What safety features do you deem to be useless or even unsafe?

Please help keep AskUK welcoming!

• Top-level comments to the OP must contain genuine efforts to answer the question. No jokes, judgements, etc.

• Don't be a dick to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.

• This is a strictly no-politics subreddit!

Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

I came on to also say lane assist mixed alongside brake assist.

In my last car, I used to drive up a specific road with parked cars along the side. I’d pull out to overtake them but my lane assist would push me back into them. Then my brake assist would kick in and slam on

Plug protectors for kids. Actively less safe than just leaving the plug open.

Im slightly embarassed i dont know the name for them but those chicanes that block one lane of traffic and give the other lane right of way that you then have to pull into the opposite lane to clear. They are supposed to calm traffic and yet about 50% of the time I find myself having to brake sharply when it's my right of way because some bozo thinks they can get round in time or they're just following the car in front without looking.

The thousands of flashing blindingly bright lights on highway maintenance equipment.

I understand the reason for them, but it makes driving past them safely very difficult. I can see nothing as I am blinded.

I remember seeing a sticker which said “This a glass wall. Do not walk into it. Use the door on the left”

… but it was on the top right corner out of normal viewing.

A lot of public buildings now have braille safety signs, which is great if the following two conditions are met:

They're placed at a height anybody might look to feel for a safety sign.

Blind people have some reason to expect there will be a safety sign.

These two conditions are never met.

We hired a car whilst on holiday (in the UK) and it had brake assist and steering assist (we didn’t know) it kept an activating on the little wiggly country roads we were driving along. It was so dangerous and could only be disabled by delving into the on board computer every time we stared the engine. It drove us away from the banks at the side of the road and into the far side on blind bends. I phoned the rental company to say the car had a fault only to be told it was a feature …

auto/manual-adjusting headlights.

I remember the old days when you could drive at night without having the eyeballs burnt out of your skull because some nimrod forgot to re-adjust their headlights to dipped following them traversing a 400 yard stretch of b road.

Those kids safety plug socket covers that you plug in. We have the safest plugs in the world and plugging these in opens the flaps for live and neutral making it far more dangerous for kiddies

Not safety features, but touch screen infotainment systems. No different to using a phone mounted on a phone holder. So distracting and just as dangerous as a phone

Oh my god yes! My car does this (VW Golf) and it is infuriating!! That and the auto brakes - why does it need to absolutely slam the brakes on when it’s invariably a bush or something?! On a couple of occasions I’ve been trying to pull out of somewhere that has a dip in the road and the sensor must be positioned in a way that it sees the road coming towards it as a hazard and absolutely slams the brakes on - I’ve had a car nearly go into the side of me because my car won’t move while I’m trying to pull out of somewhere!

I work in software and password safety is unsafe.

Passwords that are too complex, insisting on periodic changes, banning previous passwords from 10 years ago, etc. makes people write them on a post-it note and stick it on their monitor.

Not sure it’s technically a safety feature, but I find the delivery PIN system to be flawed, all it basically does is tell the delivery driver there is something worth nicking in the package.

You give the PIN generally without being able to check what’s actually inside, if it’s not the item the supplier says “you supplied the PIN, you are therefore liable”.

My car is one of those Muskmobiles so the list is as long as your arm of what is unsafe.

The worst one for me though is something called obstacle-aware acceleration. With this enabled the car can intercept the rate of acceleration if it thinks you’re at risk of driving into the back of something. So what might look like a nice juicy gap to pull out into can become decidedly dicey if the car decides that actually you can’t go full beans.

Best way to describe it is a bit like turbo lag, or when a turbo is failing on a car and you get a dip in power just when you most need it. It’s infuriating and seems to like to re-enable itself at a whim.

That almost all comments are to do with driving at this point is really quite sad.

Stock reflectors on bikes. They are garbage. Selection of reflective stickers with proper coverage are way better.

90% of anti concussion features in and around helmets.

And thats before we start talking of pseudoscience products which are down right a scam.

Also a whole bunch of Amazon safety products. It's basically all AliExpress shit.

Mazda's lane assist only kicks in at around 35mph, so I never have this problem in residential streets. Don't know why it can't be common sense across all models.

Fucking hate lane assist, but also hired a car in Iceland, a Hyundai SUV which had automatic windscreen wipers.

If you haven't been, lovely place but Iceland is known for wind and rain. When we were there it was mostly off and on drizzle which didn't really set off the wipers so I couldn't see, but then when they were triggered it was the fastest most distracting wiping ever. The only control I had was to turn them off or have the shitty automatic flapping.

