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Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figur
by peterlk 3mo ago
Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm.
Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
- sixtyj 3mo agoImagine driving thru night with kids sleeping and suddenly car starts beeping. Is there a way how to switch sensors off for similar situations?
- ShellfishMeme 3mo agoYou can switch them off but only until the engine is turned off again. Most manufacturers have a shortcut on the dashboard or steering wheel though. Eventually you just get used to doing that every time you start driving.
- londons_explore 3mo agoThere'll be firmware hacks to force that mode soon enough.
- Scoundreller 3mo agoYou wouldn’t download a bookmarklet on your car
- bigiain 3mo ago"Download NoBeepPro for Android Auto now! It silences all unwanted warning sound, and totally doesn't surreptitiously enroll your car into a residential proxy service or mine crypto currency using your main power or hybrid battery!"
- ssl-3 3mo agoThat hasn't broadly happened yet, and it's even less likely to happen in the future with encrypted comms and locked-down firmware increasingly becoming the rule instead of the exception.
- toast0 3mo agoDepends on the car (and the regulatory regime, I'd imagine). My fancy pants 2025 car is happy to leave driver alertness detection disabled, which is handy because it's not good. Of course my ultra base model 1981 van doesn't have any features... it's a lot more fun to drive, other than the engine noise is pretty oppressive on a drive any significant length oh and the floor is missing where the accelerator pedal should mount :P
- frollogaston 3mo agoThat works. I already got so used to disabling ESC on start that I do it unconsciously at this point, can't even recall afterwards that I did it. (My car is old and has a glitchy ESC)
- Ccecil 3mo agoI saw a mod where there was an arduino/lcd setup on the dash of an Audi to turn off the ESC and other annoyances on startup. I turn mine off quite often. On dirt roads and snow.
- frollogaston 3mo agoYeah, there are ways if you figure out the manufacturer specifics. Thought it'd be fun to try capturing and replaying CAN messages, gave up cause whatever cheapo CAN to USB adapter I got wasn't working with my Linux laptop. Probably could've figured it out but decided it wasn't worth risking my 2005 Quattroporte with something that was feeling increasingly jank. Autel scanner already gave me all the read-only access I needed, including clutch wear.
- Ccecil 3mo agoI recommend "the car hackers handbook". Gives you all the info you need including software. Great start to knowing what the CAN is doing.
- frollogaston 3mo agoThat one is good. I did actually start there, just bought the wrong stuff :S
- freetonik 3mo ago>...until the engine is turned off again Modern electric Volkswagens (and some other brands) have this amazingly awful feature where lifting your ass off the driver's seat turns off the "ignition". The car just shuts off immediately, AC turns off, CarPlay disconnects, those driver settings reset. Even if I sit back one second later.
- fhub 3mo agoIn my experience, rental cars are the worst. They are configured to make so much noise. My kids sleep in rentals more than daily driving too (longer commutes when traveling). My 2022 Volvo treats me like a adult and makes very little noise. Heads up display shows things that might be important.
- petre 3mo agoThe kids will wake up a few times, then just get used and grow up to ignore all the annoying beeps. My boss sometimes drives without a belt while the car keeps beeping and he succesfully ignores it.
- goodpoint 3mo agoMaybe you should ask yourself why you are not looking at the road in the first place.
- smackeyacky 3mo agoI think it was clear that the poster was distracted by all the useless bongs and beeps and that was what caused the extra distracted driving bong or beep
- goodpoint 3mo agoThat does not justify not looking at the road.
- pontussw 3mo agoIf it makes someone put their phone down, or pull over when they are too tired to drive, perhaps the bigger question is if it prevents you all ending up in an accident - a lot worse of a situation than the beeping, in my opinion
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoIf it beeps when you're NOT using your phone then people won't care about using their phone to begin with.
- dylan604 3mo agoThat sounds like one of those situations where you just keep turning up the radio until the beeping goes away
- Foivos 3mo agoThey have thought of that. The radio volume is reduced during the Beep.
- fhn 3mo agoI'm deaf so they better shine lasers into my eyeballs
- NonHyloMorph 3mo agoHehe
- lstodd 3mo agoI'm also blind so they can stuff those lasers where it doesn't shine.
- allenrb 3mo agoDo you drive often, then? :-)
- Paradigma11 3mo ago
- dumbmrblah 3mo agoSo to play devil's advocate... were you taking your eyes off the road for too long? There are many many poor drivers and many many distracted drivers out there. I'm not accusing you of one, but maybe a little bit of self-introspection may be necessary.
