Safety alerts and chimes are distracting drivers, and it’s becoming dangerous

I’ve spent a lot of time driving many different new vehicles over the last couple of months. Between the 4X4 of the Year test and multiple new model launches, I’ve sampled many new 4x4s and have been reacquainted with some old favourites.

One stand out from driving all these different new 4x4s is that the newer they get, the more annoying and distracting chimes they emit. While vehicle manufacturers and do-gooders like to warn us about the dangers of distracted driving, and are happy to point the blame at drivers themselves, the onus should be on the vehicle companies and the distractions they create.

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The chimes, bleeps, buzzers and bongs that come from the dash of these new vehicles has become so relentless that I’ve had to teach myself to tune out from them; I reckon they have become the biggest distractions of all when they prompt the driver to take his/her eyes off the road ahead to see what the warning is for.

When you hear a warning chime you look down at the dash which is a complex array of lights and information, some of them miniscule and not always obvious. If you paid heed to all of them you would never have the time to look at the road ahead, in which case you’d really hope the autonomous systems would do their job in preventing you from running into something while you are looking at the dash.

Perhaps that is why many new vehicles have that little widget in the gauges in front of the driver to show where the vehicle is sitting in the lane. It’s a symbol of the vehicle with lines either side of it representing the lane, and they light up and warn you when you drift one way or the other. The widget mimics the image you have out through the windscreen, which is far a far better indicator of where you actually are than if you’re looking down at the stupid dashboard!

Heaven forbid that the distracting warning should be about anything important!

Then you get in the LandCruiser 76 Series or the Ineos Grenadier, which have very limited levels of safety tech. The Ineos has almost none (for the time being), while the LandCruiser just has a lane-keeping assist that occasionally pulls the vehicle back into the centre of the lane with an autonomous application of the brakes, but for the most part these are non-intrusive systems. More importantly, the LandCruiser has great visibility out of its deep windscreen and side windows, so you’ll see any potential hazards in the real world, with your own eyes, not on the dash!

Modern safety tech saves lives, there’s no denying that, but loading vehicles up with excessive tech just because it exists will prove more hazardous than not having any of that tech at all.