Motorists are ignoring — even deactivating —
one high-tech safety system they tend to find ‘annoying’
By Jim Gorzelany
CTW Features
Heralded as a major advance in auto safety when they debuted on a handful of luxury cars a decade ago, lane departure warning systems are now widely offered on a variety of new vehicles. They’re intended to help inattentive, occupied or just plain dozy drivers from inadvertently allowing their cars to drift across lane markers and potentially get into crashes with other vehicles.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C., says such systems can reduce the number of lane- and road-departure crashes by 26.1 percent and the number of seriously injured drivers by 20.7 percent. That is, if motorists are bothering to pay attention, or they haven’t switched off their cars’ lane-departure systems in the meantime.
In a recent study of Honda models brought in for service at dealerships in Germantown, Maryland and Alexandria, Virginia, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), also in Arlington, discovered that two-thirds of the 184 models with lane departure warning systems came into the shop with that feature disabled, which easily is accomplished via a dashboard- or console-mounted switch. By comparison, only one driver had disabled his or her car’s forward collision warning system (it sounds an alert if the car is closing in on another vehicle or other obstruction too quickly).
In earlier surveys, the IIHS determined that only 13 percent of those driving Dodge, Jeep and Toyota vehicles said they always left their lane departure warning systems operational, while a quarter of Volvo owners and 41 percent of Infiniti owners found the lane departure alerts to be “annoying.”
“Lane departure warning has the potential to prevent a lot of the most serious crashes,” says Ian Reagan, an IIHS senior research scientist. “However, if people consider it a turn-signal nanny, they may not accept the feature.”
Here’s how the system works: Cameras aimed at the road monitor lane markers and sound both an audible and visual alert if the car is crossing them unless the turn signals are engaged, which is what a prudent driver would do before purposefully changing lanes. Unfortunately, many motorists neglect to signal their intent to change lanes when there are few (if any) other vehicles within proximity, which results in an abundance of alerts that may be perceived as false alarms. Poor weather and ill-marked roads, combined with sharp curves and stretches of narrow lanes further contribute to what drivers interpret as spurious warnings.
General Motors takes a seat-of-the-pants approach to such warnings with its novel Safety Alert Seat that’s available in Cadillac models and a few other General Motors vehicles. Here the system engages “buzzing” pulse patterns on the left or right side of the cushion when the car is drifting beyond the highway markers on that side of the car. It works well enough, but the warnings might be a bit too subtle for their own good; they’re more easily ignored than the typical shrill audible warnings, and to some it may just feel like the car is riding over pavement irregularities or rumble strips.
Second-generation lane departure systems go a step further and automatically employ braking and/or steering intervention to help “nudge” a wandering car back into the center of a lane if its drifted across the markers. Lane departure intervention is one of the technologies upon which tomorrow’s self-driving cars will be built.
At that, some drivers no doubt will find this variation to be even more grating despite the fact that, according to NHTSA, they have the potential to reduce the number of lane- or road-departure crashes by 51.0 percent and the number of serious injuries by 45.9 percent.
Of course, if the system is switched off before hitting the highway, its effectiveness is reduced to zero.
© CTW Features