- gotski 3mo agoI had a similar situation with a rental car, driving on winding roads. The beeping happened periodically as I was driving around hairpin bends, and the eye detection was triggered by me turning my head to look towards the oncoming sharp corner. Not the best situation to have a "safety" alert start chastising you!
- afandian 3mo agoI wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers. They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.
- mothballed 3mo agoWhy would the manufacturers care though? You will still buy a car and now the barrier to foreign competition is higher, increasing profit, and the price goes up to pay for the dooo dads which increases financing kickbacks even if margin is same.
- giantg2 3mo ago"might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation." Nah, you just get knee-jerk, feel-good laws because the masses never dig deeper and the elected only care about being reelected.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoThese laws are not driven by masses. The masses do not want this crap. These laws are driven by busybodies who think they know what's best for the masses. The politicians and their advisors think they can get "free" (statistically nobody ever voted for the other guy over something so little) turnout from these busybodies in their favor by promising/doing this stuff. It's a sick numbers game and we all lose. Just like everything else these days.
- throawayonthe 3mo agongl i think people should just read their car's manual
- Brian_K_White 3mo agongl I think you should and then try to say that again
- throawayonthe 3mo agoi don't own a car but i have read through most of a car manual at some point, it had many useful detail on maintenance and configuration if the parent commenter read the manual, they would know what the beeping means
- moffkalast 3mo agoDriving4answers had a similar rant recently about the 2024 Prius, where there's an always-on warning beep every time you enter an intersection, which intrusively pulls away your attention in the exact moment when you need to be focusing on the road the most. I'll be surprised if it doesn't cause someone to die in the coming years. Laws for drivers written by people with chauffeurs.
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago> Laws for drivers written by people with chauffeurs. Not even that. They know the laws are stupid. They don't care. It's just another day at work for them. They're trying to surgically write laws to garner support/votes from shorsighted hand wringing Karens (plenty of examples in HN comments) while also not actually hurting industry/donors. So stupid rules and stupid beeps are what you get.
- phoronixrly 3mo agoAnyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
- zelphirkalt 3mo agoWait until they mandate a panel of warning LEDs on your bike or a cam on your bike recording your face.
- newsclues 3mo agoWait until manual bikes are banned and only gps tracked e-bikes exist for citizen safety!
- cavoirom 3mo agogiving up your freedom to limit others in the name of safety seems unwise. too much control creates a generation behave like the kids.
- LtWorf 3mo agoI gave up and just ignore all the blips. It also sometimes invents speed limit signs.
- ghastmaster 3mo agoDo 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.
- petre 3mo agoDoes soaking the beeper with water trigger a modification clause? Annoying alarms trigger driver distresss which has equally negative effect on attention while driving. We had a replacement Yaris that had the speed alarms but one could lower the volume to the point where it didn't matter much. Much better design than the older Toyotas which would beep incessantly and louder if you didn't put belts on, back seats included.
- letitbeirie 3mo ago> back seats included I ended up buying loose seat belt buckles for my wife's car from a pull and pay to stop this. Evidently nobody at Toyota has a dog.
- petre 3mo agoWe carry the dog in a crate fastened with straps. This is the safest way to transport a dog in a car. The seatbelt was not practical to fasten the crate. The crate sits in the trunk of our hatchback crossover with the seat in front of it collapsed, so I can visually keep it in check and the dog gets AC. There are also dog "seatbelts" if you carry it on the back seat. It's like a leash with a seatbelt buckle at the end.
- johen8 3mo ago> if you didn't put belts on, back seats included. I don't drive/don't have a car, but it drives me mad when I take an Uber, I go into the back seat and put my backpack beside me and the car keeps beeping because of it (I obviously put my seatbelt on). For some time I didn't understand what was that beeping until a driver told me, now when I hear it I know to put the seatbelt in my backpack seat, and remove it when I get off the car.
- skhr0680 3mo ago> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy. It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".
- ffsm8 3mo agoI disagree, It's about treating people as sheeple that the politicians need to supervise and teach. Basically these brainrotten politicians consider themselves the only responsible ones that need to remove choices for the simpletons they administer because they (the politicians) know better. That's the core of our current woke culture that has become the zeitgeist since the 2010, especially in Germany - and it's especially strong on the left side of the spectrum ... But can be observed across all current parties to varying degrees. That causes the politicians to think more about what "should" society be like (from their "I know better" perspective), instead of looking at reality - consequently ignoring that what they're trying to create isn't even within the bounds of our technical capabilities right now. Yes you can get close, but close is not enough for such features
- mrandish 3mo ago> It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new apps and won't update the apps they have. If you're in that meeting... speak up. I do and sometimes it even gets people to re-consider annoying defaults that don't even benefit the company very much.
