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

#981

Post by izacus » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

ang_cire wrote: post #308

izacus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you... not understand what the ADAS system does and how it works? You have a camera aimed at your face when typing this nonsense post.

It's funny how assumptions betray us. Not everyone is on their phone, or a laptop. On a site for tech enthusiasts, there are a shocking amount of folks with very "tech is what you get at the Apple Store" mindsets about.

On a site of tech enthusiasts I'd expect an intelligence level of understanding the difference between an embedded ADAS camera and a surveillance system. So how about you check you assumptions first? :)

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

#982

Post by zeratax » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 11:48 AM UTC

avaer wrote: post #75

"The cars have all have cameras checking for bad behavior, why shouldn't your phone and laptop?" said the esteemed lawmaker. "Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."

seems categorically different to have something beep vs informing law enforcement or w/e. and also don't think politicans are going to get cars without this installed

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

#983

Post by ddalex » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

laughing_man wrote: post #913

randerson wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car (from VW Group) came with Active Lane Keep. It detects when you're drifting out of your lane and steers you back into it. Sounds great in theory. Except that in the US, if you're cruising in the right lane then every time there's an exit it will actively steer you towards the concrete median between the lane and the exit. I don't understand how this feature was signed off on. The risks outweigh the benefits, i…

I will never buy a car with that feature unless I can turn it off. I don't need the be fighting my car if I need to swerve in an emergency situation.

I give it 6 years for not being able to disable the "safety" feature for all the cars in EU.

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

#984

Post by llamajams » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

dvratil wrote: post #827

I sometimes wonder how these systems are being tested on the road and whether there's any feedback from the test drivers, or what kind of morons are there saying "this is completely fine, exactly like intended" when they read the feedback... 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 w…

Well; Feature X is about to be released and the industry just invented feature Y and its all the rage and if its not in the pipeline the shareholders and the critiques get mad. So, The boffins decide that the company needs to get on it ASAP and cannibalize feature X team to make feature Y team and the "best" need to get on that team otherwise their career suffers. So the unwilling/incapable are left to sort out the kinks. They are divided into two camps which play a 0 sum game to get feature X released. Losing is bad for the losers, so you either resign t being an asshole for the benefit of the product or you try to not get your teammates fired at the detriment of the product. Maybe you try both and see. Either way youre resource starved and dammned either way. Maybe noone cares if you caught a bug before release. Maybe the guys that catch the bugs at the end of the line get praise and attention. Maybe everyone just gets mad that youre holding up the release, cuz the boffins wanted it done yesterday. After a while youre in a meeting debating whether an issue is not an issue and after an hour everyone has somewhere to be and one camp insists that if you hold it just so its not really an issue, and some think that this is a very rare edge case and would never happen IRL. one guy thinks this isnt a bug at all the user just has bad expectations. Others are tired of having to speak up and just wanna get on with their day because there might be a feature Z team and even though you got passed up for Y , youre actually a really god fit for Z s you better shut up if you wanna leave this mess. The guy who would have stopped this train rage quit 6 months ago. Finally everyone just calls it a non-issue and full send. Six months after the release there is an issue and now the regulators are coming, and you feel very vindicated that this was an issue but you didnt speak up , but secretly told Gary at lunch that this is gonna come back. Gary was in the meeting with the VP and the regulator ad made an off hand comment to the VP that you actually spotted this way back. And now the VP is mad that this issue could have been stopped, and now they think youre a pansy for staying mum , in fact this is unethical behavior and so youre off Z team and back to X. So you figure you never wanna be in this mess gain and switch to a diff org/company/ rage quit.

Rinse. Repeat.

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

#985

Post by cess11 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #178

cess11 wrote: post #88

Designing this machine vision system is insurmountable. It will never be actually good at its stated purpose, because how much you can look through some window or glance back at your kids is decided by the outside environment and it will be impossible to fit accurate judgement of it in the computers in the car. Also, lane assist fucking sucks. It places all cars in the same place on the road, i.e. all wear is in the…

I have news for you: those systems already exist and they work. The "insurmountable" development work has already been done. How long you can safely look away from the road is determined mostly by physics and has hard bounds. More than ~5 seconds is never OK while the vehicle is on a public road. At speed, a single second can be a second too long. The problem isn't that the road looks clear now. The problem is that t…

No it hasn't. There's some approximation of supposed assistance for particular situations.

I don't think cars should whine about what I do or don't, because they suck at being drivers. As I understand it, this kind of crap comes from the US, which is a society that tries to force people to spend as much time as possible in the car regardless of whether they should be there or not, even allowing people to drive when rather drunk at 0.08% BAC. It's not something I welcome the spread of.

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

#986

Post by phyzix5761 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

Is it just HN or is Europe really a surveillance state? Seems every article posted on here is about how different governments in Europe are passing more laws to spy on their citizens.

If it truly is like this how are you Europeans ok with this? Do you really trust your politicians to have your best interest at heart?

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

#987

Post by MaxikCZ » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

yomismoaqui wrote: post #899

psd1 wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thinking, but try a mirror. The majority of primate species don't recognise their own reflection, and the threat signals they display make them back off.

But then you have the problem of cleaning the feces from that mirror.

I hate it here. Please dont change.

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

#988

Post by bzzzt » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #885

kybernetyk wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distinctly remember that there was an article years ago about this. Automotive bodies have been mandating features for decades, and were doing followup studies. The introduction of seatbelts, ABS, ESP all came with noticeable drops in accident rates. However it was noticed, that these new driver assist features didn't reduce the number of accidents accordingly. These systems are not new. We know they don't really h…

It's a moat. If you're afraid of losing market share you want your competitors to be busy finding out ways of passing these kind of rules you already figured out how to implement. That's why quality doesn't matter, only compliance does.

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

#989

Post by ghastmaster » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

martin8412 wrote: post #953

ghastmaster wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if the law prevents you from modifying the car to disable these devices? Caveat to anyone considering this: Modifying could be used against you in a liability case. Additionally if your insurance contract has some stipulation about not removing these safety "features" and they find out, I would think you could be dropped.

All cars in the EU has to pass periodic inspections. All safety equipment must be in working order to pass.

Therefore, to skirt the law, one would have to be able to reverse the modifications.

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

#990

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

imp0cat wrote: post #696

cptskippy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

That's an incredibly vague and dismissive statement to support lazy engineering.

If the intent is something like preventing CO2 build up in the cabin then they could periodically open the mixing value when the car is set to recirculation to refresh the cabin air.

It doesn't have to be a binary control. I've owned cars with manual mixing valves to let you control the amount of outside air gets circulated into the cabin.