Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera • Hacker News Board

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#691

Post by imp0cat » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

dwa3592 wrote: post #298

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #6

All new cars. At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't tu…

>>The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit is this a feature really? is it only applied in European cars?

It's one of the travel assist features where the cars try to stick to the changing speed limits, slow down for corners etc... .

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#692

Post by pontussw » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

lawik wrote: post #303

dumbmrblah wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to play devil's advocate... were you taking your eyes off the road for too long? There are many many poor drivers and many many distracted drivers out there. I'm not accusing you of one, but maybe a little bit of self-introspection may be necessary.

My in-laws Kia did this for me. It got really shitty when it got darker and presumably had to use an IR camera. And I am tall so the angle might have been bad. It flagged me every minute. Even when I intentionally focused right ahead. Tracking gaze is not immune to assorted failure modes.

There we maybe need some regulation that the system should be working, and the manufacturers of the cars should be forced to recall and fix the system if it doesn’t work!

The solution to bad implementation can’t be to just throw our hands in the air and say that Kia produces bad cars so therefore we cannot introduce safety regulation

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#693

Post by mcmoor » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #459

BurningFrog wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is the universal aviation language. In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.

You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps. You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word. Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.

Feels like it'd be easier to differentiate jingles compared to different words of a language you don't know. You can vary intonations etc, but by that point you're back to jingles.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#694

Post by BuyMyBitcoins » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

kybernetyk wrote: post #657

skhr0680 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy. It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".

Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.

I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#695

Post by johanvts » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

nehal3m wrote: post #665

petre wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's part of why VW had to fire 100k employees? They've been lately doing a subpar job designing cars.

I think it’s a legal requirement, because it’s the same for Tesla.

The speeding chime is legally required to be reset to on after every trip. But I find the speed signs are very rarely missed (model 3 highland), also its a single press on the main screen to disable. My warnings are +99% genuine cases where i need to slow down and I bet that’s true for +99% of people who have these system.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#696

Post by imp0cat » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #515

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #6

All new cars. At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't tu…

> looking at you, Volkswagen I have a new Volkswagen and there's an annoying amount of arrogance behind the technology decisions in the vehicle that really sour the experience. Perhaps the most annoying is that many notifications like "you can't do that while driving" are toast style notifications that disappear before you can notice or read them. It has 360 degree cameras but it gets to decide when you can activate…

> You put the re-circulation fan on, perhaps because you don't like smelling exhaust fumes? Car quietly turns it off again in the not to distant future.

I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#697

Post by idonotcare » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

i welcome this and bought a car specifically for this and more. -its not constantly beeping stop looking at your phone -its a good security feature -the article is actually wrong since last year cars come equiped with this function mandatory and many others, automatic radar breaking, lane assist, blind spot lane change assist and many more. -in europe gdpr works, don't worry usa does not buy eu law cars nor do we buy your behemots.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#698

Post by pontussw » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:30 AM UTC

afandian wrote: post #304

gotski wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads. The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner. Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!

I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers. They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.

They aren’t for some weird reason being pressured to make systems that work. Even in this thread I see wild shit like people telling how the system completely doesn’t work for them, but no indication that they are pushing the manufacturer to fix it?? How can we have the kind of attitude that we let the manufacturers just get away with it if it’s a safety system? If the radio didn’t work, we’d be at the dealership bothering the service staff every day - but important safety tech? Blame the EU…?

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#699

Post by like_any_other » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:30 AM UTC

It's a bit disturbing how easily and quietly our own property is being slowly weaponized against us, isn't it? Instead of guarding us from manufacturer hostility, they mandate it.

And this and similar laws just keep coming up, no matter what the public says. I guess from now on I'm voting for the most anti-EU party I can find. Too bad, because I like the idea of cooperating to protect our interests, but the EU just keeps growing and invading areas it has no business in (like social media content moderation - I'd prefer not to outsource free speech rights away from our national constitution and to the EU). It needs to be rebuilt, with strict limits to its authority, to stop it from continually draining sovereignty from its constituent countries.

Re: Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

#700

Post by lelanthran » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #376

Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms. The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident. So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right? But car beeps gen…

> But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.

I'd like to know more about this, actually.