Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
Unlikely this camera is on a fuse by itself. If this camera is faulted, or can’t see a face, it’s likely all driver assistance features, like lane centering or adaptive cruise control, would be disabled.
That might be a dealbreaker for some
Good. These features make sense if you’re 96 years old and drunk. For everyone else, they make the driving worse.
Keeping to the very right of the road, so that oncoming cars can pass a cyclist with a safe distance for everyone? No, goes the drunk retiree assistant, I’ll pull you to the centre for a nice head-on collision.
Lane centering is designed to be compliant, not dominant, unlike self-driving (though I dont have experience with any self-driving systems. I’d bet they’re compliant as well, just less so).
It requires little input maybe 95% of the time, but (to my knowledge) all implementations require hands on the wheel, so that the human can immediately take over for the other 5%.
I can’t think of a case where adaptive cruise control is detrimental.
In my case, it started pulling the car to the middle, while I was deliberately driving on the very right to avoid oncoming, passing traffic. I could override it by turning the steering wheel in the other direction, but there was a fair bit of resistance. It very nearly caused a serious accident. This all happened in a split-second at 80 km/h. Had I been old or less alert people might’ve died because of this dumb fucking idiot system.
Again, if someone so far gone or so heavily impaired they can’t keep a car in the middle of the lane, then the system is worth it. But then maybe that person shouldn’t be driving in the first place?
In a friend of mine’s car during rainfall the system detected a car in front where there in fact was none, and performed emergency braking. Again, a serious accident was only avoided due to the quick reaction of the following driver, or a rear-end collision at 120 km/h would’ve occurred.
These bullshit systems cause accidents.