Observing ADAS from the passenger seat: how annoying is it, really?

Cars are always on the lookout these days – and too many think drivers aren’t doing likewise Recently we had a ‘situation’ on the road test desk. Nothing serious, just a logistical mess, but the eventual solution involved me blagging a lift up to MIRA from one of my What Car? colleagues. George kindly bent his run from Brixton to the M1, passing through not just Finchley but also Archway, which is where I was waiting at the kerbside, crummy old road test backpack stuffed with the essentials: tape measure, gaffer tape, telemetry gear and very old, if-it-ain’t-broke laptop running VBox data-logging software. The London-to-MIRA dash is one I do once or twice weekly. Three times if the proverbial hits the fan. Like a lot of this job, it’s a journey passed in solitude, so it was nice not only to be driven by somebody else but for it to be decent company, as George is. He bought a Range Rover L322 in his early twenties so, in terms of raw tolerance for car-based financial turmoil, is up there with the best of us, only recently swapping the Rangie for a Mk5 Golf GTI (five doors, big teledial wheels, red: not my dream spec but still a lovely thing). Playing passenger was enlightening. Free to observe, I could readily appreciate how much George was suffering at the hands of our car’s ADAS, which were running amok in London traffic. No sooner had the lane keeping assistance made itself known than the road sign recognition would go off, then the driver attention monitor would extract its pound. I sat there thinking: this is what a dogfight sounds like when the entire squadron of enemy fighters achieve lock-on. At this point I need to make it clear that George appeared to be doing nothing wrong. He seemed to be operating slickly in London traffic, which is, of course, as much art as science. There’s give and take in the melee, but these systems don’t allow for that. They operate in a binary world where everything has a defined scope. At one point the driver monitoring went loco purely because poor George had had the temerity to glance out of the side window at an HGV speeding up to the dotted lines at a T-junction. Sensible to keep an eye on that sort of thing, no? So it was interesting to be removed from the role of ADAS victim. A bit like the loved one who gets bullied by their boss but can’t quite see it and muddles through, only when you witness somebody else getting harried by these systems can you appreciate just how overwhelming it is. They go off constantly, chip, chip, chipping away. I will say this, though: while they’re all subject to the same regulations and are all to an extent very annoying, these systems do work in subtly different ways, and that is starting to matter. By MIRA, the two of us had reached the conclusion that we’re not far from ADAS behaviour being a part of the brand-loyalty equation. Performance, design, practicality and price are all big decision-influencing areas when it comes to car buying, but none of them are going to matter if the thing drives you up the wall every time you want to pop down to the shops. Two things particularly matter: the manner of the intervention (everything from the timbre of the bong to the pick-up of steering auto action) and how simple the systems are to disable. Some manufacturers do get it. They tend to be the ones that have traditionally put the driver first. BMW, for example, has a superbly gentle lane keeping action and lets you curtail the speed limit warning with one push on the wheel (seriously, who can stand bings going off at 52mph in a 50mph zone when, as every road tester can confirm, you’re really doing only 49.5mph?). And with the launch of the Vantage Roadster, Aston Martin has introduced a physical ADAS shortcut button, right next to the exhaust and damping switches. To them, it’s that important. On the other side of the equation there is Toyota. God I love Toyota, from Yaris to Land Cruiser, but its current, faintly paranoid ADAS are just infuriating. There’s even an alert to tell you when another car is wafting up behind you. Gratuitous or what? Would I like to take a break, as it suggests, 12 minutes into my trip? No, but I might like to steer off that cliff. The ‘off’ switches are also buried in fiddly menus and you can’t access them on the move. Not sure I’d buy one. Or the Ford Mustang, whose conversion for Europe has been done with such cavalier ADAS coding that the display often erroneously pops off a ‘hands on the wheel’ bong on the motorway. I couldn’t live with the aggravation. Not for £75k. It makes an extended physical test drive more crucial than ever, because it’s not just the driver these things annoy but the sorry passengers too.

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