Somewhere in the past decade, a collection of decisions were made across virtually every manufacturer simultaneously, decisions that have transferred control of the driving experience away from the driver and handed it to software engineers, marketing departments and regulatory compliance teams. What follows is an honest accounting of what that has produced.
Driver monitoring that treats you like a suspect
Let us start with the one that actually makes driving more dangerous, not less.
The systems marketed as attention assistance operate on a simple and insulting premise: the car assumes you are distracted until proven otherwise. Look at a pedestrian on the pavement for slightly longer than the algorithm permits and the car shouts at you. Move your eyes to check a junction and it shouts at you again. Take one hand off the wheel for a moment and it shouts at you some more. Meanwhile, you are reacting to the car shouting at you instead of watching the road, which is the specific outcome the system was designed to prevent.
Lane keep assist compounds this. In the genuine overtaking manoeuvre, the car fights you. You have assessed the road, judged the gap, committed to passing the vehicle ahead, and your car decides this is the moment to resist your steering inputs and drag you back toward the white line you are trying to cross. The white line does not know a lorry is approaching at 70mph. You do. The car does not care. You have to physically overpower the system to do what you already decided was safe, which means your attention is now divided between the road and arguing with the steering wheel.
We wrote about Euro NCAP overhauling their testing protocols to penalise excessive alerts, and we stand by our assessment that it is long overdue. The industry has spent years installing systems that cry wolf so often their warnings become meaningless, and then wondering why drivers switch them off. Nearly a third disable these systems entirely because the false alerts are constant. A system that is switched off saves nobody.
Touchscreens for everything
The temperature in this car is controlled by a menu. Adjusting it requires you to look away from the road, find the right area of the glass panel, press it accurately while the car is moving, wait for it to respond, and then return your eyes to what is in front of you. In the car you drove ten years ago, you turned a knob by feel without looking. The knob is gone because glass looks better in a press photograph and costs less to manufacture at scale. You have been made less safe so the interior looks cleaner in the brochure.
The same applies to the volume control, the fan speed, the seat heating, the mirror adjustment and in some vehicles the indicator stalk, which has been replaced by a capacitive touch area that requires you to look at it. The indicator. The most frequently used primary control on the vehicle. A touch panel.
Subscriptions for things that already exist in the car
The hardware is installed. The sensors are fitted. The software is running. You simply have not paid the monthly fee to unlock the function that is physically present in the vehicle you own. Heated seats as a subscription. Remote updates that remove features until you pay. Performance upgrades that exist on the chip but require payment to activate. This is not innovation. It is the deliberate crippling of a product you have already purchased, followed by a charge to restore it to the condition it should have been in when you bought it.
Fake engine sounds
We covered the Mercedes-AMG GT's elaborate system for generating a synthetic V8 experience in a car that has no V8. Over 1,600 recorded audio samples, a simulated gearbox that does not exist, vibrating seats, a fake tachometer. This was presented as a feature. The seat vibration is described in the press materials as immersive. What it actually describes is a car company that knows it has removed something fundamental and is attempting to patch the gap with a recording. Ferrari at least had the engineering honesty to amplify actual motor vibrations rather than play back samples. The AMG approach treats the absence of soul as a content production problem.
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Electric door handles
The door handle has been a solved problem for approximately a century. You pull it, the door opens. Now it is an electric actuator with a motor, a sensor, a circuit board and a failure mode. In cold weather it freezes. In hot weather the mechanism expands. When the battery dies, you cannot open the door from outside. When the actuator fails, you pay a bodyshop rate for a component that previously cost nothing to replace. The flush aesthetic that required this engineering is the same flush aesthetic that makes the car difficult to enter in a car park while holding shopping. The solution to a problem that did not exist has created several problems that do.
Updates delivered over the air that change the car you bought
You agreed to terms and conditions that permit the manufacturer to alter your vehicle remotely. Your car is now software as much as it is hardware, and software is updated by the company that wrote it, not by you. This has produced incidents in which features present at purchase were subsequently removed. It has also produced updates that introduced new faults. The relationship between manufacturer and owner has been redefined. You have not bought a thing. You have bought a licence to use a thing, subject to revision.
Autonomous cars
They will arrive, in some form, eventually. The question is why anyone with the slightest interest in driving would want them. The entire argument for the autonomous car rests on the premise that the journey is an inconvenient obstacle between two places you would rather be, and that surrendering control to software is preferable to the act of driving. If that is your relationship with driving, the train already exists and does the job better. It has more legroom, you can read, it runs on a track so the navigation is handled, and you do not need to park it at the other end.
The people who enjoy driving do not enjoy it despite the engagement required. They enjoy it because of it. The car as a context for autonomous transportation is a very expensive and technically complex solution to a problem that public transport has already solved. The car as a driver's machine is something else entirely, and that is the thing being removed.
Everything beeping at everything
The reversing sensor. The proximity alert. The collision warning. The lane departure chime. The attention warning. The speed limit notification. The seatbelt reminder that fires even when the belt is fastened. The door open alert. The low fuel warning that activates forty miles before anything needs to happen. The notification that your tyre pressure has deviated by two PSI. The sound that tells you a car passed you on the motorway.
All of these alerts exist individually for a reason. Installed together, they produce a vehicle that is making noise at the driver constantly, which means the driver has learned to filter all of it out, which means the one alert that actually matters has the same response rate as the seventeen alerts that did not. The engineers who designed each system were responding to a genuine safety consideration. Nobody stood back and looked at what all of them together produced, which is a cabin so full of notifications that the word emergency has lost its meaning.
The size of everything
The Volkswagen Golf has grown with every generation until the Mk8 is 250mm longer than the original. The Ford Explorer that fits in an American parking space no longer fits in a British car park with several levels. The kerbs of every city on earth carry the scratch marks of wheels that belong to vehicles that were designed for roads two sizes larger. The parking space was built for the previous generation. The current generation was not. The cars will keep growing as long as crash test regulations reward mass and height, and the cities will keep being incompatible with them.
We are not asking for much. We want to drive our cars. We want to look where we choose to look. We want the controls to be where our hands are. We want the door to open when we pull the handle. We want the temperature adjusted by turning something rather than navigating a screen. We want the lane to be ours to leave when we decide to leave it.
The car was supposed to be freedom of movement. Most of what is on this list is the industry deciding, one system at a time, that drivers cannot be trusted with it.
Sources
- GaukMotorBuzz prior coverage — The end of bings and bongs? Euro NCAP overhauls ADAS testing (see our Euro NCAP 2026 piece)
- GaukMotorBuzz prior coverage — Mercedes just played a recording of a soul and called it a car (AMG GT fake V8)
- Jalopnik QOTD — These Are The Worst Current Automotive Trends, According To You
- Euro NCAP 2026 protocol announcement — euroncap.com
- Which? — Subscription car features survey