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

First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.

Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?

Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.

Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.

On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.

I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.

Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.

I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.

My car has adaptive cruise control and will automatically adjust speed based on speed limit signs. I was on a highway at 130km/h and the car read a 60km/h speed limit sign that was on an exit shoulder (already separated by a concrete barrier from the highway, so technically a different road altogether) and started breaking really fast - I was pretty close from getting tailgated by the driver behind me, who did not (rightfully) expect me to suddenly start breaking with nothing in front of me. Luckily this can be permanently turned off, so I can continue using cruise control without being afraid of every single speed limit sign.

Recently I had rented a Skoda Karoq (very new one, probably 2024/2025) which adjusted the cruise control speed not even based on signs, but probably based on data from built-in maps? I don't know - but it would randomly decide that I entered a 20km/h zone while driving on a 90km/h road. And this couldn't be turned off. So I just turned off cruise control completely, because wtf, how can anyone think this is improving road safety?

Edit: typo