I missed my little shitbox.

I used to have a car with an anti stall feature. If you were in 2nd gear and not braking, it would automatically increase your speed up to 10mph so not to fall out of the range of the gear. I thought it was a really good idea until I was stuck on a motorway in the snow one night. This particular motorway had quite a large hill leading up to the services (m61 if anyone is interested) and a lorry had jacknifed near the top. This lead to the rest of the traffic trying to crawl up the hill through the snow. So picture the scene me trying to set off in 2nd gear so not to skid in the snow, trying to stay around 5mph as that was what we were crawling at and my car automatically accelerating to 10mph. I realised very quickly that this wasn't a good idea so swapped to trying to set off in 1st only for the traction control to kick in and cause me to skid. It was a very interesting drive until I remembered to turn off the traction control which made setting off in 1st better, not great but better.

I've had various accidents and run-ins with 'Caution! Wet Floor' A-board signs and warning cones (tripping over them etc.), but have never failed to successfully traverse a floor which was wet.

Those little plastic caps for electrical sockets. They defeat the in-built safety features and are made of the flimsiest plastic and are often not to the correct size.

Currently in Crete where the done thing is to half straddle the hard shoulder to allow / avoid the nutcase locals over taking on blind bends.

Hire car has lane assistance. Can confirm it's caused a few moments when I've forgotten to turn it off.

Funny you should start this thread, I just saw a TV advert for a Renault with “up to 30 driver assistance systems”!

Brake assist, particularly when reversing/manoeuvring. My current Seat and previous VW are both offensive in this regard, slamming on the brake when the car decides I'm going to crash into something. You could turn down the sensitivity on the VW and it would remember the setting. The Seat is either on or off and resets with the ignition.

I was given a courtesy car recently - I don't remember what, but it was one of the French brands - maybe a Peugeot or Renault. It was brand new and had all the added extras.

It slammed on the brakes at 70 on an A-road because it saw a triangular 'traffic signals ahead' sign on an adjacent road which had faded slightly so the red on the traffic light icon was more prominent. The lorry I had just overtaken almost crashed trying to avoid me.

Watching something on the TV the other day there were people sitting in the back of a hire car/limo type thing and all over the back doors were these signs telling you that the door was the emergency exit. One even said “in the event if an emergency, pull the handle"

Staggering

I think the "no electrical outlet within 3 metres of the bath or shower" should be modified, most bathrooms here aren't big enough to accommodate it.

These car "safety" features are fucking insane. What's safe about your vehicle being taken out of your control by a blind computer? Absolutely fucking ridiculous.

If anyone asks this sort of thing is why I still have a 2009 Aygo, and not cos I'm skint 👀

The plastic plug socket cover things. They're actually more dangerous than nothing at all.

Get it coded to automatically be off.

I got the cables and the software for my car and coded loads of stuff to suit me, like start-stop is automatically off so I need to press the button to put it on, changed some other functions, coded it so it doesn't go into park if I open the door etc. If you don't like a feature, get the stuff and change it or pay someone to do it.

Laughs in being too poor to afford a new car.

Seriously though, stuff like this makes me think I’m better off in my 2012 car.

Unannounced fire drills, particularly in large buildings, offices, student halls etc.

All they do is make people think “f-sake not another drill” and cause potentially life risking delays before people realise it’s a real fire.

This came dangerously close to a deadly situation once when I worked in the US. No word of a lie we had 3 “surprise” fire drills one month in our office building. Everyone got sick of it and when the alarm went off again less than two days after the last time, everyone just rolled their eyes and carried on working.

Then a junior associate opened the door to the kitchen and was damned near engulfed in a fire ball.

Everyone was fine (though the jr lost his eyebrows) and the fire brigade were able to get it under control pretty quick. But that fire spread so fast and if it had been left much longer, it would have spread in front of our main exit and near to the fire door and at that point we’d have been in serious trouble.

Airbags. Lethal if you're a small female.

Safety knives (like craft knives or Stanley knives), where the blade withdraws instantly into the handle as soon as the knife slips out of what it's cutting. Awful.

Maybe safe in some use cases but absolutely infuriating a lot of the time.

The company I used to work for rolled them out across the board, disposing of conventional knives because health and safety.

Using them to trim the uneven edges of composite moldings was rage inducing. The blade would retract every time you cut through one bit of rough edge before it could get to the next, sending your hand flying as there was zero resistance when you expected it to bite into material again. I cut myself on the material I was cutting, due to one such unexpected withdrawl!

