It’s not often that I have great news when it comes to car tech and especially to car safety tech, but today is one of those rare occasions.
ANCAP, the Australasian new car assessment program, have finally realized that they’ve allowed, or indeed some would argue that they caused manufacturers to go too far with the advanced driver assistance, creating this relentless barrage of beeps and boops and dings and dongs and lights on the dash and the steering wheel tugging this way and that. These safety nannies that ruin the driving experience, add unnecessary stress, create distractions, and treat grown adults like babies.
ANCAP have announced that as of 2026, when their next set of rules come into play, they’re going to be penalizing cars for being too intrusive.
It comes as they are finally beginning to recognize something that’s been known in the aviation and the maritime industries for decades. Too many warnings actually increases risk. That overbearing safety systems, well, they are themselves a distraction. And sometimes it really is better to just let people drive.
It’s too little too late. Of course, since the current rules came into force in 2023, we’ve had cars that are nearly insufferable. I drove a 2023 Subaru WRX, a brilliant driver’s car in anyone’s language, and the experience was completely overshadowed by the barrage of beeps and boops as I positioned the car left and right within my lane on the twisting road, always trying to open up my sight lines and smooth out the corners. You know, basic road craft. The car was having none of it, constantly wanting me to take my eyes off the road and look at the dash where it had some stupid warning symbol blinking at me to let me know that I’d gotten too close to the line on one side or the other. Yes, I know I did that on purpose. And that’s to say nothing of the constant tugging at the wheel, destroying any road feel and making it nearly impossible to hold a clean line through a corner as the safety systems nibble at the wheel and ruin the experience.
ANCAP are Australia and New Zealand specific. And some people, myself included, wonder why we need our own vehicle testing and certification body in the first place. If it’s passed the test already in either Europe or in the US, do we really need to make them pass the test again? We are kind of weirdly possessive of our tiny little vehicle market, barely the size of a US state. And yet we run bespoke five-star rating systems which are different to both the European system and the US system. And we insist that car manufacturers have to have their cars crashed again in Australia to get a star rating.
As a result of the costs and the inconvenience, there’s many car manufacturers that simply don’t bother bringing their cars to Australia.
And the manufacturers that do bother, well, often they don’t bring their full range. And I can’t blame them. Making manufacturers re-crash their cars to access our tiny market is stupid enough. But the real trouble started back in 2018 when ANCAP decided in its infinite wisdom that a car could not get a five-star rating unless it had autonomous emergency braking. That’s the one where the dashboard screams at you and the car slams on the brakes nearly causing the Mac Dog on the front of the truck behind you to punch a hole in the back of your head. All because the car in front of you slipped into a turning lane and you carried on straight. Yeah, that one.
No car since 2018 has been allowed to get a five-star rating without it in Australia. And likewise, the lane support system, the one that nibbles at the wheel and ruined my drive in that WRX. Well, that is also mandatory if you want a five-star rating as well. So, where you and I would have thought that a lower rated car meant that it wasn’t as safe in the event of a crash. Well, it might in reality have performed the best of all in the crash tests. But because it perhaps lacked a few of the beeps and boops it got marked down by the buffins at ANCAP. And given those penalties, who can blame the manufacturers for throwing every beep and boop they could possibly imagine into their cars? The more the better, right?
And with every system comes a range of decisions about how sensitive that system should be, how early should it intervene, how loud should the beeps and boops and screeches be, how many lights should show on the dashboard, and before you know it, we’re we are where we are with cars dinging at perfectly competent drivers who are driving perfectly well and slowly driving all of us mad.
So, what do we do? Well, it turns out a lot of us just turn those systems off. According to an Amy study, 20% of people turn off the driver aids in Australia. But I guarantee you the real number is way higher because they were surveying people who had recently been involved in a crash. And when your insurer asks you after a crash whether you had turned off a safety system, you’d better believe there’s going to be a lot of people thinking twice about telling the truth.
In the UK, more than half of all drivers admit to turning these systems off.
