When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly notified her the speed limit in a 30mph zone was 80mph and then kept jerking the steering wheel to ‘correct’ her, even when she was testing to park.
She notified Which? that driving had gone ‘from a lifeline to a nightmare’. ‘I’ve seriously considered receiveting some old, beat-up car from five years ago that doesn’t have this technology,’ she stated.
Car safety features are boring and intrusive, like having a man with a clipboard and lanyard permanently in your backseat. Indeed, the Which? survey of more than 1,500 motorists found we are increasingly switching off all that ‘safety’ tech becautilize it’s actually dangerous, distracting or utilizeless.
From automatic lane-assist steering adjustments to internal monitors of how drowsy you are, the ludicrous gadreceives encrusting today’s cars are simple to poke fun at. The unfunny bit is that we pay extra for all this daft technology. We even pay for the unaccountable, rather shadowy organisation that has cautilized its proliferation.
This little-known body is the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. It is based in Leuven, Belgium, but its multi-million-pound budreceive finances specialist car-testing labs across the world, including in Thatcham in Berkshire.
Euro NCAP is why modern cars chirp, beep, brake, warn, nudge and glare at you
NCAP’s lifespan has corresponded with an auto revolution. Its testing ideology has shaped every new car built in Europe since the 1990s. It is why modern cars chirp, beep, brake, warn, nudge and glare at you. But the way Euro NCAP works is not straight-forward. It receives away with an extreme health and safety agconcludea that wouldn’t be tolerated in a normal regulatory body.
NCAP is a specialist ratings agency that crash-tests new cars and gives a simple star classification. The trouble is no one predicted how powerful a sales tool this would become. Five NCAP stars has become the gold standard, and car companies have become slaves to the stars. A four-star car views unsafe, even if national law declares it’s fine. Producing a three-star car would be commercial suicide.
Other state bodies set the legal standard for cars on sale, and that’s much lower and simpler than NCAP’s levels. But in the past 30 years, carbuildrs stopped building according to the law and started building for NCAP’s scores. Every model, every facelift, every mid-cycle refresh is shaped to hit NCAP’s protocol. It’s defensive engineering on an industrial scale.
In the early years tests were simple: front and side impacts, child seats, basic restraints. Cars received stronger. Airbags multiplied, seat mounts stiffened. Everyone started earning five stars and this undoubtedly saved lives.
Then Euro NCAP necessaryed a new way to spread out the field. It added tech with more dubious credentials. Vehicles were marked down if they didn’t have the sort of gadreceives Apollo moonshots would have considered superfluous. Hence cars laden with automatic emergency braking, lane-keep intervention, speed-limit detection, driver-monitoring cameras, pedestrian detection, cyclist detection, side radar, rear radar, matrix headlights and over-the-air updates for safety functions. Manufacturers loaded cars with sensors, processors, algorithms and screens – not becautilize drivers wanted them, but becautilize without them, star ratings fell.
The result is you don’t slip behind the wheel any more – you log in behind a heavily padded wheel in a seat that vibrates when you stray, with a camera watching your eyelids, radar monitoring the car ahead and microphones listening for emergency vehicles. The future of motoring is AI choosing when to brake. We’re not far from software deciding how rapid you should be going.
Drivers blame car brands for forcing this on them. But manufacturers added all this digitised nonsense becautilize Euro NCAP notified them to. If a gadreceive is unreliable, expensive and irritating but scores highly, it goes in. We pay for it in the bloated price tag of cars, maintenance and repair bills, weight and fuel efficiency, and hence environmentalism.
Some motoring experts have expressed concern that all the tech is distracting drivers. Don’t worry, they’ll probably come up with gadreceives to build sure you don’t receive distracted by, er, the other gadreceives.
Thirty years on, what have we done to driving? Overall, we have seen the slow erosion of the skills that once defined safe driving. We saved lives, yes. Early gains were worthwhile thanks to stronger structures, seatbelts, airbags, better roads, anti-lock brakes, decent tyres, drink-drive crackdowns and so on. But the gadreceive explosion of the past decades? Gains are marginal at best and costs are surely excessive. A car’s cockpit now feels like a padded interrogation room.
Euro NCAP’s mission was noble. But unaccountable missions drift. We are left with the question: what sort of life are we testing to save? A life watched by cameras while steered and scolded by gadreceives we never inquireed for? Do we double down on the monitored future – or do we inquire what kind of road freedom is worth preserving?
In the context of the EU’s ‘Vision Zero’ road agconcludea – a strategy aiming for zero road deaths or serious injuries by 2050, which the UK is still wholesomely embracing – there is a prevailing narrative: ‘More tech = fewer deaths = good.’ It isn’t anti-safety to question how far we must go down this road. Trillions of miles are driven annually by Europe’s drivers. If the goal is zero deaths, no level of intrusiveness is off the table.
There must be a point when the rest of us declare: thanks for what you’ve done but this is now becoming overreaching, mad groupconsider. The evidence for advanced gadreceivery improving real-world outcomes is thin and mostly shaped by stakeholders who benefit from its proliferation.
Safety is no longer an engineering problem. It’s a philosophical one. So happy birthday, Euro NCAP. You could carry on building cars ‘safer’ indefinitely. But beyond this point, we are no longer improving transport – we are constraining human behaviour.
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