I bought a new (to me) car recently, and as part of that experience I got to drive two other brand new cars whilst the dealership fixed the car I actually wanted to buy. And whilst they both had their ups and downs, there’s one thing that really stood out to me: I would like my car not to try to kill me. This should not be a request I need to make, and yet.

The two cars in question are the Ora GWM and the MG HS Trophy, both made by SAIC Motor Company under the GWM and MG brands respectively. One is a smallish electric hatchback and the other a petrol “SUV Crossover”. Both have cameras and sensors galore, but the two features I want to talk about here are lane assist and “driver awareness”.

Lane assist is a simple feature: use the camera on the front of the car to find lane markings, and warn the driver if they’re going to cross them. There’s just one problem, and that’s that British roads look like this:

Sometimes it can be hard enough as a human who routinely uses these roads to figure out where the lane markings are. But hey, the car screaming at you is one thing, it’s not like the car will violently take control and try to course correct if you try to cross the imaginary line it draws, right?

Right?

The default setting disagrees, and will correct your steering if it thinks you’re going to veer out of your lane without indicating. Or if you are indicating but there’s something in your way as shown by the blindspot radars. Or sometimes if the system gets spooked. I am all for driver safety systems, but I shouldn’t live in fear of them.

The driver awareness system is a camera built into the front pillar of the car, pointed at your face. It looks to make sure you’re looking at the road and not sleepy, by paying attention to your eyes. The salesperson who showed me the Ora warned me that some other people with glasses had reported issues with it, but I didn’t drive it that much and didn’t have any issues with it. I was not warned about it in the MG HS, but as I was driving to Scotland in it, it would not stop screaming.

It turns out, the system can’t tell the difference between the light glinting off the glasses, and me closing my eyes. And it will beep every time the light changes to warn you to look at the road. But what’s worse is that the first time I tried to turn on the cruise control, it turned it back off!

So all these features can be turned off, but thanks to EU regulations, the car turns them back on when you restart the car. Which meant every time I got back into the car I had to dig through menus to turn off the driver awareness and drowsiness features, and downgrade the lane assist to “warn” rather than “immediately veer into traffic”.

Clearly anything that makes driving safer is good, but I worry that releasing these features onto the public in such a way that they erode public confidence in the very idea of driver assistance features in general is itself harmful. Like, if I now get into another car with a drowsiness detector, am I going to give it the benefit of the doubt, or am I just going to turn it off (and potentially get into an accident that could have been avoided)?

It is also worth noting that on my drive back from Scotland, there were points where I was absolutely 100% drowsy enough that I needed to stop and take a break at the next services. I’d left the feature turned on after the last services as it was now dark enough that I didn’t think it would trigger in the glare. It never fired. This makes me worry. A user who trusts the system to say “hi you’re too drowsy to drive” might start to take the absence of an alarm as an indicator that they are, in fact, fine and drive past the point they previously considered stopping.