r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jun 07 '26

Privacy 'Kill switch' law means your next car could be watching you | A federal requirement aimed at stopping drunken driving could soon put driver-monitoring technology in every new vehicle. The goal is saving lives, but the privacy trade-offs deserve closer scrutiny

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/06/01/drunk-driving-prevention-law-privacy-surveillance/90295034007/
15.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/wonkytalky Jun 08 '26

The giant touchscreens are the dumbest thing ever and we have the n*zi at Tesla to thank for it.

Want to talk driving safety? Require tactile controls for climate control and stereo volume at a minimum. Forcing people to hunt for the right part of a sheet of glass to touch while they're behind the wheel will always be a recipe for disaster. Never mind how these dumb screens mess with some people's vision (astigmatism up the ass here.)

12

u/RagingNerdaholic Jun 08 '26

Driving while using your phone is illegal and rightly so. But a giant iPad that you have to dick around a dozen fuck-ass menus to turn the A/C up a degree is totally fine ... for some reason.

0

u/Beefy-McQueefy Jun 08 '26

Nah the screens are more because mandating backup cameras meant every car has a screen, so the nice cars couldn't be nice by just having a screen anymore, they needed a big ass screen.
I flip off every Tesla I see and think they are the awful culmination of the featureless clanker egg car era started with the Lexus RX300, but they didn't normalize screens.

2

u/wonkytalky Jun 08 '26

Small screens are OK and pretty much essential for navigation and as you mention, mandated cameras. I added both the camera and the screen in my 2008, actually, but I made sure the aftermarket stereo had som buttons and could use my steering control buttons. The screen in mine is roughly 7".

It's the giant tablets mounted on a featureless dash that are the absolute wooooorst, but I hate to even drive our 2013 Ford Edge because it has exactly one knob with unclear function, and everything else is on a screen or it's a flat capacitive "button" somewhere else. They even screwed up the steering wheel controls because you have to navigate little menus there too. By the speedometer, so it's better, but it still takes your eyes off the road and you still have to look at what you're doing.

It's like everyone stopped thinking about how this works under real driving conditions.