- lazide 3mo agoLet’s not talk about cookie consent popups…
- kybernetyk 3mo ago
- ajsnigrutin 3mo ago> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car. Where do you live? In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways). This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.
- mschild 3mo agoIn Germany, we love our signs (not really). We have so many of them though and specific rules and lots of exceptions on where to put them. For example, typical city road speed is 50kmh, but residential side streets are 30kmh. If you cross an intersection there usually should be a sign telling you the speed limit because people turning onto other roads need to know how fast they're going. Except there sometimes isn't. So you're coming from a 30kmh road and turn onto a 50kmh without a sign. Your car now thinks you're still in a 30kmh road. What about GPS positioning? Sure, that works, until cities have started deciding that actually their main city roads should be 30 instead of 50. (Something I agree with btw) Except no signs and if you don't pay for your cars subscription service to get the newest updates, good luck getting that info. Beyond that, construction zones with shittily placed signs or signs that are placed not in optimal locations. Driving on the highway but there's an offramp for an interchange with a 60kmh speed limit for the offramp? Guess your highway speed is set to 60 now. Enjoy the car beeping at you.
- silon42 3mo agoHere (Slovenia), there is an intersection rule, speed limit is cancelled at next intersection (unless in a "30" zone, or a "town wide speed limit"). Good look recognizing this situation without GPS maps.
- frereubu 3mo ago> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car. A lot of these features seem to assume that you're driving on a multi-lane motorway with well-marked lanes. I'm constantly being nudged by my ID.3 one way or another on rural roads. You can turn it off, but it turns itself back on the next time you unlock the car.
- petre 3mo agoMaybe that's part of why VW had to fire 100k employees? They've been lately doing a subpar job designing cars.
- nehal3m 3mo agoI think it’s a legal requirement, because it’s the same for Tesla.
- dzhiurgis 3mo agoAt least with Tesla you have massive ecosystem of third party add-ons, including defeat devices. I do wish it was even quieter tho. It's kinda of a shame you got a quiet EV but then add annoying bingbongs.
- petre 3mo agoOne can still make a good design within the legal requirement. It doesn't say how many dB the beeper has to have or adjust the level of assistance. Maybe pressure from Chinese manufacturers will force them to get their stuff together, cut back on the user hostile design.
- johanvts 3mo agoThe speeding chime is legally required to be reset to on after every trip. But I find the speed signs are very rarely missed (model 3 highland), also its a single press on the main screen to disable. My warnings are +99% genuine cases where i need to slow down and I bet that’s true for +99% of people who have these system.
- Nursie 3mo ago> Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car. I rented a car in the UK about six weeks ago, and this was infuriating! No, car, this is not a 30 zone. It's a 60 zone and I'm driving to the conditions (country road, decent visibility, slightly poor surface) at around 45. Whatever GPS data or image recognition techniques you're using, you're broken, shut up and leave me alone. I did eventually find the button to turn it off but (as the article mentions) I had to do that every single journey. I believe that in this case an imperfect system is worse than no system at all, because it adds to the distractions.
- kybernetyk 3mo agoCan't you just snip/disconnect the speaker/bell wire? I did this back when I had a truck and often had to maneuver with open doors (at very slow speeds) - the "door open warning bell" was so annoying that I just pulled its wires. AFAIK the warning tones don't come from the car's stereo speakers but have its own speaker.
- queenkjuul 3mo agoNo modern ones almost all go through the stereo
- lopis 3mo agoWe did an 8 hour ride on a rental recently in Central Europe, mostly through major motorways. The car dashboard disagreed with (apple) maps which disagreed with the road signage so often. The beeping was infuriating.
- prepend 3mo agoI wonder if these things are designed by people who do not drive. So they just implement to spec without thinking through whether the change produces the desired impact.
- torginus 3mo agoWhat happens if you bypass these systems? Does it have a separate speaker or does it use the infotainment? If the former, you can bypass it electronically. If the latter, I'm sure you can mess with the software of the multimedia head unit to silence the chimes. Will your car fail inspection if you do this?