EU Nanny State on Wheels: My Car Thinks I’m an Idiot

Right, let’s get one thing straight. I am all for safety. Seatbelts? Fantastic invention. Airbags? Superb. Crumple zones? A work of engineering genius. But what I am not for, what I will never be for, is being treated like a dribbling simpleton every time I climb aboard my own motor car. And yet, thanks to the meddling bureaucrats in Brussels, that’s precisely what’s happened. My car has been transformed into a nagging, beeping, self-righteous busybody.

This is all thanks to a fresh set of EU regulations, the General Safety Regulation 2 (GSR2), which came into force for all new cars from July 2024. The stated goal is, of course, a noble one: to slash road accidents and save lives, with predictions of preventing over 25,000 deaths by 2038. But in their relentless pursuit of “Vision Zero,” they’ve overlooked a rather crucial component of the entire driving equation: the person behind the wheel.

A Symphony of Stupidity

Settle into the driver’s seat of a brand-new car, and you’re immediately assaulted by a symphony of bongs, bings, and chimes before you’ve even selected a gear. It’s like finding yourself in a hospital intensive care unit, only without the pleasant haze of morphine. The chief offender in this orchestra of annoyance is the Intelligent Speed Assistance, or ISA. A more infuriating piece of technology has never been conceived.

Here’s the theory: the car uses cameras to spot speed limit signs and combines this with GPS data to “know” the local limit. The moment—and I mean the very millisecond—you creep 1 km/h over that decreed speed, it begins. BING! A light flashes on the dashboard. Persist, and you might get a little tremor through the accelerator or even have the car actively push back against your foot. It’s the automotive equivalent of having a perpetually nervous passenger who won’t stop jabbing you in the ribs and pointing at the speedometer.

The most brilliant part? It’s frequently wrong. You’ll be cruising along a motorway at the national speed limit, and it will spot a 30 km/h sign on a distant slip road or on the back of truck and have a complete and utter meltdown. It’s a system so intelligent it can’t distinguish between a major arterial road and a sleepy village lane or a truck.

The Unwanted Backseat Driver

Then we have the Lane Keeping Assist. This is supposed to be your guardian angel, gently nudging you back into line if you start to wander. A fine idea in principle. Except, when you deliberately move to the edge of your lane to give a cyclist a wide, safe berth or to avoid a pothole the size of a small badger, the car, in its infinite electronic wisdom, decides you’ve made a terrible error and yanks the wheel. It’s a constant, unnerving fight for who’s actually in charge.

And don’t get me started on the Advanced Emergency Braking. Yes, in theory, it’s a lifesaver. But it also has a terrifying habit of seeing ghosts. A plastic bag drifting across the tarmac? Full emergency stop! The shadow of a low-flying pheasant? SLAM! The anchors are deployed with such violence you’d think you’d hit a brick wall, all while a 40-tonne lorry is trying to get intimately acquainted with your boot.

A Glimmer of Common Sense and the Illusion of Choice

“Well,” you might be thinking, “just turn it all off!” And you can. But here we encounter the masterstroke of bureaucratic buffoonery: these systems are mandated to be active every single time you start the car. Disabling them is a maddening ritual of navigating through touchscreen menus, a process that is not only a colossal faff but also a dangerous distraction from, you know, driving.

But wait, a flicker of hope has emerged from an unlikely place: Dacia. The Romanian budget brand, bless their cotton socks, have looked at this EU-mandated nonsense and devised a brilliant, simple solution. They’ve introduced a physical button called the ‘My Safety’ switch. With a couple of presses, you can recall your own personalised settings, instantly turning off the cacophony of unwanted “helpers”. It’s a beautifully simple workaround to the EU’s stupidity. Finally, a carmaker that trusts the driver. Of course, all the other manufacturers will follow suit, which means we’ll have gone through this whole rigmarole just to end up with a button that does what should have been possible in the first place: letting the driver decide.

Conclusion: A Cure Worse Than the Disease?

Look, the intention to make roads safer is a good one. No one can argue with that. But by drowning the driver in a relentless torrent of notifications, warnings, and interventions, the EU has created a dangerous situation. You’re either so irritated by the constant noise that you start to ignore everything, or you become so reliant on the electronic nannies that you forget the fundamental skills of driving.

They have created a system that is, frankly, distracting and unsafe. We are being nagged into submission, our attention diverted from the road to the dashboard. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and right now, it’s a road filled with beeping, flashing, self-steering cars being driven by people who are slowly, but surely, being driven completely mad. And that, I’m afraid, is not progress.

PS: It is clear that car manufacturers can’t be that dumb. So the Toyota that I wrote about earlyer, can’t be that stupidly build with that annoying alerts. Now we have an answer to all those warnings.