Six in ten Australian drivers turn off annoying and nannying driver assist systems in their cars. But why? And what can be done to improve it?
Let me take you back a quarter of a century.
As we shifted millenniums and entered the year 2000, Sydney was hosting the Olympics, Eminem and Coldplay occupied the radio, you were addicted to playing Snake on your Nokia dumbphone, and 9/11 was only the name of a sportscar, not a world-shifting event.
Speaking of cars, there’s a school of thought that the turn of the century was an absolute peak for automobiles, and it’s gone downhill ever since.
How so? Well, our cars weren’t mobile computers hell bent, it seems, on constantly telling us off.
By the year 2000, combustion engines – petrol and diesel – were pumping out big power and torque numbers without any hybrid/electric assistance. Reliability and fuel economy was markedly better than previous decades, and, for the driving enthusiast, there were countless powertrains rich with personality, emotion and proper noise.
From the Honda S2000’s four-pot VTEC to a BMW M3’s 3.2-litre straight-six; a Ferrari 360’s high-revving 3.6-litre to GM’s bent-eight in the reborn Holden Monaro, these were “proper” engines and available with three pedals and a stick you’d shift yourself. High days indeed.
SEE MORE: Car news
Hop in a MY2000 car today and it feels like a different species. You mechanics working on such cars back then must almost cry at how relatively simple and straightforward most of it was.
But today we’re overrun with hybrid and electric motors and batteries, double-clutch or CVT gearboxes (often fragile), ludicrous amounts of complicated tech and touchscreen controls, and an uncontrolled barrage of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems – ADAS.
I can almost hear the collective groan from you readers. Anyone driving or working on a vehicle made in the past five years will be familiar with these driver aids. While fitted for the right reasons (to reduce accidents and the road toll), they’ve become Big Brother-like in their control, tellings-off and incessant beeping and bonging.
Big Brother is watching
It all started so well. When I began testing cars for a living (coincidentally, also in the year 2000), the only real driver aids were anti-lock brakes. I remember my first drive in a car with traction and stability control – a BMW M Roadster – and as with ABS, we should all agree such assistance has proved an overall positive.
Then came other unquestionably useful stuff like reversing cameras and blind-spot monitors.
They made sense.
But what’s followed has seen cars of today become over-nannying nightmares, turning what should be pleasant drives into irritating stress-fests. I don’t know about you, but I get told off enough at home. I don’t need my car doing likewise.
Biggest offenders include lane keep assist, driver monitoring and speed sign recognition. Some are so over-sensitive, or so prone to mistakes, they prove distracting enough to actually make driving more difficult and, perversely, more dangerous.
But not all ADAS is created equal.
Some manufacturers calibrate it well, others seem to just sling in as many aids as they can without bothering to check if it’s functioning coherently. Many of the recently-arrived Chinese brands have been most guilty.
I’ve literally pulled hair out testing cars from GWM, Deepal, Chery and Leapmotor – there’s a bong, buzz or beep if you dare go 1km/h over the limit, get near a white line or take eyes off the road to use the touchscreen… usually because I’m trying to disable the dictator-like ADAS.
Legacy brands haven’t been blameless either. Mercedes-Benz’s early lane keeping efforts would aggressively brake the inside wheels to almost shock the driver into lane perfection. Subaru, Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Kia have also gone heavy on the tellings off, and I’ve heard from countless car buyers who’ve outright rejected such cars due to the annoyances on test drives.
A change for the better?
Common sense is creeping back. Australia’s independent safety authority, ANCAP, has long penalised new vehicles for not featuring driver assist systems, such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB).
For 2026, ANCAP assures us it’s now going to more exhaustively test a new car’s ADAS robustness. It correctly states: “Driver monitoring should support the driver, not irritate them. The car shouldn’t add to distraction or frustration.”
As for the nannying lane-keeping tech, ANCAP says this “shouldn’t be intrusive or obvious,” and will now take each car it tests onto public roads for real-world assessments, where efficacy of speed sign recognition will also be monitored.
