BMW

BMW drivers seem to be on their phones an awful lot for a car with no signal

Alt punchline: Of course, he gave no signal that he was changing jobs.

I don’t signal because it’s none of your business where I’m going!

I own a BMW EV. The latest update dialed the “lane correction” to 11. If you do not use your signal light before exiting or switching lanes, the vehicle will steer you back in your lane. It is the most aggressive “lane correct” default behaviour of any vehicle I’ve driven so far, almost as if BMW knows what is required to train their drivers.

The biggest problem is when they don’t indicate when they’re changing road. They’ll be driving along and suddenly they’ll slam on their brakes and turn left, zero warning.

They’re absolutely a nightmare on roundabouts. You have no idea where they’re going, so you have to just sit there until they’ve left, it’s the only safe way to handle them.

Probably not to the same level of lane-correct-agressiveness, but my SIL’s Volkswagen’s lane correct is insane. The roads around here aren’t great, and it will often detect random streaks or lines of potholes as a lane and refuse to allow you to avoid them. Once an elk ran in front of the car and when my brother tried to swerve to avoid the damn car fought him so hard we only narrowly missed it. And at other times when on roads with no lane markings at all it randomly decides that the road isn’t the road, and that ditch over there is the lane we’re supposed to be in.

All that said, it works great most of the time, and we just turn it off if it’s acting hinkey

I find this is all cars. They’ll either not indicate or indicate a ms before making a move. It’s as though they don’t understand they’re indicating for others benefit.

Is this real or a joke? It reads like the “if you don’t use the turn signal the car doesn’t turn” meme.

the problem with “most of the time” is that it only takes one car accident to be the last car ride you ever take

Unironically I had a cab driver tell me he doesn’t indicate because then nobody would let him get over.

The only people who reliably use their blinkers over here are vehicles so big nobody dare block them.

It"s real. You can disable it, but it is on by default.

Props to BMW for that. Obnoxious but evidently entirely necessary.

Which is a great argument for why F1 drivers should not use it, but most people are terrible at driving and probably risk much more with it off than with it on.

Badly worded. A potential rewrite:

He, of course, did not signal his intent to anyone.

They are listed as indicators as well. And that’s exactly what it means when you are changing lanes, indicating what your intent is to others around you.

Is spot on

I almost hit pedestrians (twice!) because our Hyundai Kona re-enables the lane correction thing at each boot (I don’t know how to say “boot” but for cars, in english. But you get the gist). And I forget it’s there, and it’s literally life-threatening.

(there are no curbs here, pedestrians have to walk on the roads)

He didn’t even blink before leaving.

Frankly, they shouldn’t be driving at all if they need something like that to drive safely day to day. The bar for being allowed to drive is way too low IMO (and I thought this before seeing you say that and realizing you might be right about that).

My thought after hearing about a lane assist that will fight you if you don’t signal is when I leave my lane without signaling, it means I really need to be out of that lane and not fighting some safety system that works on the assumption that unusual things don’t happen. Even during usual situations, it just sounds like a feature that encourages paying less attention.

Makes me glad to have a car where the most it does to “help” is traction control. Hell, even the ABS seems to be tuned for pavement rather than snow/ice and I had to learn to not trust it to help stop in those conditions and instead pump the breaks.