her to leave more of a gap between her and the car in front of her on a regular basis, and perhaps take a defensive driving course . My wife’s MDX has this system and my new Tacoma has them, and while I’ve gotten the BRAKE! warning before, I’ve never actually had a car apply the brakes for me in any situation. Granted, I’m good about not following too close and I’m a very aware driver, but it shouldn’t be “normal” for any driver for a braking system like this to be intervening on a regular basis.

Textured Soy Protein > SPAMBot - Horse Doctor 08/15/2018 at 13:08

0

Does the ND lane departure buzz the steering wheel or beep? I like the steering wheel buzz in the CX-5.

Textured Soy Protein > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 08/15/2018 at 13:11

0

Clearly you are underestimating kamikaze DC drivers.  Including the most recent time this is only the 3rd time she's had a car brake for her in the 3 months and change since we moved here. After the first couple times it happened in the Impreza she did say she was going to leave more of a gap though.

SPAMBot - Horse Doctor > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 13:20

0

It just beeped at me. I’m not sure if there was a setting to change from a beep to a vibrate, though .

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 13:22

0

Ah, okay. I was thinking it was more like 6 or something. Three is understandable, especially with the crazies you have up there.

StndIbnz, Drives a MSRT8 > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 13:25

0

First thing I do when I hop in a car is turn off the lane departure system, then turn the warning beep off for blind spot.  I have my mirrors set to where I can see whats in my blind spot anyways, but the little light is nice.  I usually turn off FCW too, but love ACC.  

Textured Soy Protein > StndIbnz, Drives a MSRT8 08/15/2018 at 13:32

0

I don’t disable them right away, but if they become irritating I will try to mess with the settings. FCW is definitely there one I’m least likely to disable.

AestheticsInMotion > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 14:30

0

I’m of the zero active safety features camp. Give me lower belt lines and thinner pillars so I can see everything in my vicinity, a loud horn for the oblivious drivers and I suppose a high definition backup camera that would STAY ON while driving.

As T he Actual RootWyrm said below, all of these nannies push me away from even considering purchasing that particular car. Greatly increased cost and complexity for a debatable safety increase, all while drastically reducing the level of attentiveness of the people who rely on those systems.

Someone on here recently got backed into, and the offending driver said, “it’s okay, I have sensors”.

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Textured Soy Protein 08/15/2018 at 14:36

0

Great write up.  I disable the lane departure whenever I get in my Mom’s Forrester.  It’s a great idea, and probably good for my mom as she’s been known to fall asleep but I think it goes off so often it becomes part of the ambient noise and I have doubts it would actually wake one up in the event it is properly needed.

Textured Soy Protein > AestheticsInMotion 08/15/2018 at 15:12

0

My 335xi has front and rear parking sensors but no backup camera. There are a few aftermarket cameras out there that apparently can plug in and will work with the stock infotainment screen. I guess BMW had the programming in there even if they didn’t have the cameras.