Auto brakes slamming on for cars in different lanes. Or cars that are turning way ahead.

Oh and the stupid sign reading auto speed limit thing. It's wrong more often than it's right.

I call that murder mode as that’s what it’s like. Especially when on the country back roads where the pot holes force you to drive down the middle and it tries to push you into the craters!

Brake assist is dangerous. I drove a rental car once with it for about 4 hours on the motorway, and every now and then the stupid feature would just yank me across the road

Good lord, I had lane assist in a previous car but all it did was shout at me if I was skirting over the lines - was very annoying doing any kind of semi rural driving (which I did a lot) so I turned it off, and it stayed off. Forcibly turning your car for you sounds like a terrible feature!

I hired a car for work which had lane assist. My own daily driver will soon be 20 years old, so I'm not really used to anything more sophisticated than a steering wheel connected directly to the front wheels and 3 pedals to make it go and stop.

Having the car continually question my driving decisions was very off-putting. Another dangerous safety feature would have to be the A, B and C pillars that were so thick it was like driving a WW2 pill box. I'm sure it's safer if you do have an accident but the chances of having and accident must be greatly increased when you can't see 25% of the road around you because there's an A pillar that an oncoming 44 ton wagon can hide behind.

Another thing about modern cars.... who thought it would be a good idea to put settings that you probably want to adjust whilst moving onto a touch screen?

Christ I sound old

Yeah, I want my car to be predictable and under my complete control thanks. Not randomly break when I'm pulling out from a junction and halfway across the road, with a car steaming towards me doing 70mph

Not a physical safety thing, but the "security" practice of forcing people to change passwords regularly is now widely recognised to reduce security.

I had a demo model Ford Focus that had some electrical gremlins. It was about a year old at the time in 2019, anyways I’m coming up to a red light and my car decided it had found me a parking spot and whipped the steering wheel full lock as if it was parallel parking - thankfully the roads were quiet - how do you even explain that to insurance? I was still doing about 20 mph!

My car has been losing its mind about vehicles parked on the other side of the road, bloody miles from where I am. Technology is so unhelpful

Fucking audi pre sense I might just jab the breaks on if it finds something it doesn’t like. I hate it

The first time I was introduced to lane assist was in a rental whilst I was on the autobahn that would activate at 50km/h.

This became problematic when I was going through road works with traffic cones crossing over where lanes would have been, and I was travelling between 45-55km/h so it was constantly activating and deactivating with me having to fight the steering wheel.

My dad has had cars with parking assist for years, but he once had a rental car without that he nearly smashed into a wall while trying to park because he was waiting for the car to start beeping at him…

Reversing sensors. Beep like fuck and give you a heart attack when you're still about a foot away from anything. Chill out man, just let me reverse in peace.

Our office tests the fire alarm once a week at the same time every Tuesday. This has effecticely desensitized our entire workforce to the fire alarm. We had it go off last year at an unscheduled time and lots of people had to be asked to leave the building because they are so used to ignoring it. My last office in comparison only ran random unscheduled tests once a year and the moment it went off people dropped whatever they were working on immediately and vacated as you would want them to.

"Smart" motorways. It's not safer, it's just cheaper than having a hard shoulder. The amount of traffic I've sat in because of breakdowns that didn't have a hard shoulder to go into.

When the higher ups decide the safety rules in a lab without consulting the folks who work in said lab.

One big example was that you always had to have gloves on. No fireproof gloves were provided. Only the thin plastic medical ones.

On the surface it seems like a good idea that folks in a room that might have dangerous spills should have protection on. The issue is that unnecessarily wearing gloves is dangerous in itself. It can make scalpel slips and cuts much more likely and if you are handling fire (say using a bunson burner) it can melt the plastic and fuse it to your skin.

Another example was eye protection. Rules chanced and you had to use theirs and couldn't buy and use your own. Folks who needed glasses were left blinded because they didn't bother getting over glasses, folks with slightly different head shapes were left with migraines and folks could feesibly wear them could barely see because they were scuffed to shit.

Safety regulations from on high are very frustrating.

I will also add. It's also really frustrating how many of the replys here are about cars.

I've not had issues with lane assist almost crashing me, but at first and occasionally it's shocked me when I'm drifting over a line and correct it at the same time lane assist kicks in and it over corrects more than I expect.

Maybe once or twice the auto breaking flashed up randomly on an empty road

Lane assist is horrible, really not good.

Lane assist for me too!

Luckily my car is old enough that I can turn it off and it stays off

VPNs

For most people, pointless.