Such a response is desperately needed. A recent survey has shown six in ten Australian drivers turn off annoying driver assist systems, defeating the point of manufacturers fitting such potentially life-saving tech.
The survey was conducted by IAG, Australia and New Zealand’s largest general insurance company with brands such as NRMA Insurance and RACV. This was ahead of a year-long ADAS study by IAG, partnering with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and iMOVE, Australia’s national centre for transport and mobility research and development.
This field study of 60 drivers, which began in January 2026, takes place at Brisbane’s Mount Cotton testing facility. It seeks to learn how Aussie drivers interact with ADAS, and how we can better realise its life-saving potential, and why it’s so far failed to reduce road accidents despite it being ubiquitous in new cars.
SEE MORE: Car news
As a general insurance company, it’s in IAG’s interests to bring down the number of crashes on our roads. “ADAS has got to be a good coach and not an annoying schoolmaster,” said IAG Research Centre Head Shawn Ticehurst.
“Not all (ADAS) systems are equal, but I’m really pleased to see a lot of car companies are now saying they’ve got to calibrate their ADAS for Australian roads.”
IAG’s initial findings revealed some shocking statistics. From the over 2000 Aussie drivers who responded, two in five (43 per cent) said ADAS had negatively impacted their driving, while more than a third found ADAS distracting and sometimes made driving more dangerous. Little wonder the majority choose to disable some or all the systems.
“People are frustrated,” Ticehurst said. “But we really want to understand are there some things about driving skill that perhaps needs to change too? It (the ADAS) might remind me, you know what, I should have put my indicator on when I was coming off the motorway.”
And here’s the rub. While we may find ADAS annoying, is it merely pointing out that our driving skills, concentration and road rule following isn’t up to scratch? In theory, an excellent ADAS system should be assisting us, and if that means the occasional wrist slap to make us less likely to have an accident, that seems a fair compromise.
“If a driver doesn’t accept, doesn’t use or doesn’t understand what benefit can be provided by the driving assistance, they’re not going to use it,” Ticehurst explained. “One of the outcomes of the study is how do we define helpful training material for the driver. How can we give them a better understanding of the safety benefits?”
The ADAS conundrum
I observed some of the testing at Mount Cotton, where a Ford Everest, Mercedes-Benz GLC and BYD Atto 3 had their ADAS sampled by participants. Some were experiencing AEB, rear-cross-traffic alert and lane-keep assist for the first time, as such things were near non-existent in cars ten years ago.
As a first-of-kind study, the research project findings will be shared with governments and regulators, said Professor in Intelligent Transportation Systems at QUT, Sebastien Glaser.
“This will provide evidence for regulators to make informed decisions about ADAS, driver training, and behaviour change.”
It’s much needed. The initial IAG survey showed 70 per cent of drivers would welcome more information on how to best use ADAS, and half the responders said their ADAS learnings came only from trial-and-error.
It also revealed the driver assist considered most helpful were blind spot warning and forward collision warning.
Least useful were driver monitoring/fatigue protection, road sign recognition and, unsurprisingly, wheel-tugging lane keep assist.
“Alerts can confuse people, and repeated warnings or steering interventions can lead to annoyance and distrust,” explained Glaser.
“Manufacturers face a difficult balance: should a system overreact and sometimes brake unnecessarily, or risk not braking when it’s most needed?”
The overarching goal is for the research to help play a role in reducing accidents through improving ADAS and the way drivers use it. These assist systems are here to stay – like it or not – so if they can function in better harmony with the driver, and prove less annoying, we’d all welcome that.
After all, with such advanced camera, radar and LiDAR-based technology in most modern cars, crashes and the road toll should be plunging. Yet 2024 saw Australia’s highest number of road deaths since 2012, with 1300 lives lost. Most sane people acknowledge something must be done.
And as I test yet another new car model and get besieged by beeps, bongs, flashes and wheel tugs, ADAS improvements can’t come quickly enough.