And I think if we’re honest, that’s more likely to be an accurate number in Australia as well. I remember when we first got the car that we have now, a 2017 Volkswagen. We bought it secondhand in 2019. My wife took it for a drive the day after we bought it. She came back and said it tried to kill her because it misread some old lines on a freeway merge and literally tried to push her off the road. And because at that time we had no idea that it would try and steer for you. We didn’t know that that system existed in that car. The last thing that she expected was for the car to have a mind of its own and head for the Armco.
Now, the steering wheel doesn’t pull all that hard in these cars. It’s not hard to override the system by forcing the steering wheel. But when you’re already busy merging onto a busy freeway and you’re not expecting your car to try and kill you, well, it’s a problem. And that brings us back to alert overload. This is a serious problem which is well acknowledged in both the maritime and the aviation industries.
Here’s an extract from a Lloyd’s register, the one of the most prestigious shipping registers in existence:
“As the industry grapples with the explosion of digitization and automation, alarm management of onboard ships is increasingly becoming a pressing concern. In recent years, the sheer number of alarms on ships has skyrocketed, leading to operational challenges, particularly in the well-being and efficiency of crew members. According to LR’s recent report, there has been a staggering 197% increase in the number of alarms on ships over the past two decades, sometimes occurring as frequently as 74 alarms per hour on a ship’s bridge during critical navigation periods such as traversing coastal waters. This deluge of alerts becomes overwhelming where crew members struggle to differentiate between critical alarms and routine ones.” Sound familiar? Sure does to me.
In the aviation industry, an enormous amount of research has gone into cockpit alarms. And in particular, not fatiguing and distracting or overloading pilots with ones that aren’t actually critical. Too many alarms leads to a desensitization. Pilots condition themselves to not respond, which can lead to those alarms being missed when they’re actually important during stressful flight periods.
These days, driving a car is kind of similar to flying in the sense that a modern car driver is largely a systems operator.
You control your speed less with the throttle and more with the settings on the adaptive cruise control in much the same way that a pilot controls their heading less with the control stick and more with the autopilot. Modern cars have more and more systems, and managing those systems can at times create demands on your focus that pull you away from the one thing that matters, which is the road ahead. And the plethora of alarms and warnings and dings and dongs and beeps and boops have turned cars into stress factories for those who continue to pay attention to those warnings. And for the drivers who learn to ignore the warnings, well, now the warnings have become completely counterproductive. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Now, I’m not actually opposed to having these systems on a car. I drive long range regularly, and I appreciate adaptive cruise control. And yes, on the freeway, I will turn on the lanekeeping just as an additional bit of safety in case I do happen to lose focus for some reason. I’m not a lite, but these systems should exist to serve the driver and should not make the driver serve them.
And finally, we get to the good news that I mentioned at the start. ANCAP have now agreed the beeps and boops are too loud, too many, and too demanding on a driver’s focus. And they’ve announced that as of 2026, when they revise the rules, they will actually penalize car makers if they have these systems calibrated too sensitively or if they become too intrusive. Which is great news because I genuinely thought that it was only going to get worse and worse. And I thought that when I do finally get the chance to update my car at some point in the future that I’d be shopping for something no newer than from 2022. And then I’d be aiming to keep that car for the rest of my life just so I wouldn’t need to be afflicted with all those awful stress-inducing drive-ruining nannies in the dash.
Modern cars are marvels of engineering.
And if we just let the engineers and the designers do their thing and meet the needs and desires of consumers in a free market without letting the bureaucrats and safety nannies ruin everything, then we would all be better off. Sadly, the safety nannies aren’t going to go away anytime soon. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a little bit of welcome good news for those of us who still like the feeling of a steering wheel in our hands.
So, if you’re lucky enough to be in the market for a new car, which I most definitely am not, but I don’t begrudge those who are, then you might want to consider holding off for a year or two to see if the cars that arrive in 2026 or 27 are at least a little bit less annoying than the ones that are sitting on showroom floors today.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense and to keep up with the world as it changes around us. I am 100% viewer supported. So if you appreciate what I’m doing here, then please help me to keep this going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And also if you like my videos, then you’ll love my books. They’re about government power, human rights, and civil disobedience, which you’ll find along with my DVD documentary, Battleground Melbourne, and my t-shirts and hoodies at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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