See all Motoring AdviceNo matter how much we try to tell ourselves otherwise, human beings are far from perfect. Whether it’s forgetting to put the bins out or dropping a glass while washing up, we all make mistakes, and we make them every day. So, it’s no surprise that some of the leading causes of car accidents essentially boil down to human error.
Nor is it surprising that legislators, tech gurus and car makers are trying to support drivers as much as possible to minimise mistakes and make roads safer. Cars are increasingly tech-laden anyway, and some of that technology is being used to help reduce speeding or to stop cars from ploughing into the back of one another when the drivers are distracted. It all sounds like a clever idea, but road traffic fatality rates are on the rise, which begs a simple question: is this technology helping or hindering progress on road safety?
How is the tech supposed to help?
The argument for high-tech driver assistance systems is self-evident. If you can reduce the number of mistakes drivers make, you limit the main cause of crashes, and should therefore cut the number of people who die on the roads. As arguments go, it’s bulletproof, so manufacturers and engineers have been hard at work creating technology that’s designed to cut our chances of having a collision.
That’s why new cars come with autonomous emergency braking (AEB), which can slow or even stop the car if it detects a hazard to which the driver has not reacted. The idea is that if you’re on your phone (please don’t use your phone when driving) and you don’t spot the car ahead braking, the car will prevent you slamming into the back of it. Or it will at least slow you down to reduce the impact.
Similarly, lane departure warning (LDW) tech is common on new cars, there to alert drivers if the car wanders out of its lane due to their inattentiveness. And a new EU edict means new cars now must have a speed limit warning system that’s designed to ‘see’ the road signs and bong if the car exceeds the limit.
This all sounds reasonable. Why are we asking whether it’s a good idea?
There’s nothing wrong with the ideas, but the execution is what we’re questioning, and those questions are raised by the statistics. In 2021, 130 people were killed on the roads of Ireland, but that figure rose to 155 in 2022 and 184 in 2023. Over that time, thousands of new cars have hit the road, armed with some or all this new technology, and yet fatalities are on the increase.
While there is no evidence to link this increase to the technology in cars, there is anecdotal evidence that suggests it isn’t always as helpful as it might be. In our review process, where we assess cars’ safety systems in the real world, we’ve experienced all kinds of issues with technology that seems to work well in the sterile world of a lab, but not on the open road.
Take, for example, the new speed limit warning tech, which bongs at drivers when they exceed the limit. The whole system is based on the car having accurate speed limit data, whether that comes from navigation tech or road sign recognition. If the speed limit information is faulty for any reason — be it an overgrown hedge shrouding a sign or outdated navigation data — the system will bong at drivers unnecessarily. And this isn’t limited to certain manufacturers. We’ve experienced this in all sorts of cars.
Similarly, we’ve experienced ‘false positives’ from AEB tech that brakes seemingly because there’s a crisp packet in the road, creating a hazard for other motorists, and we’ve seen lane-keeping assistance tech that tries to push drivers into the path of oncoming traffic on narrow country lanes or where the white line is worn out.
That isn’t ideal, but if it saves a life or two, then surely some inconvenience is a small price to pay?
Arguably so, but such a situation effectively has two possible outcomes. Either the driver loses trust in the system and ignores it, or they switch it off altogether for some peace and quiet, ‘safe’ in the knowledge they know better than the car. Either way, the system doesn’t necessarily make the car any safer.
Alternatively, under-trained drivers who don’t understand the limitations of the systems may find themselves trusting the systems to keep them out of trouble too much, putting themselves in all kinds of bother. And if you think that won’t happen, just ask all the people who trust their navigation implicitly, right up to the moment it directs them into a river.
Won’t driverless cars fix all this?
Maybe, but they’re some way off now. Some driverless technology is in development and simple driverless systems are available commercially, but none is advanced enough to take over a whole journey — at least not to a standard deemed safe enough for complex, and sometimes archaic European public roads. For now, semi-autonomous driver assistance technology is about as good as it gets.
So, has safety tech gone too far?
There is no simple answer. If we want to reduce fatalities on the road, we need an integrated approach to safety, which includes making changes to driver training, safety technology and road design. In an ideal world, we’d have highly trained drivers who know their car inside and out, while the roads would be purpose-built and maintained to the highest possible standards and the tech would be honed for decades before being used in consumer products.
If we could do that, we wouldn’t have to ask this question, but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in the real world, with low road maintenance budgets, drivers with comparatively little training and nascent technology being forced into cars by well-meaning but over-zealous regulators. In that world, we need to do more than just add some tech and hope it works. So, you could argue that we haven’t gone too far. We just haven’t gone far enough.