I switched this car’s safety systems off – but when I wasn’t looking, they turned themselves back on

I totally get the need for some bits of advanced safety tech. Autonomous emergency braking, for example, is a great idea, and blind-spot monitoring is brilliantly simple and effective.

But like a lot of people, I will switch off the more annoying ones as soon as I get into a car – because I don’t much like being bonged at for minor transgressions like doing 31 in a 30. What I especially don’t like is when the systems designed to make me a safer driver nearly get me into a head-on collision with a farm vehicle.

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The truth is that a lot of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) are particularly thick. I’ve had cars that yell at you for not looking at the road – just because you’ve turned your head to check a blindspot or look as you’re entering a roundabout. I had one car that thought it was in Europe, read the signs as if they were in km/h, and then proudly informed me the speed limit on a dual carriageway was 19mph when it picked up the roundel from a side road.

But I’m beginning to see something far more insidious than features that just don’t work too well. I’ve had a couple of run-ins now with systems that genuinely think they know better than me, and will not be switched off.

A recent week with a Lepas L8, a new Chinese plug-in hybrid SUV, was one of the worst. Despite having a switch for its driver monitoring system, that’s pretty much a placebo – because no matter what you do, it will not turn off. It’s also hyper-vigilant, and thinks any sort of looking away from dead ahead is driver distraction.

That would be annoying enough on its own, but what’s worse is that every time it thinks you’re distracted, it turns the lane-keeping aids back on. What that means in practice is that you can never have them fully off, because as soon as you’re five metres down the road, they’ll turn themselves back on.

I’ve also had similar in Hyundais and Kias, though not quite to the same extent. In cars like the Santa Fe, the driver drowsiness detection stays on at all times. If you yawn a lot, then the car thinks you’re tired, and will turn some of the safety kit back on.

Irritatingly, it’s not great at knowing what a yawn looks like – so a particularly committed round of carpool karaoke will result in the same thing. It’s infuriating.

It’s also potentially quite dangerous. I live in the East of England, where the roads over the fens are often as cratered as the surface of the moon and just about wide enough for 1.2 tractors. That means I frequently need to get out of the way of oncoming traffic, or swerve to avoid a tyre-killing pothole.

During my week with the Lepas L8, I found myself fighting with the lane-keeping every time this happened. When you’re edging over to give a farm vehicle enough room to pass and the car violently tries to steer you back to the centre of the road, that has the potential to be deadly.

I spoke to Lepas about it, and the car’s product manager agreed it sounded as though the driver monitoring system was responding more sensitively than it should. But the suggested workaround to switch it off didn’t work – it remains on, complete with slightly creepy eyeball graphic in the instrument cluster. He even acknowledged that ‘when the DMS is disabled, the system is not completely switched off.’

It’s totally undermined my trust in the car, and any belief that the systems will do what I ask them to. I’m worried that creeping regulations or overzealous car manufacturers will begin making this more common, where you spend £30,000+ to buy a car and then spend your life fighting for the right to actually drive it yourself.

Happily, it’s still an isolated problem for now – but you can bet it’s a feature I’ll be looking for on every car I test, and I intend to call it out when I see it.

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